Plagiarism earned genomics researchers an erratum, not a retraction, in BioMed Central journal BioData Mining. We keep a list of best euphemisms for plagiarism, and this one is right up there. Here’s the notice for “An iteration normalization and test method for differential expression analysis of RNA-seq data”:
A group of scientists at the Chinese Earthquake Administration in Beijing have lost their 2014 paper in Nature Scientific Reports for lifting chunks of text from a previously published article. The abstract of the paper, “Early magnitude estimation for the MW7.9 Wenchuan earthquake using progressively expanded P-wave time window,” states:
Two solar cell researchers at the University of New South Wales have lost a paper in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews after the discovery of “substantial overlap” with work by a UNSW graduate student. The notice cites three sources for the plagiarism. One is an unpublished manuscript by UNSW student Matthew Wright, which he shared with the … Continue reading Solar paper retracted after plagiarism and duplication come to light
Welcome to our last Weekend Reads of 2014. This week featured our second annual Top 10 Retractions list. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Irish eyes definitely are not smiling at Trinity College in Dublin, where the campus paper, The University Times, has acknowledged that one of its editors seems to have been a serial plagiarist. According to an editorial in the paper published on Friday:
The Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology has retracted a 2011 paper on depersonalization disorder by a pair of authors in Azerbaijan who got a bit too familiar with their source material without proper attribution. And the journal has offered its readers a handy — if depressingly obvious — admonition about publication ethics. The article, “Lamotrigine in … Continue reading Psych paper falls afoul of journal’s plagiarism policy (hint: don’t plagiarize)
This week, we published a feature in Nature on how some researchers are gaming peer review systems to review their own papers. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
The Journal of International Oral Health has retracted a 2014 paper on dental pain by a group from India. Although the ostensible reason was plagiarism, we wonder if the offending authors might gone a bit further. The article, “Sniffing out pain: An in vivo intranasal study of analgesic efficacy,” purported to be a study of … Continue reading Plagiarism charge bites authors of oral pain paper
This one brings together a bunch of our favorite topics, including plagiarism, poetry, and predatory publishers. Look, alliteration! Richard Lawrence Etienne Barnett, who often publishes under the name R-L Etienne Barnett, has been accused of plagiarizing at least 18 articles by other scholars, mostly analyses of French poetry, as well as duplicating his own work at least eight … Continue reading Tracking down lit crit plagiarism leads to “discourses of madness”
Nearly two decades after a Polish researcher plagiarized the work of a Turkish team, her theft has been exposed and the paper retracted. According to an article in Polish-language paper Gazeta Wyborcza, Jolanta Rzymowska of the Medical University of Lublin was the subject of two disciplinary hearings, the first in February 2014, following the discovery of her plagiarism … Continue reading Leukemia paper retracted for plagiarism — 18 years later