Plagiarism: It’s just an “approach” to writing papers, right?

We’ve heard a lot of rationalizations for plagiarism on this beat — “I didn’t know I had to cite that text”; “That author said it better than I ever could”; etc. — but here’s a new one for the wall of shame.

Chemistry – A European Journal is retracting a 2012 article, “A New Indicator for Potassium Ions at Physiological pH by Using a Macrocyclic Luminescent Metal Complex,”  by a group of Chinese authors who used the cut-and-paste method to put together their manuscript. That’s not unusual. But the notice is:

University of La Laguna ethics committee finds evidence of misconduct in chemists’ papers

A committee at the University of La Laguna (ULL), in Spain’s Canary Islands, has found evidence of misconduct by two chemists in at least two papers. One of those authors had already been forced to retract a paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS).

The story is complicated. Here’s a try at telling it:

Did a McLuhan moment lead to retraction in Chemistry — A European Journal?

The authors of a chemistry paper are retracting it after a Columbia University chemistry researcher pointed out a fatal misinterpretation of his own work in it.

Here’s the notice in Chemistry — A European Journal: