A new record? 27-plus years later, a notice of redundant publication

A 1984 paper in Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B is now subject to a notice of redundant publication because a lot of it had been published in Cell the same year.

Whether 28 years — 27 years and 9 months, to be precise — is any kind of official record is unclear, since we haven’t really kept track of notices of redundant publication. It would, however, beat the record for longest time between publication and retraction, 27 years and one month.

Here’s the notice, which ran in September of last year but just came to our attention:

Double-dipping leads to removal of petroleum research paper

Iranian scientists have lost one of two articles they submitted — and published — simultaneously to different journals. Watch as confusion ensues.

The retracted paper, “Permeability Estimation of a Reservoir Based on Neural Networks Coupled with Genetic Algorithms,” appeared online in August 2011  in Petroleum Science and Technology, a Taylor & Francis journal. According to the liner notes, the paper had been received on January 15, 2010 and accepted a few weeks later. It has been cited once since, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, by its authors, in a paper published in the same journal.

Meanwhile, in August 2011 the authors (minus one name) also published “Evolving neural network using real coded genetic algorithm for permeability estimation of the reservoir,”  in Expert Systems With Applications, an Elsevier title.

The standing paper — which has been cited seven times — now carries the following erratum notice (dated far into the future, September 2013):

Heart pulls sodium meta-analysis over duplicated, and now missing, data

The journal Heart has retracted a 2012 meta-analysis after learning that two of the six studies included in the review contained duplicated data.  Those studies, it so happens, were conducted by one of the co-authors.

The article, “Low sodium versus normal sodium diets in systolic heart failure: systematic review and meta-analysis,” came from an eclectic group of authors from the United States, Canada and Italy (the first author is listed as being at a Wegmans pharmacy in Ithaca, N.Y.). The paper, published online in August 2012, purported to find that:

Mitochondrial fission paper falls for fusing data from earlier work

A team of neuroscientists in Japan has lost their 2012 article in Brain Research for duplicating elements of a figure from a paper they’d published earlier that year in another journal.

The article, “Dynamic changes of mitochondrial fission proteins after transient cerebral ischemia in mice,” came from a lab at Okayama University. The last author was Koji Abe. According to the retraction notice:

Duplicate publication of headache paper earns Expression of Concern, erratum

A 2003 paper is now subject to an Expression of Concern after its author reused a lot of its material in a 2007 paper.

Here’s the Expression of Concern for “New therapeutic target in primary headaches – blocking the CGRP receptor” by Lars Edvinsson of the University of Copehagen:

Heart attack: Two cardiology retractions, plus a notice of duplication, in three different journals

We’ve come across three notices in cardiology journals this week, so although they’re unrelated, we’re gathering them here.

Item 1, from Circulation Research:

Frequent Retraction Watch fliers rack them up: Stapel hits 51, Lichtenthaler scores number 9

Rewards may vary

Quick updates on work by two people whose names appear frequently on Retraction Watch: Diederik Stapel and Ulrich Lichtenthaler.

Last month, we reported on the 50th retraction for Stapel. Here’s number 51 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, for “The flexible unconscious: Investigating the judgmental impact of varieties of unaware perception:”

Flu paper duplication earns Expression of Concern

A six year-old review on bird flu that failed to credit some content from another six year-old review of bird flu is now stamped with an Expression of Concern.

Here’s the notice, from Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses:

“Considerable overlap” leads to retraction of medical imaging paper

We have poked fun at Pattern Recognition Letters before for failing to catch blatant plagiarism. We probably should have held off on those jokes for this post.

A group of IT researchers from India has suffered the retraction of a paper in PRL for heavily basing the piece on at least four previous papers written by one of the co-authors without proper attribution (not that such attribution likely would have absolved the sin).

The paper, titled “A robust kernelized intuitionistic fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm in segmentation of noisy medical images,” was published in January of this year by Prabhjot Kaur and colleagues.

Here’s the retraction notice:

Duplication, aka self-plagiarism, meets management-speak

What happens when people who study management have to write a retraction notice? This, from Management Learning, regarding a paper by Gordon Müller-Seitz of the Free University of Berlin, suggests one possibility: