The week at Retraction Watch featured an economist being asked to review his own paper, and a new member of our leaderboard. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
It was one of the most difficult posts we’ve ever written: A researcher’s eagerness to publish a paper before asking all co-authors for their permission forced him to retract the article, wasting a postdoc’s time and destroying a professional relationship in the process. This 2011 post wasn’t difficult to write because the facts were complex; … Continue reading After painful retraction, authors republish replicated findings five years later
After a journal began tagging papers that adopted open science practices — such as sharing data and materials — a few other scientists may have been nudged into doing the same. In January 2014, Psychological Science began rewarding digital badges to authors who committed to open science practices such as sharing the data and materials. A study published … Continue reading “I shared:” Can tagging papers that share data boost the practice?
“Eerily familiar”: That’s how Serdar Sayan of TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Turkey says it felt to read a submission to the Scandinavian Journal of Economics, after the journal asked him to review the manuscript. It turns out, it was Sayan’s paper, word for word, equation for equation, down to the last punctuation … Continue reading Ever been asked to review your own paper? This economist was
Four different journals have pulled papers from the same authors due to alleged duplication or manipulation of images. All four papers have two authors in common — Jianting Miao and Wei Zhang, both based at The Fourth Military Medical University in Xi’an City, Shaanxi, China. Many of the other co-authors are also listed in two … Continue reading “Mixed up” images earn biologists four retractions
The week at Retraction Watch featured an imposter editor and an author who threatened to sue a journal if it didn’t reverse a retraction. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
A publisher is retracting two papers today by a team of physicists who took a short cut in reporting their data. The papers present a method for imaging very small things — like biological processes on a molecular scale — that could be an alternative to electron microscopy, as the authors explain in a video. But after … Continue reading Physics journal pulls two papers for data shortcuts
When a paper is retracted, how many other papers in the same field — which either cite the finding or cite other papers that do — are affected? That’s the question examined by a study published in BioMed Central’s new journal, Research Integrity and Peer Review. Using the case of a paper retracted from Nature in 2014, the authors … Continue reading How much does a retracted result pollute the field?
Earlier this week, we covered the case of a retraction that happened against one of the author’s wishes. That’s not all that unusual. What was unusual in this story, however, is that the author who objected to the retraction had published a well-considered paper in which she identified an error in the original work, and corrected … Continue reading Why that Evolution paper should never have been retracted: A reviewer speaks out
The Open Automation and Control Systems Journal has published five items this calendar year — and all of those are retraction notices. That’s what we’re sure about. Now to what we’re not clear on in this story, which is one of a growing number of cases we’ve seen in which so-called “predatory” publishers are starting … Continue reading Confusion reigns: Are these four retractions for compromised peer review, or not?