Archive for the ‘Scientific Fraud’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Global warming paper withdrawn for being “false and impossible”

January 20, 2011

Global warming enthusiasts are getting desperate it would seem. Perhaps they are disturbed by their crumbling credibility as the entire faith is being debunked. Polar bears are thriving and the Sun is very quiet and we are in for 20 or 30 years of a cooling trend and the effect of man-made CO2 having any significant effect on warming is looking more and more implausible. Catastrophe claims are being exaggerated to the level of the impossible and draconian measures are being called for. The global warming crowd are sounding more like eco-fascists whose creed is that “discipline, prohibition, enforcement and oppression” are the only solution.

On the one hand we have one of the high priests of the global warming faith (NASA’s James Hansen) calling for authoritarian measures a la China to enforce de-carbonisation – http://hauntingthelibrary.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/hansen-us-democracy-not-competent-to-deal-with-global-warming-calls-on-communist-china-to-save-humanity/

The NASA scientist at the heart of the global warming fiasco seems set to stir more controversy after declaring in an op ed piece for The South China Morning Post and a personally published follow-up that American democracy is not competent to deal with global warming, and communist China now represents the world’s “best hope”.

In the op ed piece for the Chinese newspaper, which he entitled Chinese Leadership Needed to Save Humanity (published as The Price of Change) Hansen placed the blame for the vast majority of Co2 emissions supposedly causing global warming on his home country of America, and appealed to China not to follow the same path. Hansen said that China was the world’s “best hope” and called for them to “lead the world through the most dangerous crisis that humanity and nature have ever faced”.

In a follow-up article published on his website Hansen calls Americans “barbarians” and slams American democracy, calling for China to raise tariffs on American-made products until such time as America falls into line. …….

Hansen goes on to condemn the current democratic system in America as “dysfunctional” as it will not enact the carbon taxes he has been calling for. All is not lost, though, as he advises the Chinese government what to do about Congress in a truly incredible passage in his letter:

“However, there is a way around that, which becomes obvious with the realization that an initially modest carbon fee is in China’s own interest. After agreement with other nations, e.g., the European Union, China and these nations could impose rising internal carbon fees. Existing rules of the World Trade Organization would allow collection of a rising border duty on products from all nations that do not have an equivalent internal carbon fee or tax.

The United States then would be forced to make a choice. It could either address its fossil fuel addiction with a rising carbon fee and supportive national investment policies or it could accept continual descent into second-rate and third-rate economic well-being”.

And now we have Canadian TV revealing that

“A study warning that the planet would warm by 2.4C by 2020, creating deadly consequences for the global food supply, is being debunked as false and impossible”.

The study came from a little-known, non-profit group based in Argentina, called the Universal Ecological Fund. An embargoed copy of the study appeared on Eurekalert!, a news service operated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that’s followed by many journalists.

The study was picked up by a number of international news organizations Tuesday. But it appears the study’s claims were erroneous. …… The correction came after The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. published a reaction piece to the study. The paper said it had interviewed climate scientists who told them that rapid global warming at the rates projected by the study was impossible.

“2.4 C by 2020 (which is 1.4C in the next 10 years – something like six to seven times the projected rate of warming) has no basis in fact,” NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt told the newspaper in an email.

According to The Guardian, the study’s lead author Liliana Hisas, who is the UEF’s executive director, erred by overlooking how the oceans, which absorb heat, will compensate for global warming by delaying the effects of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere.

Hisas said she stands by her report’s findings, which have been endorsed by Nobel Prize-winning Argentine climate scientist, Osvaldo Canziani.

The AAAS says that after receiving complaints that the study’s conclusions were impossible, it has removed all references to the study from its website.

“EurekAlert! deeply regrets the accidental posting of an erroneous news release on 18 January 2011,” the news service wrote in a notice to journalists who subscribe to the service.

  1. It should be noted that the Universal Ecological Fund is just another lobby group, and
  2. that “the Nobel Prize-winning Argentine climate scientist, Osvaldo Canziani” who supervised this work got his much-maligned Peace Nobel as part of the IPCC for lobbying activities and not for any scientific endeavour, and
  3. the paper seems to have received little or no competent scientific review before being published by EurekAlert

Tags:, , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Scientific Fraud | 5 Comments »

Hausergate: In scientific misconduct “confirmation bias” or “fudging data” are equally corrupt

January 2, 2011

The Scientific American carries an article about the Marc Hauser case at Harvard. (Marc Hauser was found to have committed 8 cases of scientific misconduct).

