Liz Wager, the chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics, knows something about retractions. In April, she and University College London’s Peter Williams published a paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics showing that journal editors’ approaches to retractions aren’t uniform. The pair is back with another paper, using the same dataset of retractions and published … Continue reading Why do — and don’t — journal editors retract articles?
The International Journal of Whole Schooling has retracted a 2007 article for what it calls “substantial” plagiarism. The article, titled “The relations between parenting and adolescent motivation,” was written by Theiienhuong N. Hoang, an education researcher at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. The aim of the paper: Parenting practices that influence or teach adaptive … Continue reading Whole schooling paper retracted after discovering that it was largely lifted
We have updates on the two mysterious Journal of Neuroscience retractions we reported on yesterday. One is that we have learned that there is a university investigation into the work of one of the teams that retracted one of the studies. More on that in a bit. Two, the journal’s editor, John Maunsell, responded to … Continue reading Update on Journal of Neuroscience retractions: Authors being investigated. Plus, editor explains why notices say nothing
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) ran two retractions this week. One of those papers was “Properdin homeostasis requires turnover of the alternative complement pathway,” which first appeared online in October of last year. The researchers were looking at the interaction between complement — a sort of primitive immune system — and … Continue reading On second thought: PNAS retracts two papers after results fail replication
Yesterday, we reported that Peter Zabel, managing director of Germany’s Research Center Borstel, had stepped down amid allegations that he had duplicated one of his German papers in English. It turns out, however, that the reason for his resignation was plagiarism of a 2008 paper in Nature Reviews Immunology by a group at the University … Continue reading Borstel update: Former director’s plagiarized 2009 paper to be retracted
Petter Portin, of the University of Turku, Finland, has been forced to retract four papers because they were duplicates of work he had already published. Two of those retractions appear in the February 2011 issue of Hereditas. Here’s one retraction notice (link added): The following article from Hereditas: Portin, P. ‘The effect of the mus309 … Continue reading Four genetics papers retracted for duplication
A retraction with a complex and yet unclear narrative appears in the April 25, 2011 issue of Physics Letters A. According to the notice, for “Nuclear spin magnetic resonance force microscopy using slice modulation:” This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors of Physics Letters A because there are unsettled issues on … Continue reading Physics Letters A paper gets retracted twice, but the issues remain “unsettled”
A team of Australian medical writers who analyzed four decades worth of retractions has reached the conclusion — we trust you’re sitting — that people in their profession are more honest than, well, the rest of us. According to the authors, articles in the medical literature are substantially less likely than other papers to be … Continue reading Want to avoid a retraction? Hire a medical writer, say medical writers
As many retractions as we cover here at Retraction Watch, there have been far more since we started blogging in August that we haven’t had the chance to report out fully. Some of those have been tips from our loyal readers — which we always appreciate, even if we can’t get to them immediately. So … Continue reading Retractions we haven’t had a chance to cover, part 1: Fishy fishery management, fluoride and kids’ IQ, and more
It’s official.* Joachim Boldt now holds the record for the most retractions by a single author. As we reported the other day, a group of anesthesia journals was on the verge of revealing a list of 89 articles by Joachim Boldt that would require retraction because the German researcher had failed to receive proper approval … Continue reading Ladies and gentlemen, we have an apparent retraction record holder: Joachim Boldt, at 89