Irony alert: If you’re going to publish in the Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, you’d better be able to play well with others. Not so, it seems, with a certain Darrel Montero. Montero, an associate professor in the School of Social Work at Arizona State University, and his colleagues have lost their … Continue reading Social work researchers lose paper for misuse of data
A pair of authors from Italy has retracted their 2012 article in the Journal of Maternal-Fetal and Neonatal Medicine for including chunks of text with a “high degree of similarity” from other published sources. But rest assured: the authors, we’re told, didn’t intend to do so. The article, “Central venous catheterization and thrombosis in newborns: … Continue reading Virtually verbatim text earns retraction of neonate paper, gives authors a pass
Another installment of Ask Retraction Watch: As experts in authorship matters, I was wondering if you could offer some guidance. I read that all authors have to approve submission of a paper. Unfortunately, a colleague of mine recently passed away. The manuscripts which he helped draft are being submitted with our colleague as author with … Continue reading Ask Retraction Watch: How should deceased colleagues be credited in papers?
The authors of an article in the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules have pulled the paper in what appears to be an authorship dispute sparked by premature submission. The paper, “Renaturation and one step purification of the chicken GIIA secreted phospholipase A2 from inclusion bodies,” came from a group of researchers in Tunisia and Marseille, … Continue reading Retraction for iffy data as authors of chicken enzyme paper lay an egg
The journal Clinical Research and Regulatory Affairs has retracted a 2012 article on over-the-counter drugs by a trio of pharmacy researchers in India who decided to “reproduce content to a high degree of similarity” from other sources. Here’s how the retraction notice puts it:
Okay, so it’s not quite Kafka, but a group of forensic geneticists from Prague’s Charles University has lost a paper in Folia Biologica (a journal from that famed institution where Kafka studied) over what appears to be a rather Byzantine dispute about authorship and the quality of the data. The 2010 article, “DNA analysis of … Continue reading Author stalemate in Czech DNA paper leads to retraction
In our work here at Retraction Watch, we’ve seen a number of euphemisms for plagiarism. (See slides 18-22 of this presentation for a selection.) Today, in following up on a case we covered last month, we’ve learned of a new way to avoid saying the dreaded p-word. We reported in June that sex researcher Willibrord … Continue reading What’s the difference between plagiarism and “unintended and unknowing breach of copyright?”
The journal Memory has retracted a paper on repressed sexual abuse after a protracted dispute between the authors and an institutional investigation in The Netherlands that led to no findings of misconduct against the first author, Elke Geraerts — a rising star in the field of social psychology. (The title of hers TEDx talk, by … Continue reading Bad Memory? Repressed sexual abuse memory paper retracted for data inconsistencies
The Journal of Theoretical and Applied Physics has retracted a 2012 paper by a pair of Iranian cosmologists who failed to adequately cite one of the critical references on which they based their work. We think that falls under the broader category of plagiarism — after all, as Heisenberg famously postulated, the same text cannot simultaneously … Continue reading Gravity paper yanked for plagiarism by another name
The French journal Biologie Aujourd’hui — Biology Today — has retracted an article it published earlier this year after learning of ethics violations, authorship issues with the paper and a problematic image. The article, titled “Utilisation de dendrimères pour une nanomédecine innovatrice,” or “Using dendrimers for an innovative nanomedicine,” was written by Jean Pierre Majoral … Continue reading French journal retracts nanomedicine paper for ethics violations, more