Scientific American

Scott O. Lilienfeld argues that Hauser may only be guilty of “confirmation bias” and that it is premature to ascribe deliberate wrongdoing to him:

Hauser has admitted to committing “significant mistakes.” In observing the reactions of my colleagues to Hauser’s shocking comeuppance, I have been surprised at how many assume reflexively that his misbehavior must have been deliberate. For example, University of Maryland physicist Robert L. Park wrote in a Web column that Hauser “fudged his experiments.” I don’t think we can be so sure. It’s entirely possible that Hauser was swayed by “confirmation bias”—the tendency to look for and perceive evidence consistent with our hypotheses and to deny, dismiss or distort evidence that is not.

The past few decades of research in cognitive, social and clinical psychology suggest that confirmation bias may be far more common than most of us realize. Even the best and the brightest scientists can be swayed by it, especially when they are deeply invested in their own hypotheses and the data are ambiguous. A baseball manager doesn’t argue with the umpire when the call is clear-cut—only when it is close.

Scholars in the behavioral sciences, including psychology and animal behavior, may be especially prone to bias. They often make close calls about data that are open to many interpretations…….

………. Two factors make combating confirmation bias an uphill battle. For one, data show that eminent scientists tend to be more arrogant and confident than other scientists. As a consequence, they may be especially vulnerable to confirmation bias and to wrong-headed conclusions, unless they are perpetually vigilant. Second, the mounting pressure on scholars to conduct single-hypothesis-driven research programs supported by huge federal grants is a recipe for trouble. Many scientists are highly motivated to disregard or selectively reinterpret negative results that could doom their careers.

But I am not persuaded. When “eminent” scientists use their position and power to indulge in “confirmation bias” it is merely a euphemism for what is still cheating by taking undue advantage of their position. It is “corruption” in its most basic form. I reject the notion that such “confirmation bias” is a form of  “unwitting behaviour”. It may well be behaviour which resides in the sub-conscious but that is not “unwitting” behaviour. Neither is it excusable just because it may be in the sub-conscious. It gets into the sub-conscious only because the conscious allows it to do so. When any behaviour residing in the sub-conscious conflicts with the values and morality of an individual it is inevitably ejected into the conscious.  Being sub-consciously immoral but consciously moral is not feasible.

In the case of Marc Hauser, even assuming that his faults were due to “confirmation bias” then either it was behaviour which remained entirely in the sub-conscious in which case his values and morality are suspect, or it was triggered into the conscious and he continued anyway in which case it was simple cheating.

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Behaviour, Corruption, Ethics, Philosophy, Scientific Fraud, scientific misconduct | Comments Off on Hausergate: In scientific misconduct “confirmation bias” or “fudging data” are equally corrupt

Belated action on scientific misconduct in India

November 18, 2010

The Calcutta Telegraph carries the sordid story of scientific fraud, establishment denial, paper retractions and finally establishment acceptance of the misconduct.

The Gopal Kundu controversy

A controversy erupted in National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS), Pune in 2006 when an anonymous mail alleged that the authors (H. Rangaswami and Colleagues from the group of Dr. Gopal Kundu) may have misrepresented data in a paper published in Journal of Biological Chemistry. The allegation was that they had rehashed the same set of data which they had published earlier. An internal committee of the NCCS advised the authors to take back their paper, however an independent committee led by G. Padmanabhan, a former director of Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, concluded that there was no manipulation in the data. This led to some heated debate between Indian Scientists with several viewpoints being presented. On 23 February 2007, the Journal of Biological Chemistry withdrew the paper amid allegations of data manipulation. The authors still maintain that the two papers used different set of data though similar experiments.

However the panel set up was not as independent as claimed. Its members were chosen by the Government and – as often when things get politicised in India – they returned a “politically correct” white-wash. But now as The Telegraph reports:

An apex association of Indian scientists today debarred for three years a senior biologist who had been accused of plagiarism by international scientific journals three years ago but was exonerated by a government panel of top scientists.

The unprecedented action by the Bangalore-based Indian Academy of Sciences, after an internal investigation by its ethics committee, appears to vindicate claims by some scientists that the government-appointed panel had tried to shield the accused.

At its annual meeting in Goa today, the academy endorsed the decision by its ethics committee (which was accepted by the academy’s council in July) and barred Gopal Kundu from participating in the academy’s activities for three years, beginning August 2010.

Nor can Kundu, a research scientist at Pune’s National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS), propose any candidates for fellowship of the academy during this period.

The prestigious US-based Journal of Biological Chemistry(JBC) had in February 2007 withdrawn a research paper by Kundu, accusing him of reusing images he had published in an earlier paper.

Another journal, Glycoconjugates Journal, too, had withdrawn a paper by Kundu because it had substantial similarities with a paper he had himself published previously in the JBC.

Better late than never but what is more important is the relatively low value given to ethics by the scientific establishment. Ethics, misconduct and scientific rigour can always be trumped by political correctness. Rahul Siddharthan writes in his excellent post:

An internal investigation at Kundu’s institution found him guilty of misrepresenting data, but a subsequent investigation by an external committee of six eminent scientists exonerated him completely, declaring themselves entirely satisfied that the images, though visually similar, were “indeed different.” I subsequently made my own analysis and published it in Current Science, who followed it with a response from G Padmanaban, the head of the committee that exonerated Kundu.

………

To me, this case is not really about Kundu. It is about our complete lack of appreciation of scientific ethics, and our tendency to “close ranks” when trouble arrives. To succumb to this tendency even after an international journal has conducted its own investigation and made its own decision, and to justify it with a paltry two-page report, merely makes us a laughing-stock.

So it is a good thing that the Academy has, belatedly, tried to correct this.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Ethics, India, Peer review, Scientific Fraud, scientific misconduct | Comments Off on Belated action on scientific misconduct in India

US scientists more likely to publish fake research

November 16, 2010

A new on-line paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics has studied the PubMed database for all scientific research papers that had been retracted between 2000 and 2010.

Retractions in the scientific literature: do authors deliberately commit research fraud? by R Grant Steen J Med Ethics doi:10.1136/jme.2010.038125

Abstract

Background Papers retracted for fraud (data fabrication or data falsification) may represent a deliberate effort to deceive, a motivation fundamentally different from papers retracted for error. It is hypothesised that fraudulent authors target journals with a high impact factor (IF), have other fraudulent publications, diffuse responsibility across many co-authors, delay retracting fraudulent papers and publish from countries with a weak research infrastructure.

Methods All 788 English language research papers retracted from the PubMed database between 2000 and 2010 were evaluated. Data pertinent to each retracted paper were abstracted from the paper and the reasons for retraction were derived from the retraction notice and dichotomised as fraud or error. Data for each retracted article were entered in an Excel spreadsheet for analysis.

Results Journal IF was higher for fraudulent papers (p<0.001). Roughly 53% of fraudulent papers were written by a first author who had written other retracted papers (‘repeat offender’), whereas only 18% of erroneous papers were written by a repeat offender (χ=88.40; p<0.0001). Fraudulent papers had more authors (p<0.001) and were retracted more slowly than erroneous papers (p<0.005). Surprisingly, there was significantly more fraud than error among retracted papers from the USA (χ2=8.71; p<0.05) compared with the rest of the world.

Conclusions This study reports evidence consistent with the ‘deliberate fraud’ hypothesis. The results suggest that papers retracted because of data fabrication or falsification represent a calculated effort to deceive. It is inferred that such behaviour is neither naïve, feckless nor inadvertent.

PhysOrg summarises the paper:

The study author searched the PubMed database for every scientific research paper that had been withdrawn—and therefore officially expunged from the public record—between 2000 and 2010. A total of 788 papers had been retracted during this period. Around three quarters of these papers had been withdrawn because of a serious error (545); the rest of the retractions were attributed to fraud (data fabrication or falsification).

The highest number of retracted papers were written by US first authors (260), accounting for a third of the total. One in three of these was attributed to fraud.

The UK, India, Japan, and China each had more than 40 papers withdrawn during the decade. Asian nations, including South Korea, accounted for 30% of retractions. Of these, one in four was attributed to fraud.

The fakes were more likely to appear in leading publications with a high “impact factor.” This is a measure of how often research is cited in other peer reviewed journals. More than half (53%) of the faked research papers had been written by a first author who was a “repeat offender.” This was the case in only one in five (18%) of the erroneous papers.

The average number of authors on all retracted papers was three, but some had 10 or more. Faked research papers were significantly more likely to have multiple authors. Each first author who was a repeat fraudster had an average of six co-authors, each of whom had had another three retractions.

“The duplicity of some authors is cause for concern,” comments the author. Retraction is the strongest sanction that can be applied to published research, but currently, “[it] is a very blunt instrument used for offences both gravely serious and trivial.”

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Behaviour, Ethics, Medicine, Science, Scientific Fraud, scientific misconduct | 1 Comment »

American Geophysical Union backs away from the “Warriors of the faith”

November 9, 2010

Wattsupwiththat has the story.

The American Geophysical Union has issued a press release backing away from “a broad campaign to push back against congressional conservatives who have threatened prominent researchers with investigations and vowed to kill regulations to rein in man-made greenhouse gases” which was widely reported yesterday: See “Warriors of the Faith”: Global warming zealots declare jehad”

The Press Release is available at http://www.agu.org/news/press/pr_archives/2010/2010-37.shtml.

 

AGU Logo

 

Inaccurate news reports misrepresent a climate-science initiative of the American Geophysical Union

WASHINGTON—An article appearing in the Los Angeles Times, and then picked up by media outlets far and wide, misrepresents the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and a climate science project the AGU is about to relaunch. The project, called Climate Q&A Service, aims simply to provide accurate scientific answers to questions from journalists about climate science.

“In contrast to what has been reported in the LA Times and elsewhere, there is no campaign by AGU against climate skeptics or congressional conservatives,” says Christine McEntee, Executive Director and CEO of the American Geophysical Union. “AGU will continue to provide accurate scientific information on Earth and space topics to inform the general public and to support sound public policy development.”..

“AGU is a scientific society, not an advocacy organization,” says climate scientist and AGU President Michael J. McPhaden. “The organization is committed to promoting scientific discovery and to disseminating to the scientific community, policy makers, the media, and the public, peer-reviewed scientific findings across a broad range of Earth and space sciences.”…….

The Army of the Warriors of the Faith has gone from 700 to 39 to zero in one day.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Alarmism, Behaviour, Climate, Science, Scientific Fraud | Comments Off on American Geophysical Union backs away from the “Warriors of the faith”

“Warriors of the Faith”: Global warming zealots declare jehad

November 8, 2010

The Chicago Tribune runs with the latest example of faith-based zealots declaring war!

Warriors of the Faith: image Jesus Christ Superstar

 

Faced with rising political attacks, hundreds of climate scientists are joining a broad campaign to push back against congressional conservatives who have threatened prominent researchers with investigations and vowed to kill regulations to rein in man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

The still-evolving efforts reveal a shift among climate scientists, many of whom have traditionally stayed out of politics and avoided the news media. Many now say they are willing to go toe-to-toe with their critics, some of whom gained new power after the Republicans won control of the House in Tuesday’s election.

On Monday, the American Geophysical Union, the country’s largest association of climate scientists, plans to announce that 700 climate scientists have agreed to speak out as experts on questions about global warming and the role of man-made air pollution.

John Abraham of St. Thomas University in Minnesota, who last May wrote a widely disseminated response to climate change skeptics, is also pulling together a “climate rapid response team,” which includes scientists prepared to go before what they consider potentially hostile audiences on conservative talk radio and television shows.

“This group feels strongly that science and politics can’t be divorced and that we need to take bold measures to not only communicate science but also to aggressively engage the denialists and politicians who attack climate science and its scientists,” said Scott Mandia, professor of physical sciences at Suffolk County Community College in New York.

This new Rapid Response Team has so far recruited 39 Warriors of the Faith!!!

A rapid-response team, however, is willing to delve into politics. In the week that Abraham and others have been marshaling the team, 39 scientists agreed to participate, including Richard Feely, senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research; and Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University.

“People who’ve already dug their heels in, we’re not going to change their opinions,” Mandia said. “We’re trying to reach people who may not have an opinion or opinion based on limited information.”

neela.banerjee@latimes.com

It is difficult to take any Global Warming “Science” or “Scientists” seriously as long they continue the shenanigans revealed in Climategate and behave like a bunch of religious fanatics. It remains to be seen how many real scientists will join these religious fanatics in committing scientific and political suicide.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Alarmism, Behaviour, Climate, Environment, Scientific Fraud | 2 Comments »

Pachauri stays at IPCC: Ultimately it’s a question of cowardice

October 14, 2010

 

Pachauri's racy thesis

 

The IPCC has just completed its 3 day meeting in Busan. The absence of any courage by any of the delegates or by their Chairman is apparent. Rather than implement all the recommendations of the IAC review they have just accepted all the easy bits and shuffled off the more painful corrections to be studied in committee. The Chairman himself has not had the courage to swallow his overweening pride and return quietly to Almora.  (A psychiatrist might be able to explain the connections between his public utterances and his steamy novel).

The BBC reports:

(The IPCC) meeting in South Korea closed with many other reforms proposed in a recent review being passed to committees for further consideration. Chairman Rajendra Pachauri confirmed his intention to stay in post until the next assessment is published in 2014. In its recent review of the IPCC, the InterAcademy Council (IAC) – an umbrella group for the world’s science academies – highlighted a case in the 2007 assessment where studies projecting rapidly declining crop yields in Africa were given more weight than they merited, in the absence of supporting evidence.

The revised guidance emphasises that in future, authors must assess both the quality of research available and uncertainties within that research.

t urges authors to be careful of “group-think”, but maintains that it “may be appropriate to describe findings for which the evidence and understanding are overwhelming as statements of fact without using uncertainty qualifiers”.

Enhanced guidance on the use of “grey literature” – material not published in peer-reviewed scientific journals – has also been drawn up, and will be finalised by chairs of the IPCC’s working groups in the coming months.

Procedures for correcting errors should they arise were also approved – which means that the most serious error in the 2007 report, on the projected melting date for Himalayan glaciers, can be formally repaired.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Science, Scientific Fraud | Comments Off on Pachauri stays at IPCC: Ultimately it’s a question of cowardice

Chinese Science Ministry vindicates academic fraud journalists

October 13, 2010
Chinese Academy of Sciences

Chinese Academy of Sciences: Image via Wikipedia

The case of the two crusading journalists in China who were brutally attacked after they had exposed academic fraud has been reported by Retraction Watch and the risks they take has been reported here.

In one case after a quick trial, a local court in Beijing convicted urologist Xiao Chuang-Guo on 10 October of assaulting two well-known advocates of academic integrity in China.
One victim of the attacks was Fang Shimin, freelance writer and self-appointed watchdog of research misconduct. Fang had questioned Xiao’s academic achievements, but this was not what prompted the attack, Xiao claimed. Xiao told the court that he had a decade-long personal conflict with Fang, mainly because Fang had insulted Xiao’s wife and teacher.
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/10/doctor-sentenced-in-beijing-for.html

But the Chinese Science Ministry has today issued a statement castigating Xiao.

China’s Ministry of Science and Technology has lambasted a doctor at the center of an academic fraud scandal who masterminded two violent attacks on his critics, and denied he was still on the payroll of a medical research project. The ministry issued a statement on its website late Tuesday, claiming Doctor Xiao Chuanguo had no respect for the law and disrupted social order.

It said Xiao should be condemned for his vicious misconduct and lack of integrity. Xiao, 55, head of the Urology Department of Wuhan Union Hospital, was sentenced Sunday to five and a half months in detention by the Shijingshan District People’s Court of Beijing. The court found Xiao hired four men to attack two writers who had accused him of academic fraud.

Xiao believed the accusation had led to his failing to become a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The victims of the violent attacks were Fang Zhouzi, a science writer with a reputation for exposing academic fraud, and Fang Xuanchang, an editor at the economic journal, Caijing.

