Retraction Watch

If articles about a Schrödinger equation are retracted, do they still exist?

Can two articles about aspects of Schrödinger’s work exist in the literature at the same time if they have plagiarized from other papers about the same subjects?

The first paper, “Fixed point theorems for solutions of the stationary Schrödinger equation on cones,” appeared in 2015 and was written by Gaixian Xue, of Henan University of Economics and Law in China, and Eve Yuzbasi, of Istanbul University. According to the retraction notice, from Fixed Point Theory and Applications:

Weekend reads: A Harvard prof in handcuffs; an alleged PhD for grant scheme; unethical reviewer behavior outed

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

growing concerns — and a new retraction — in a case involving spider research that we first reported on two weeks ago;
an apology in a retraction notice for a paper about apologizers;
a retraction at NEJM.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

NEJM paper retracted for “inaccuracies in the analytic database and data analyses”

Until yesterday, the New England Journal of Medicine had retracted only 24 papers. Now that tally is 25.

As our Ivan Oransky reports at Medscape:

Journal expresses concern about possible animal abuse in trauma paper

A journal has issued an expression of concern over a 2018 paper which involved strapping 21 anesthetized minipigs to sleds and running them into a wall at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour.

The study, “Experimental study of thoracoabdominal injuries suffered from caudocephalad impacts using pigs,” came from the Third Military Medical University in Chongqing, China, and was funded by the People’s Liberation Army.

About those impacts. The purpose of the study, according to the abstract, was this:

Authors questioning papers at nearly two dozen journals in wake of spider paper retraction

Talk about a tangled web.

The retraction earlier this month of a 2016 paper in the American Naturalist by Kate Laskowski and Jonathan Pruitt turns out to be the tip of what is potentially a very large iceberg.

This week, the researchers have retracted a second paper, this one in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, for the same reasons — duplicated data without a reasonable explanation.

Dan Bolnick, the editor of the American Naturalist, tells us:

Four dead authors, a duplicate publication and questions: Solve this one!

A study spanning dozens of years, four deceased authors and a retraction for duplicate publication. Sounds like a recipe for an episode of that new show about medical detectives (not epidemiologists; detectives with guns).

We’d like to be able to explain, but, well, we can’t. What we do know is that the authors of a 2019 article about the role of aluminum in neurologic disease have retracted their paper because it’s a duplicate of an article some of them had published in 2018. But that’s as clear as things get.

Here’s the retraction notice, which, like any good mystery, is full of question marks:

Duplicated study of apologizers leads to a retraction — and an apology

The Journal of Consumer Research has retracted a 2019 paper because it overlapped significantly with a study previously published in Chinese by the same authors.

But whether both authors agreed to the previous submission is a subject of some confusion on the part of one of them.

The journal, published by Oxford Academic, added “RETRACTED” to the beginning of the paper’s title, “Sorry by Size: How the Number of Apologizers Affects Apology Effectiveness,” but did not include a retraction notice, nor any other explanation. The notice, second author Sam Maglio, of the University of Toronto, told Retraction Watch, will read:

Weekend reads: Texas A&M vs. Harvard; scientific publishers a “threatened species”; six researchers with “greed and a disregard” for rules

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

A researcher starting 2020 off with a forthright retraction;
A journal retracting a 30-year-old paper by a controversial psychologist;
A look at whether reproducibility has improved.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Digging deeper: Authors retract soil paper so “the error we made does not propagate”

The authors of a 2018 paper on how much carbon soil can store have retracted the work after concluding that their analysis was fatally flawed.

The article, “Soil carbon stocks are underestimated in mountainous regions,” appeared in the journal Geoderma. Its authors are affiliated with the French National Institute for Agricultural Research.

According to the abstract of the paper:

Group that reused cheese cloth in different experiments up to six retractions

The other day, we reported on the retraction this month of a paper that was laid low by reuse of experimental materials — cheese cloth, to be exact — when fresh were required.

At the time, we asked the senior author, Donghai Wang, of Kansas State University, whether any other articles from his group had similar problems. Wang’s response was no — but it turns out the group already had five other retractions in December, and has requested another.

All are from the same journal, Bioresource Technology.

These retractions include the August 2019 paper titled “A study on the association between biomass types and magnesium oxide pretreatment.” According to the notice:

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