Retraction for water researchers who ripped off dissertation

A pair of engineers at Hohai University in Nanjing, China, has lost their 2012 paper in the Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics. The reason: The article, “Study of the New Leon model for concrete failure,” wasn’t theirs to publish.

According to the retraction notice (which is dated September 2013 but has already appeared in ScienceDirect):

Paper — with longest title ever? — retracted for lack of author approval

The journal Inorganica Chimica Acta has retracted a paper it published earlier this year over an authorship dispute involving the lead researcher and his colleagues in France.

The title of the paper — whose bulk alone gave us a headache  — was “Reaction of a bidentate ligands (4,4′-dimethyl 2,2′-bipyridine) with planar-chiral chloro-bridged ruthenium: Synthesis of cis-dicarbonyl[4,4′-dimethyl-2,2′-bipyridine- κO1,κO2]{2-[tricarbonyl(η6-phenylene- κC1)chromium]pyridine-κN}ruthenium hexafluorophosphate” — and it purportedly came from a lab in Beirut.

However, as the retraction notice indicates, that’s not quite so:

Not in my journal: Two editors take stock of misconduct in their fields — and don’t find much

Today brings two journal editorials about misconduct and retractions. They take, if we may, a bit of an optimistic and perhaps even blindered approach.

In an editorial titled “Scientific misconduct occurs, but is rare,” Boston University’s Richard Primack, editor of Biological Conservation, highlights a Corrigendum of a paper by Jesus Angel Lemus, the veterinary researcher who has retracted seven papers:

A different tack: A “notice of redundant publication,” rather than a retraction, for duplication

How should journals deal with duplication — aka “self-plagiarism?”

Scientists have engaged in vigorous debates here on Retraction Watch about whether such duplication is a minor form of scientific misconduct, or just a conflict between the interests of publishers and those of researchers who have better things to do than figure out different ways to describe their materials and methods.

So we thought we’d highlight how an obstetrics and gynecology journal recently handled a six-year-old duplication. Here’s the “notice of redundant publication:”

Two patch-clamping retractions in PNAS and the JCI after first author admits image manipulation

A group of cardiology researchers formerly of the University of Cologne has retracted two papers, after investigations into allegations of misconduct led to an admission of guilt by one of the lab’s junior members.

Here’s the first retraction, for “Connexin 43 acts as a cytoprotective mediator of signal transduction by stimulating mitochondrial K_ATP channels in mouse cardiomyocytes,” published last week in the Journal of Clinical Investigation:

Make it a double: Alcohol treatment study pulled for duplication

European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry has retracted a 2003 paper on the treatment of alcoholism for a vague “copyright violation.” But the reason appears to be that the article was largely identical to a 2002 report from one of the authors and other colleagues.

The offending paper, “Acamprosate and its efficacy in treating alcohol dependent adolescents,” appeared in June 2003 and has been cited 51 times, according to Google Scholar. The authors were Helmut Niederhofer and Wolfgang Staffen, of the Christian Doppler-Klinik, in Salzburg.

According to the rather uninformative notice:

Immunology paper retracted because “documents were not archived with due diligence”

A group of researchers from Austria, Canada, Germany, and the U.S. have retracted a 2008 paper in the Journal of Immunology after being unable to verify the contents of some key figures.

Here’s the notice:

Salzburg University fires crystallographer Robert Schwarzenbacher for faking data in Journal of Immunology paper

Robert Schwarzenbacher

The crystallographer who confessed to data fabrication that has forced the retraction of a structure in a Journal of Immunology paper on birch pollen allergen — but later recanted — has been fired by the University of Salzburg.

Robert Schwarzenbacher, 39, was awarded a 1.7 million-euro Marie Curie fellowship, the highest individual European research award, six years ago. According to Salzburg’s ORF.at:

Protein structure retracted after investigation into “highly improbable features,” journal calls it fraud

In 2010, a group of crystallographers immunologists and allergy researchers at the University of Salzburg published a paper in the Journal of Immunology claiming to have derived the structure of a birch pollen allergen.

That structure, however, caught the attention of Bernhard Rupp, an eminent crystallographer. In January of this year, Rupp submitted a paper to Acta Crystallographica Section F pointing out problems with it, which prompted the editors of the crystallography journal to contact the authors of the original paper a month later. Those authors, it turns out, agreed with Rupp, they write in a response to his paper published in the April 2012 issue of Acta Crystallographica Section F:

Duplication forces retraction of paper by group whose work is used to justify prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing

A dozen years might seem like a publishing eternity, but the European Journal of Cancer has decided to purge a duplicate paper from 2000. The article, on the utility of the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test for detecting prostate cancer, comes from a group whose work in this area has been widely cited as evidence for the benefits of the highly controversial screening tool.

“Prostate cancer screening in the Tyrol, Austria: experience and results,” by a group of Austrian researchers, has a rather complicated past. It’s been cited 42 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s the notice, which appeared in a recent issue of the journal: