Salami slicing in pork research leads to retractions

We get accused of grabbing at cheap puns around here, but the headline above is meant to be taken straight up.

Three journals in the food sciences are retracting a trio of papers published last year on bacterial contamination in pork products because the articles used the same data sets — a classic (Platonic?) case of “salami slicing.”

The Journal of Food Protection, which published one of the articles, “Performance of three culture media commonly used for detecting Listeria monocytogenes,” has the following retraction notice:

“Some sentences…are directly taken from other papers, which could be viewed as a form of plagiarism”

Plant Physiology and Biochemistry as an amusing retraction notice this month that underscores the perils of allowing authors to come up with their own statements.

The paper, “Molecular strategies in manipulation of the starch synthesis pathway for improving storage starch content in plants (review and prospect for increasing storage starch synthesis),” came from a group at Sichuan Agricultural University in China — including its Maize Research Institute — and was published in the December 2012 issue.

Which came first? Plagiarism flap forces retraction of chicken nugget paper

It never pays to take a closer look at the inside of a chicken nugget.

The journal Food Chemistry has retracted a 2010 article by Iranian researchers who claimed to have used spectroscopy to examine the inner workings of breaded-fried chicken nuggets. Trouble was, someone else had already done the work.

Issues with the paper first surfaced in March, in the form of a correction that should have given the editors serious indigestion: