Scientia Horticulturae, a plant journal published by Elsevier, has retracted a paper after realizing it was a graft of another that appeared in its pages. Here’s the notice for “Water stress effects on Cumin (Cuminum cyminum L.) yield and oil essential components,” by Farshid Vazin, Islamic Azad University, Gonabad, Iran:
Alan Sokal’s influence has certainly been felt strongly recently. Last month, a critique by Sokal — who in 1996 got a fake paper published in Social Text — and two colleagues forced a correction of a much-ballyhooed psychology paper. A few days after that, we reported on a Serbian Sokal hoax-like paper whose authors cited the scholarly … Continue reading Science reporter spoofs hundreds of open access journals with fake papers
Talk about a Trojan Horse. Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications has withdrawn a paper it published earlier this year on metabolic proteins linked to diabetes, not because the article was bogus but because the authors appear to have been. The work itself is accurate — indeed, it likely belongs to a Harvard scientist, Bruce Spiegelman, … Continue reading Journal withdraws diabetes paper written by apparently bogus authors
Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation has retracted a pair of articles by a group of chemists from Iran and the United States after finding evidence of plagiarism in the papers. The researcher team included authors from Islamic Azad University, Ferdowski University of Mashhad and, perhaps somewhat incongruously, Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. … Continue reading Journal retracts two chemistry papers for plagiarism
The latest issue of Elsevier’s Editors’ Update is part one of a two-part series on publishing ethics. It contains a bevy of articles on various issues that will be be familiar to Retraction Watch readers, from bias to research misconduct. (Not surprisingly, given the sheer number of journals they publish, Elsevier shows up regularly on … Continue reading Editor: “Close to 10% of the papers we receive show some sign of academic misconduct”
Here’s a warning to would-be plagiarizers: Don’t submit to the journal Molecules unless you have no problem being called out by name when you’re busted. Consider: The journal is retracting a paper it published earlier this year after learning that the article contained verbatim text — and lots of it — from previously published papers. … Continue reading Your bad: Journal yanks paper for plagiarism and duplication, and points fingers
CHICAGO — Almost two years after editors at 18 journals agreed in March 2011 to retract 88 of former retraction record holder Joachim Boldt’s papers, 10% of them hadn’t been retracted. That’s what Nadia Elia, Liz Wager, and Martin Tramer reported here Sunday in an abstract at the Seventh International Congress on Peer Review and … Continue reading What happened to Joachim Boldt’s 88 papers that were supposed to be retracted?
Case report: An 85-year-old man eats some chicken and unknowingly swallows a bone. After two days of worsening abdominal pain, he shows up to the emergency room. A CT scan reveals the bone perforating his colon. He is rushed to surgery, which is successful. Then, during his otherwise uneventful recovery, he develops female breasts. That’s … Continue reading Sir, that’s not my colon: Journal has a bite of a chicken and egg problem
Sam Lee, a Harvard biologist who had two mega-corrections published last year, has retracted a paper in Molecular Cell because some of the figures were “inappropriately assembled.” Here’s the notice for “GAMT, a p53-Inducible Modulator of Apoptosis, Is Critical for the Adaptive Response to Nutrient Stress:”
If it seems that we write “irony alert” often, well, can you blame us? The Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries (we’ll call it JLPPI for short) has retracted a paper it published earlier this year for plagiarism from multiple sources. The article, “FTA vs. Tripod-Beta, which seems better for the analysis of … Continue reading Irony alert: Authors lose paper in loss prevention journal for plagiarism