Comments on: Academic purgatory: Papers withdrawn before they’re “officially” published

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 08 May 2013 23:03:00 +0000

Recent article on peer review and a peer reviewed article that was shown to contain false information when used in a federal court case. http://www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php/pot/article/view/256

By: Thomas Zaslavsky

Thomas Zaslavsky — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 02:03:11 +0000

It’s a bit much to expect an editor who didn’t recognize plagiarism to explain why s/he accepted the paper. But it’s a bit much for the journal to fail to explain that the article was plagiarized.

In math there have been cases of plagiarism. Once it was detected that X (nameless) was systematically plagiarizing, the American and European review journals each published one factual description listing the articles for which plagiarism was certain. No articles or reviews were withdrawn. The evidence remains available to all. Apparently math is more transparent than some other parts of science and medicine.

By: Steven Salzberg

Steven Salzberg — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 18:26:54 +0000

I have a better example for you. A review paper was accepted and published online in 2008 by the journal Proteomics. The topic was supposedly about mitochondria. However, the authors had an anti-evolution, creationist agenda, and they snuck in two passages that asserted that “a mighty creator” was responsible for the origin of life. Several bloggers including myself and PZ Myers caught it when the paper appeared online:
http://genome.fieldofscience.com/2008/02/stealth-attempt-to-sneak-creationism.html

After PZ wrote his entry, one of the commenters decided that the authors shouldn’t be trusted and started searching their text. The commenter found that almost the entire article (except the Creationist bits) had been plagiarized, word-for-word, from other articles.

The Editor-in-Chief eventually retracted the article, but never fully explained despite many demands from scientists and bloggers. I re-visited the issue a year later:
http://genome.fieldofscience.com/2009/02/creationism-in-journal-proteomics.html
but the Editor never explained how he allowed such a flawed article in the first place.