In 2011, Diederik Stapel, a Dutch researcher who at the time was a shining star in the world of social psychology, published an article in the British Journal of Social Psychology with the counter-intuitive claim that failure can sometimes be more emotionally gratifying than success. We’re guessing this isn’t one of those times. As readers of … Continue reading Brit psych journal retracts Stapel paper on the paradox of failure
As Stevie Nicks sang in Fleetwood Mac’s hit, “Landslide”: Well, I’ve been afraid of changing, cause I’ve built my life around you …. The authors of a 2010 paper in the journal Landslides might have taken those words a little too much to heart. Their manuscript, “Real-time slope water table forecasting by multi-tank model combined … Continue reading Fleetwood Mac, anyone? Landslides paper crumbles under weight of “significant originality issue”
The June 2012 issue of Current Opinion in Critical Care has a retraction that might have been a rather mundane case of plagiarism but for the remarkably intertwined relationships of the authors of the publications involved. Here’s the notice, which doesn’t attempt to broach the conflicts of interest (we can hardly blame them, as you’ll see):
Duplication has, as we noted on Twitter the other day, been tripping up more and more scientists. And now self-plagiarism has snared a prominent Columbia University chemist in a paper that left many people scratching their heads to begin with. As reported by the Chembark blog and Nature, the Journal of the American Chemical Society … Continue reading JACS temporarily pulls “space dinosaurs” paper for alleged duplication
The authors of three papers in Rheumatology International about systemic sclerosis, also known as scleroderma, are retracting them after patients were misidentified in databases. According to the three notices: This article has been retracted at the request of the authors. The authors made a serious statistical error which unfortunately invalidates their results. Corresponding author Metin … Continue reading Patient database errors lead to three rheumatology retractions
The Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England has an informative retraction notice about a recent paper it published that was marred by self-plagiarism. The article, “Current concepts of surveillance and its significance in head and neck cancer,” from a group of researchers at Grant Medical College, in Mumbai (which is known to … Continue reading Surgery journal retracts cancer paper for duplication after “naive” response from authors
A group of cancer researchers from Tunisia has been seeding the oncology literature with plagiarized articles that steal liberally — both text and data — from the work of others. The group has one retraction, in the journal Obesity — whose splash page has the jaunty, if disconcerting, invite: “Welcome to Obesity!” — and at … Continue reading Whistling the same Tunisia: Serial plagiarists plague the oncology literature
Have a seat, this one’s a howler. According to a retraction notice for “Computer application in mathematics,” published in Computers & Mathematics with Applications:
Two liver journals have retracted articles from a group of Irani researchers who published similar — but not quite identical — versions of the same paper some months apart. A retraction notice in the Journal of Gastrointestinal and Liver Diseases — which bills itself as the “Official Journal of the Romanian Societies of Gastroenterology” — explains what … Continue reading Crise de foie: Liver journals retract duplicate biomarker pubs
Perhaps it’s appropriate given the Easter season, but we have learned that Naoki Mori, the Japanese cancer researcher who received a 10-year publishing ban from the American Society of Microbiology (ASM) for imagine manipulation, has published a new paper. Mori, who was fired and then rehired by the University of the Ryukyus over the scandal, … Continue reading Back in the saddle: After more than 30 retractions, Naoki Mori publishing again