Elsevier retracting 26 papers accepted because of fake reviews

Elsevier has retracted 13 papers—and says it will retract 13 more—after discovering they were accepted because of fake reviews. A spokesperson for Elsevier told us that the journals are in the process of retracting all 26 papers affected by the “peer-review manipulation” and “unexplained authorship irregularities.” Most share one corresponding author, a physical science researcher […]

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Hydrogen journal pulls palladium paper for data misuse

The International Journal of Hydrogen Energy is retracting a 2013 article for what appears to be the misappropriation of data. The paper,  titled “Hydrogen production by an anaerobic photocatalytic reforming using palladium nanoparticle on boron and nitrogen doped TiO2 catalysts,” was written by researchers from the Veltech Dr RR & Dr SR Technical University, in Chennai, […]

“Different but similar” data lead to retraction of fuel cell paper

intjhydroenergycoverA group of researchers from Taiwan has been forced to retract their 2012 paper in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy for what appears to be a case of double submission.

The paper was titled “Electricity harvest from wastewaters using microbial fuel cell with sulfide as sole electron donor.”

As the retraction notice explains:

This article has been retracted at the request of the Authors. The authors acknowledge that this paper covered the same research topic as an earlier paper by them (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhydene.2012.01.092) presenting different but similar experimental results.

What’s puzzling is that the earlier paper, “Electricity harvest from nitrate/sulfide-containing wastewaters using microbial fuel cell with autotrophic denitrifier, Pseudomonas sp. C27,”  also appeared in the October issue of the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy. In fact, it covered pages 15827 to 15832, while the retracted article ran on pages 15787–15791.

A clue here is that the October 2012 issue of the journal carried presentations from the 2011 Asian Bio-Hydrogen and Biorefinery Symposium, which suggests that the Taiwan group submitted at least two papers to the conference on highly overlapping subjects and that the decision to retract one and not the other may well have been a coin toss.

That sort of either/or-ness seems to be a motif with this journal. When we last reported on the IJHE, in November 2012, it had retracted a paper, also from a symposium, whose authors maintained that their work had “merit” despite also having enough errors to merit retraction.


Hydrogen study has “merit” — just not enough to avoid retraction

The International Journal of Hydrogen Energy has retracted a paper by a group from Malaysia and India who, reading between the lines, couldn’t quite get the low notes to overcome what the high notes lacked. Or something like that.

The paper, “Hydrogen production from sea water using waste aluminium and calcium oxide,” appears to have come out of the quaintly named 7th Petite Workshop on the Defect Chemical Nature of Energy Materials, held in March 2011 in Norway.

According to the notice:

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.

Although the authors believe their work is of merit, repeating some of the studies indicated there were some errors in their paper and therefore they have requested its retraction.

We’re not sure if the evident conflict over who requested the retraction is a real discrepancy or merely semantics, and no one has responded to our requests for comment. Still, the net result’s the same.