A group of researchers from Mexico has been forced to retract their July 2012 paper in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology *Biology*Physics after a reader noticed cracks in the data that proved to be signs of fatal instability. Here’s the retraction notice for the article, titled, “Randomized Clinical Trial to Assess the Efficacy of … Continue reading “Extensive” errors force retraction of lymphoma radiation paper
A new paper has catalogued retractions over the past few decades in business and economics journals — and hasn’t found very many. In “Retraction, Dishonesty and Plagiarism: Analysis of a Crucial Issue for Academic Publishing, and the Inadequate Responses from Leading Journals in Economics and Management Disciplines,” which just went online in the Journal of … Continue reading Why aren’t there more retractions in business and economics journals?
Biological Trace Element Research has retracted a paper by a group of Egyptian authors for duplication. The paper, “The Effect of Lead Acetate Toxicity on Experimental Male Albino Rat,” came from investigators in the department of Economic Entomology and Pesticides at Cairo University and appeared in December 2011. As the notice states: Article has been … Continue reading Get the lead out: duplication leads to retraction of heavy metal paper
In circumstances we haven’t quite sorted out, an Australian climate researcher has retracted a paper because he didn’t have the right to use data from a now-shuttered government program. Ravinesh Deo, of the University of Southern Queensland, published “A review and modelling results of the simulated response of deforestation on climate extremes in eastern Australia” … Continue reading Australian government-funded study of deforestation, climate retracted for intellectual property conflicts
October, apparently, is “studies of retractions month.” First there was a groundbreaking study in PNAS, then an NBER working paper, and yesterday PLoS Medicine alerted us to a paper their sister journal, PLoS ONE, published last week, “A Comprehensive Survey of Retracted Articles from the Scholarly Literature.” The study, by Michael L. Grieneisen and Minghua Zhang, … Continue reading Most retraction notices don’t involve research misconduct or flawed data: new study
Maybe it’s an occupational hazard of dealing with quantum physics — uncertainty and all that — but a group of Swiss researchers has retracted their paper on quantum dots after discovering “major errors” that undermined their conclusions. The article, published in 2010 as a research letter in Nature Photonics, was titled “Polarization-entangled photons produced with … Continue reading “Major errors” lead to retraction of Nature Photonics paper on quantum dots
The Journal of Computational Chemistry is retracting a 2011 paper by a group of Chinese researchers for duplication. The article was titled “Predicting Protein Folding Rates Using the Concept of Chou’s Pseudo Amino Acid Composition.” According to the notice:
It’s tempting to start calling this a trend. Three Elsevier math journals are among the latest scientific publications to be retracting papers because fake email addresses were used to obtain favorable peer reviews. The three papers appear in two journals: “On two subclasses of (α,β)-metrics being projectively related,” in the Journal of Geometry and Physics; … Continue reading Iranian mathematicians latest to have papers retracted for fake email addresses to get better reviews
Here’s a new one that may stoke the debate about whether a paper deserves retraction merely for being wrong or less than fully right. The journal Cell Biochemistry and Function, a Wiley title, has retracted an article it published earlier this year by a pair of Chinese authors — or, rather, from one author an … Continue reading Biochemistry journal retracts paper for being, well, less than conclusive
Last week, we brought you the story of Thong Duc Le and his colleagues, physicists who were forced to retract four papers, including one that cited, as we noted “their own study that had already been retracted for plagiarism.” The team has now retracted three more papers: