A paper in Physical Review Letters has been retracted for “overlap” with two other previously published papers.
The notice isn’t available online yet, so we got in touch with American Physical Society (APS) editorial director Dan Kulp for more information. Here’s what he told us about “Anomalous melting scenario of the two-dimensional core-softened system”: Continue reading Physics paper sinks amid accusations of unacceptable “overlap”
Late last week, Nature reported some details of PubPeer’s fight against a subpoena from a researcher who claims to have lost a job because of comments on the site. (Background here.) Here’s another installment of PubPeer Selections: Continue reading PubPeer Selections: From “this comment is clearly unfounded” to “happy to elaborate,” a range of responses
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 by well-known Polish fraud hunter Marek Wronski. It was determined that her 1996 paper contained word-for-word text from a paper by a team at the University of Ankara.
Ultimately, Rzymowska was given an official reprimand, rather than any harsher disciplinary action, because she copied descriptions rather than results. From a Google translation of the article: Continue reading Leukemia paper retracted for plagiarism — 18 years later
Last week, microbiologist Enrico Bucci emailed us with concerns that several of the citations listed on his Google Scholar profile were fake.
Colleagues of his had noticed the same problem on their pages.
The listings seem to be real titles, researchers, and publications, but scrambled. When Bucci first spoke with us, the Scholar citations all linked to clearly fake pages on a site hosted by e-commerce giant Alibaba. You can see an example here (that’s a screenshot on the right). Continue reading Fake citations plague some Google Scholar profiles
Chang-Suk Han, a member of the engineering faculty at Hoseo University in South Korea, has had ten articles retracted at once because of duplicated data.
Here are the ten studies from Metals and Materials International: Continue reading Engineer in South Korea forced to retract ten papers in one fell swoop
A paper by a former postdoc at MD Anderson Cancer Center who “admitted to knowingly and intentionally falsifying” a figure has been retracted.
In August, the Office of Research Integrity announced that it had sanctioned Jun Fu for faking data in a study of the results of a mouse study of NVP-HSP990, a Novartis compound designed to fight brain tumors. Here’s the notice for the study in question, published in Cancer Research:
Continue reading Retraction appears for faked study of Novartis anti-cancer compound
Highlights at Retraction Watch this week included a case of overly honest referencing and the story of how a medical resident flagged up a pseudoscientific study. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Speed kills in publishing too; studying blank pages; apologies for the Rosetta Shirt
A group of researchers at the Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences in Guangzhou, China have retracted a paper that came out of a clinical trial on transarterial chemoembolization, a targeted kind of chemotherapy.
According to the notice, one of the authors mixed up the control samples with the clinical samples, and “could not recall which samples were in the wrong group.” The paper hasn’t yet been cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Here’s the notice in Medical Oncology:
Continue reading Paper on circulating tumor cells taken out of circulation after lab error
The Leadership Quarterly has retracted a trio of papers by Frederick Walumbwa, an “ethical leadership” guru at Florida International University, whose work has come under scrutiny for flawed methodology. And another journal has pulled one of his articles for similar reasons. That brings his count – as far as we can tell — to seven retractions and a mega-correction.
Meanwhile, Arizona State University, Walumbwa’s former employer, has found
that the preponderance of evidence does not support the charge of research misconduct by Dr. Walumbwa…
but that he engaged in “poor research practice.”
The bottom line, according to the Leadership Quarterly, which first announced problems with the articles in February:
University of Regina professor Shahid Azam is the kind of thesis advisor that gives prospective grad students nightmares.
According to the CBC, Azam lost a paper in Environmental Geotechnics for plagiarizing the work of his student, Arjun Paul, without bothering to cite it. Azam went on to trash the student’s ability to the CBC reporter.
He’s got two excuses, but we’re not sure which is more repugnant – that he wrote much of his student’s thesis for him and so deserves to steal it, or that plagiarism is standard practice in engineering publishing.
From the CBC: Continue reading Professor defends ripping off his student by insulting him in the media
