Another installment of Ask Retraction Watch:
Do you know of any instances of meta-plagiarism, i.e. a paper plagiarizing a second paper, which plagiarized a third paper? Or even longer chains of this? I know one instance of meta-plagiarism, but there should be a few others out there, I guess.
We’ve seen one such daisy chain. No poll this time, but Continue reading Ask Retraction Watch: Ever seen a case of “meta-plagiarism?”
Last week, we reported on a retraction in the Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry that left us a bit puzzled. The notice referred to a problem with “the way the data was presented,” but the authors told us this was just an error picked up in proofreading, somehow after the paper had been published online.
We now have much more of the story. The Royal Society of Chemistry’s May Copsey, who edits the journal, tells Retraction Watch: Continue reading Royal Society of Chemistry apologizes for unclear retraction notice
Okay, so great speechifying isn’t always recognized the first time it’s heard. We’re sure “I Have a Dream” had its detractors at the time. And Homer probably put more than his share of listeners to sleep while reciting the Iliad (that sucker’s LONG, after all).
But when the Patriot & Union, of Pennsylvania, trashed Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address for being “silly,” it found itself on the wrong side of history — oratorically and otherwise — before the ink was dry.
The first retraction has appeared for Alfred Fusco, a leading cancer researcher in Italy under criminal investigation for fraud.
Here’s the notice from the Journal of Clinical Investigation: Continue reading Retraction appears for Italian cancer specialist facing criminal investigation
A group of researchers in Ireland has retracted their 2013 article on a possible new method for treating amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — ALS, also commonly called Lou Gehrig’s disease — after identifying errors in several images in the paper.
The article, “Acidotoxicity and acid-sensing ion channels contribute to motoneuron degeneration,” was published online in Cell Death & Differentiation (and appeared in the April 1 print issue, although we think that was a coincidence…). Continue reading ALS paper retracted for figure problems
Has anyone seen our irony meter?
The author of a 2003 study on “the ethics of being first” is retracting it because it turns out he had already published it elsewhere — making it, well, not first.
Here’s the retraction notice for “Surgical Research and the Ethics of Being First,” the Journal of Value Inquiry paper: Continue reading Who’s on first? Paper on “the ethics of being first” retracted because it was…second
mBio, whose editor, Arturo Casadevall, has contributed greatly to our knowledge about why articles are retracted, has an interesting retraction of its own.
The journal — a publication of the American Society for Microbiology and the American Academy of Microbiology — is pulling a 2011 paper by a trio of researchers from the University of Alabama, Birmingham, Li Tan, Mei Li and Charles L. Turnbough Jr. The article was titled “An Unusual Mechanism of Isopeptide Bond Formation Attaches the Collagenlike Glycoprotein BclA to the Exosporium of Bacillus anthracis.” The paper, which has been cited twice, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web Knowledge, purported to show that:
Continue reading mBio retracts anthrax paper whose authors say they misinterpreted findings
The Retraction Watch archives are full of dubious distinctions — most retractions by a single researcher, longest time between publication and retraction, etc. — but now we have a competition for another: “The three most plagiarized papers.”
That new category comes to us courtesy of a retraction notice in The Scientific World Journal, “Recent Advances in DENV Receptors,” by a group of researchers in China. Here’s the new notice: Continue reading And the award for the “three most plagiarized papers” goes to…
The Brazilian medical journal Clinics — edited by the Faculdade de Medicina of the University of São Paulo — has lost two more papers in a citation stacking scheme that cost one of the authors his job as editor of the publication.
The first paper, by former editor Mauricio Rocha-e-Silva and Ariane Gomes, was titled “An overview of recently published medical papers in Brazilian scientific journals,” and was published in 2011. As the retraction notice states: Continue reading Medical journal guilty of citation manipulation retracts two “inadequate” review articles
Last month, we reported on the case of Nitin Aggarwal, who earned his PhD at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and who, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), faked data in his graduate thesis, in applications for National Institutes of Health and American Heart Association grant, and in two published papers.
Given the findings about his PhD thesis — and the fact that he had won a $1,000 award for his dissertation — we were curious whether he would lose his degree. Ravi Misra, dean of the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Graduate School of Biomedical Science, tells Retraction Watch he won’t: Continue reading Scientist who faked data in his thesis will keep his PhD