A group of researchers from Taiwan has been forced to retract their 2012 paper in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy for what appears to be a case of double submission. The paper was titled “Electricity harvest from wastewaters using microbial fuel cell with sulfide as sole electron donor.” As the retraction notice explains:
Renewable Energy may cover conservation, but that doesn’t mean it expects its authors to recycle their own words. The Elsevier journal is retracting a biodiesel paper it published in February 2012 by a group of Chinese researchers who published much the same work in another title a month later. That periodical, the Journal of the … Continue reading Hey authors, “Renewable Energy” doesn’t mean you can recycle words
An anti-terrorism researcher at the University of Southern Denmark has had a number of papers in conference proceedings retracted for plagiarism. Debora Weber-Wulff, who has researched plagiarism for a decade, reports on her blog Copy, Shake, and Paste that eight papers by Nasrullah Memon have been retracted after the Vroniplag website revealed similarities between his … Continue reading Eight papers by anti-terrorism professor retracted for plagiarism
Two more retractions for Diederik Stapel, his 33rd and 34th, by our count. The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, which has been a frequent subject of Retraction Watch posts recently, has retracted “Similarities and differences between the impact of traits and expectancies: What matters is whether the target stimulus is ambiguous or mixed:”
Earlier this week, we reported on retractions six and seven , in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, for Lawrence Sanna, the former University of Michigan psychologist who resigned last May after questions were raised about his work. Retraction eight has now appeared, also in the JESP. Here’s the notice for “When thoughts don’t feel … Continue reading Retraction eight appears for social psychologist Lawrence Sanna
Diederik Stapel has another retraction, his 32nd. Here’s the notice, for “”Information to go: Fluency enhances the usability of primed information,” which first appeared in 2010 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology:
You’d think this sort of thing would be, well, obvious to the editors of a journal called Pattern Recognition Letters — could a fox get away with publishing in Henhouse News? — but a group of Lithuanian researchers managed to get a duplicate article into the pages of PRL. The paper, titled “Application of Bayes … Continue reading Seeing double in Pattern Recognition Letters leads to retraction
We’ve learned a lot about retractions in 2012, from the fact that most retractions are due to misconduct to the effects they can have on funding. We’ve seen eyebrow-raising reasons for retractions, from a hack of Elsevier’s peer review system to a researcher peer reviewing his own papers, to massive fraud in psychology to a … Continue reading How many retractions were there in 2012? And, some shattered records
Here at Retraction Watch, we’ve covered retractions for misconduct, journal errors, editorial system hacking and even no particular reason. And that’s just in the last week. However, we’ve identified a new reported reason: carelessness. A paper in Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry claimed to show how a tiny RNA causes fat cells to die. Instead, the … Continue reading RNA paper retracted for “carelessness in including some of the figures”
Plant Physiology and Biochemistry has an amusing retraction notice this month that underscores the perils of allowing authors to come up with their own statements. The paper, “Molecular strategies in manipulation of the starch synthesis pathway for improving storage starch content in plants (review and prospect for increasing storage starch synthesis),” came from a group … Continue reading “Some sentences…are directly taken from other papers, which could be viewed as a form of plagiarism”