After we reported on a retraction for a 13-year old paper by Mohammed Aassila, a reader alerted us to two retractions and an editorial notice for the mathematician. Each of the notes is several years old. That makes a total of four problematic papers for Aassila. Each is plagued by the same thing: plagiarism. Here is … Continue reading Plagiarism count for mathematician updated to four papers
An article by Alexander Spivak, a mathematician based in Israel, is being retracted from the proceedings of a 2014 numerical analysis meeting because Spivak had already published “a major part of text and results” in a mathematics journal in 2010. Spivak, a member of the faculty of sciences at Holon Institute of Technology, has a bit of a … Continue reading Duplication of “a major part of text and results” adds up to third retraction for mathematician
The week at Retraction Watch began with news of a lawsuit against PubPeer commenters. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
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 … Continue reading Blatant plagiarism sinks paper (and earns a sabbatical!) for mathematician
An expression of concern has been issued for the second of three papers on the idea that, if you have three positive emotions for every negative one, you will be more successful in life. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has spent the last decade building a brand around this ratio, … Continue reading “Positivity ratio” research now subject to an expression of concern
We have some updates on the case of more than 120 fake SCIgen conference proceedings papers that slipped into IEEE and Springer journals.
Two major publishers will remove more than 120 papers created with random paper generator SCIgen, according to Nature. Richard van Noorden, who has the scoop, reports:
There were lots of pieces about scientific misconduct, publishing, and related issues posted around the web this week, so without further ado:
A higher-ed journal has retracted a recent paper by a New Jersey scholar who failed to adequately cite one of her sources. Trouble is, the researcher did reference the article more than once — raising the question of whether a retraction, rather than a correction, was the right move. The paper was written by Lynne … Continue reading Remedial math lesson: When does one reference equal an entire paper?
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