You’ve been dupe’d: Catching up on authors who liked their work enough to use it again

As we’ve noted before, we generally let duplication retractions make their way to the bottom of our to-do pile, since there’s often less of an interesting story behind them, duplication is hardly the worst of publishing sins, and the notices usually tell the story. (These are often referred to — imprecisely — as “self-plagiarism.”) But … Continue reading You’ve been dupe’d: Catching up on authors who liked their work enough to use it again

Duplication forces retraction of paper on effects of prenatal environment on behavior

A journal has retracted a 2005 paper by a group of physiologists at the University of Toronto after it became clear that the work duplicated five other articles by the same researchers. Here’s the notice in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews for “Maternal adversity, glucocorticoids and programming of neuroendocrine function and behaviour:”

Radioactive fish study retracted for “significant and extensive” corrections

The authors of a study estimating how much radioactive material from two sunken Russian submarines is taken up by fish in the Barents Sea have retracted it, citing the need for “significant and extensive” corrections. Here’s the notice, from Environmental Pollution:

Bad vibrations: Composites paper pulled after subsequent, duplicate article appears

Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering is retracting a 2011 paper by an Italian researcher who submitted a similar article to another journal. What makes this interesting is that the retracted article appears to be the one that was published first. The article, “Free vibrations of laminated composite doubly-curved shells and panels of revolution … Continue reading Bad vibrations: Composites paper pulled after subsequent, duplicate article appears

Legal medicine journal pulls paper over image goof

Irony alert: The Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, which really ought to know better, is retracting a 2012 article by an Australian researcher that threatened to run afoul of…privacy law. The article, “A challenging injury interpretation: Could this be a stab wound?” was written by Les Griffiths, of the Clinical Forensic Medical Unit at … Continue reading Legal medicine journal pulls paper over image goof

Journal “mistake” forces removal of toxicology study by leading scientist

We’ve seen this movie before: Researchers present a study at a scientific meeting, then learn to their surprise (and, sometimes, chagrin) that a journal has published the data in a supplement or other edition. That’s the case with a group of UK scientists whose abstract for a meeting of the British Toxicology Society wound up … Continue reading Journal “mistake” forces removal of toxicology study by leading scientist

Iranian mathematicians latest to have papers retracted for fake email addresses to get better reviews

It’s tempting to start calling this a trend. Three Elsevier math journals are among the latest scientific publications to be retracting papers because fake email addresses were used to obtain favorable peer reviews. The three papers appear in two journals: “On two subclasses of (α,β)-metrics being projectively related,” in the Journal of Geometry and Physics; … Continue reading Iranian mathematicians latest to have papers retracted for fake email addresses to get better reviews

Slew of retractions appears in Neuroscience Letters

We’re not sure how many you need for a “slew,” but we’ve seen five retractions in Neuroscience Letters recently, most of them because researchers republished translations of papers in English, so we thought we’d round them up in a post. We’ll start the count — appropriately, we think — with the notice for “Simple mental … Continue reading Slew of retractions appears in Neuroscience Letters

Comp sci journal retracts paper for overlap

The Journal of Systems Architecture has retracted a 2010 article by a group of researchers in China who tried to publish their work twice. The paper first appeared in July 2010 in the Journal of Software under the title, “Description and Verification of Dynamic Software Architectures for Distributed Systems.” At the time, it had three authors — … Continue reading Comp sci journal retracts paper for overlap

Glasgow’s Beatson Institute investigating circumstances of Cell retraction for inappropriate images

The Beatson Institute for Cancer Research in Glasgow, Scotland is looking into how inappropriate images ended up in a Cell paper that has just been retracted. Here’s the notice for the paper by Lynne Marshall, Niall S. Kenneth, and Robert J. White: