Another busy week at Retraction Watch, which kicked off with an introduction to our first-ever intern. This coming week, Ivan will be in Zwettl, Lower Austria, speaking at the Vienna Biocenter PhD retreat, and in London, speaking at the UK Conference of Science Journalists. Here’s what’s been happening elsewhere:
From the world of physics, we have a retraction involving rivalry and alleged sock puppetry. The Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology has removed a letter from its website after a scientist complained that it was making unproven allegations against him. It’s a head-scratching case. The letter, from Lorenzo Iorio, first appeared … Continue reading Journal retracts letter accusing physicist of using fake names to criticize papers
Another busy week at Retraction Watch, beginning with a story that stunned even us. There was lots happening elsewhere on the web, too, particularly among science journalists taking a look at their own work:
A new site, Stand Up 2 Science Bullies, launched last week: www.standup2sciencebullies.com is a forum for scientists to share their experience and provide advice pertaining to scientific bullying. We welcome questions and comments from all scientists including students, faculty, and members of industry. We sincerely hope that this forum will serve as an informative resource … Continue reading Scientists, do you feel bullied by critics? These chemists do
A suggestion: If you’re going to use the words “overestimated accuracy” in the title of your paper, you’d better make sure you aren’t guilty of the same yourself. A group of authors in China has lost their June 2013 paper in the European Biophysics Journal because they appear to have misinterpreted their data. The paper, … Continue reading “Unable to dispel the doubts,” authors lose protein structure paper
Here at Retraction Watch, we judge retraction notices every day. We even have a category called “unhelpful retraction notices.” But we haven’t systematically analyzed those notices, so lucky for us, a group of academics at Vanderbilt decided to. In a new paper published in a special issue of Publications — an issue whose editor, Grant … Continue reading A rating system for retractions? How various journals stack up
The physics journal Pramana — a publication of the Indian Academy of Sciences — has retracted two studies by a group of researchers in Malaysia who appear to have cobbled together their papers from other sources. The 2007 articles came from A.R.M. Yusoff, M.N. Syahrul and K. Henkel, of the University Science Malaysia, in Penang. … Continue reading “Complete copies” earn physicists in Malaysia a pair of retractions
The publisher of a journal apparently favored by climate change skeptics has shuttered it, saying that the editors changed the aim of the title and committed malpractice by using a peer reviewer selection process based on nepotism. Here’s the notice:
We’ve found a fourth retraction for a group of chemists in Iran who plagiarized. As before, the offending article had appeared in Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation. This time, however, it did not include a co-author from Ball State University in Indiana, Robert Sammelson, whose name had appeared on three of the earlier … Continue reading Fourth retraction for chemists in Iran
Ariel Fernandez, an Argentine chemist (who claims to hold the fastest-awarded PhD from Yale) and the subject of institutional investigations at multiple universities, has corrected several papers recently. What makes the moves particularly unusual — and interesting — is the stated reason for the amendments: disclaiming any funding from the National Institutes of Health for … Continue reading Researcher who threatened Retraction Watch with lawsuit corrects funding source for several papers