The ministry denied claims that Xiao was still a chief scientist on a ministry-sponsored science project.

According to the statement, Xiao used to be the chief scientist researching neurological damage repair on the “973 Plan,” a key national science project. The statement said Xiao’s program ran from 2003 to 2008 and that Xiao was no longer responsible for any “973 plan” projects. It said “chief scientist” was not an honorary title.

 

 

Tags:, , ,
Posted in China, Media, Scientific Fraud | 2 Comments »

Academic Cheating: China and India need to clean up their acts

October 9, 2010

The number of scientific research papers published in India stood at 22,215 in 2007, up from 11,067 a decade earlier.  Chinese academies published a similar number of papers in 1997 — 12,632 but that figure had leapt to 67,433 by 2007.  China in 2007 contributed8.6 percent of the world’s scientific papers while India produced 2.4 percent.

 

Plagiarism

 

Publish or perish is the prevailing paradigm in both countries and plagiarism, data manufacture and manipulation and just downright cheating are endemic to academia. (Plagiarism is rampant in the Indian movie industry and in book publishing as well so academia merely reflects the society at large).

Where cases of plagiarism come to light as with the recent high profile case of plagiarism in reports on GM crops or the cases of plagiarism at IIT-Kanpur, the whitewash committees soon swing into action. Even if sometimes suspended, it does not take long for the parties involved to regain their former positions. CYA prevails.

But the solution does not lie just with correcting institutional processes and better monitoring. A fundamental change in institutional and personal standards of ethics  is required. Academia will need to lead society and not just be sheep.

Just some of the recent cases of academic plagiarism in India and China are given below:

India

  1. Plagiarism: a scourge afflicting the Indian science
  2. Plagiarism plagues India’s genetically modified crops
  3. Biotechnology Advances retracts 3 papers from India for plagiarism
  4. Scientific plagiarism in India
  5. We must restore scientific integrity in Indian research
  6. In India, plagiarism is on the rise
  7. Call for Indian plagiarism watchdog
  8. Copycats from IIT-Kanpur?

China

  1. Do plagiarism, fraud, and retractions make it more difficult trust research from China?
  2. Rampant Fraud Threat to China’s Brisk Ascent.
  3. Scientists behaving badly; Recent events show China needs to clean up its scientific act.
  4. Academic corruption undermining higher education: Yau Shing-tung.
  5. CHINA: Universities fail to tackle plagiarism.
  6. In China, academic cheating is rampant; Some say practice harmful to nation.
  7. CHINA: Professor sacked for academic plagiarism
  8. Nearly half of China’s science workers think academic cheating is “common”.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in China, Fraud, India, Science, Scientific Fraud | Comments Off on Academic Cheating: China and India need to clean up their acts

Biotechnology Advances retracts 3 papers from India for plagiarism

October 5, 2010

Biotechnology Advances

 

 

Update 3: 7th August 2011 Kalasalingam University sacks Sangiliyandi Gurunathan

Update 2: 27th June 2011: Yet another

Sangiliyandi retraction  h/t JV Prasath


Update:

Links to the retraction notices have been added – 31st January 2011 and the links have been updated 22nd February 2011.

Biotechnology Advances has retracted 3 papers from India (2 from IIT Kanpur and1 from Kalasalingam University), all at the request of the editors and all for plagiarism.

A matter of some shame for Indian science and especially for the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. It remains to be seen if the Institutions take any action. The plagiarism seems to have been particularly inept since it included blatant copying even from Wikipedia and Encyclopedias.

The 3 retraction notices are given below:

1. Retraction notice to “Microbial production of dihydroxyacetone” [Biotech Adv. 26 (2008) 293–303] by Ruchi Mishra, Seema Rani Jain and Ashok Kumar

Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, 208016-Kanpur, India

Available online 22 August 2010.

Retraction Notice

Reason: This article has been retracted at the request of the editor as the authors have plagiarised part of several papers that had already appeared in several journals. 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 apologise to the readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.

From a limited, non-exhaustive check of the text, several elements of the text had been plagiarised from the following list of sources:

(more…)

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Biotechnology, Ethics, India, Science, Scientific Fraud | 24 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »