Retraction Watch

PubPeer Selections: PubPeer comments prompt investigation; Memory of water returns?

Here’s another installment of PubPeer Selections: Continue reading PubPeer Selections: PubPeer comments prompt investigation; Memory of water returns?

Blatant plagiarism sinks paper (and earns a sabbatical!) for mathematician

You know it’s a good one when it makes it onto the Wikipedia page for “scientific misconduct.”

On April 21, the International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics retracted two 2008 papers by scientist Alexander Spivak of Holon Institute of Technology in Israel. In September, the journal updated the notice to explain why: The papers both contained copy/pasted chunks from a 2001 paper by Spivak’s post-doc boss at Tel Aviv University, Zeev Schuss, and two other authors.

The tipster seems to have been Schuss himself, who told us about his role in the unravelling of the fraud: Continue reading Blatant plagiarism sinks paper (and earns a sabbatical!) for mathematician

Oxford group reverses authorship requirements for sharing data after questions from Retraction Watch

It seemed like an egregious violation of academic standards.

A researcher forwarded us a data access agreement from the University of Oxford, in which Schedule 4 read as follows:
Continue reading Oxford group reverses authorship requirements for sharing data after questions from Retraction Watch

Networking paper retracted for “overlap” with author’s prior publication

Here at Retraction Watch, we have a lot of fun exploring all the different kinds of science that cross our paths.

Some, though, we’re just not qualified to understand, like this retracted paper in the Journal of Management Studies, which according to the abstract “demonstrates that the persistence of brokerage positions decreases broker performance.”

What is clear is the retraction: the author already published the conclusion in a Japanese management journal in 2011.

Here’s the notice: Continue reading Networking paper retracted for “overlap” with author’s prior publication

Journal makes it official, retracting controversial autism-vaccine paper

A little more than a month after removing a highly criticized article that claimed the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine increased the risk of autism in African American boys, Translational Neurodegeneration has officially retracted the paper.

Here’s the notice, dated yesterday: Continue reading Journal makes it official, retracting controversial autism-vaccine paper

Weekend reads: How’d my name end up on that paper?; Bob Dylan in the scientific literature

The week at Retraction Watch featured yet another case of a researcher peer reviewing his own paper, and an odd defense of plagiarism. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Continue reading Weekend reads: How’d my name end up on that paper?; Bob Dylan in the scientific literature

Curtain up on second act for Dutch fraudster Stapel: College teacher

Diederik Stapel, the Dutch social psychologist and admitted data fabricator — and owner of 54 retraction notices — is now teaching at a college in the town of Tilburg.

According to Omroep Brabant, Stapel was offered the job as a kind of adjunct at Fontys Academy for Creative Industries to teach social philosophy. The site quotes a Nick Welman explaining the rationale for hiring Stapel (per Google Translate): Continue reading Curtain up on second act for Dutch fraudster Stapel: College teacher

Doing the right thing: Particle physicists pull paper after equation collides with the truth

Three physicists at Imperial College London have retracted a paper on Coulomb collisions, a kind of fender bender between two charged particles, after realizing their equations were written wrong.

The mistake resulted in an erroneous conclusion about the strength of the collisions.

Here’s the notice for “Effects of Large-Angle Coulomb Collisions on Inertial Confinement Fusion Plasmas”: Continue reading Doing the right thing: Particle physicists pull paper after equation collides with the truth

Oops: Elsevier journal publishes paper citing paper it promised to retract two months ago

Journal publishers can be agonizingly slow when it comes to officially retracting a paper.

Here’s a prime example of the consequences of that bureaucratic foot-dragging: Ten months after being told that Fazlurrahman Khan had fabricated his data, and two months after announcing two of Khan’s papers would be retracted from two of its journals, Elsevier still has not retracted either paper.

Worse, at least one of the papers, “Degradation of 2,4-dinitroanisole (DNAN) by metabolic cooperative activity of Pseudomonas sp. strain FK357 and Rhodococcus imtechensis strain RKJ300,” in the journal Chemosphere, has been cited since the announcement was made. In fact, the paper was published in Journal of Hazardous Materials, the Elsevier journal that is dragging its feet retracting another of Khan’s papers, “Aerobic degradation of 4-nitroaniline (4-NA) via novel degradation intermediates by Rhodococcus sp. strain FK48.”

Jim Spain, in whose lab Khan worked at Georgia Tech, reached out to us to express his concerns with this timeline: Continue reading Oops: Elsevier journal publishes paper citing paper it promised to retract two months ago