Moez Smiri, a graduate student in a Tunisian-French laboratory collaboration, clearly needed publications on his CV. But we wouldn’t recommend his solution to the problem. Smiri used cut-and-paste data (his own, to be fair) to write a flurry of manuscripts that he sent around to a variety of journals, most of them deeply obscure. And, … Continue reading Plant Science retracts paper for reused data, forged authorship
The authors of a 2008 paper alleging to have described how a particular protein binds to the parathyroid hormone have retracted it. The paper, “Structure of the Parathyroid Hormone Receptor C Terminus Bound to the G-Protein Dimer Gβ12,” has been cited 12 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. According to the notice:
The journal Angiogenesis is retracting two articles by a group of researchers in India whom it accuses of using manipulated images in six other publications as well. According to the retraction notice for one of the papers, “Gold nanoparticles inhibit vascular endothelial growth factor-induced angiogenesis and vascular permeability via Src dependent pathway in retinal endothelial … Continue reading Angiogenesis retracts two papers, cites image manipulation in eight, as PI blames unethical students
Applied Mathematics Letters, which agreed to apologize to Intelligent Design-friendly Texas professor Granville Sewell and have its publisher, Elsevier, pay $10,000 in legal fees, has posted the text of its apology (Of note: Elsevier has the apology behind a paywall. So if 318 people fork over the $31.50 fee, they’ll have their $10,000 back.):
Back in March, we reported that the journal Computational and Theoretical Chemistry (CTC) had retracted a pair of 2006 papers by a group of Iranian researchers. As the notices stated, the scientists had recalled their articles after detecting “serious errors” with the work post-publication. At the time, the authors still had three other articles in … Continue reading Three more chemistry papers fall to “serious errors” of unknown nature
A controversial study of how relationships between climate change scientists may affect the field, and that has been dogged by charges of plagiarism, will be retracted, USA Today reports. The abstract of the 2008 paper in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, by Edward Wegman and colleagues, concluded: We conjecture that certain styles of co-authorship lead … Continue reading Controversial paper critiquing climate change science set to be retracted because of plagiarism
Journal editors like to believe they are more than mere traffic cops. But here’s a case that makes us wonder. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review — yes, there are parts A-D of this — is retracting a 2009 paper which stole liberally from a 1996 article in a different journal from the … Continue reading Traffic violations: Plagiarism leads to retraction of transit modeling paper
Two math journals have recently retracted two papers that share most of their text — and their first author. The two papers were “Unsteady flows of an Oldroyd-B fluid in a cylindrical domain for a given shear stress,” in Applied Mathematics and Computation, and “A note on longitudinal flows of an Oldroyd-B fluid due to … Continue reading Duplicate publication and apparent guest authorship force retractions of two math papers
A retraction with a complex and yet unclear narrative appears in the April 25, 2011 issue of Physics Letters A. According to the notice, for “Nuclear spin magnetic resonance force microscopy using slice modulation:” This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors of Physics Letters A because there are unsettled issues on … Continue reading Physics Letters A paper gets retracted twice, but the issues remain “unsettled”
As we reported nearly two weeks ago, the eminent surgeon Lazar Greenfield recently lost his position as editor-in-chief of Surgery News over a Valentine’s Day editorial that some readers, particularly women, found offensive. Surgery News is an in-house publication of the American College of Surgeons (although it’s published by Elsevier), and Greenfield was scheduled to … Continue reading Semen editorial costs Greenfield presidency of American College of Surgeons