Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation has retracted a pair of articles by a group of chemists from Iran and the United States after finding evidence of plagiarism in the papers.
The researcher team included authors from Islamic Azad University, Ferdowski University of Mashhad and, perhaps somewhat incongruously, Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.
The first paper, “An analytical approach to the stability of solitary solutions of cubic–quintic coupled non-linear Schrödinger equations,” appeared in 2009 and has been cited twice, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. (Question: is an article that will ultimately be retracted for plagiarism considered to exist in a state of un-retracted retractionness, such that by detecting the plagiarized text the article immediately ceases to be?):
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and the authors.
The authors have plagiarized part of a paper that had already appeared in the Iranian Journal of Physics Research 6(4) (2006) 245–251. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.
The second paper, “An analytical approach to the solitonic solutions in the three-component plasma of the positive ion–electron–positron and investigating the effect of positron increase on the solitonic wave characteristics,” which also came out in 2009 and has been cited twice, has a similar notice:
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and the author.
The authors have plagiarized part of a paper that had already appeared in the Iranian Journal of Physics Research 5(4) (2005) 225–234. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.
This marks at least the third retraction in the journal for this group. In 2011, they lost “An analytical approach to the Klein–Gordon and the Dirac relativistic oscillators in a non-commutative space under a constant magnetic field”:
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and Author. Please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). Reason: The authors have plagiarized part of a paper that had already appeared in Iranian Journal of Physics Research. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and we apologize to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.
Robert Erik Sammelson was the author from Ball State. We have tried to reach him for comment and will update this post if we hear from him.
Source: retractionwatch.com