Retracted Research Article and Publication Ethics an Appproach to Research Integrity

Last updated on Sunday, October 11th, 2020

Research integrity includes the publication ethics that one scientific author has to maintain for it. Retracted Research Articles are those articles where authors ignored the publication ethics, and the publisher in the initial stage couldn’t identify the source of malpractices. 

Latest Retracted Research Articles

One of the extreme limits of publication ethics violations is observed in this decade. Recently a paper published in the Journal of Elsevier, the name of the journal is “Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells“. The title of the article was “Ageing effects of perovskite solar cells under different environmental factors and electrical load conditions” and authors were “ Zaeem Aslam, Hifsa Shahid,  Zeeshan Mehmood” affiliated from “Centre for Energy Research and Development, University of Engineering & Technology Lahore, UET“. This paper was published in the above-said journal dated October 2018, Volume 185, and pages 471-476.

Article Matrics on website

This article was read by the 15 readers to date i.e. 19/10/2018 and mentioned in 3 blogs and 1 news according to the official website of the journal. While on social media total of 309 shares, likes, and comments are recorded, on Twitter it was tweeted 453 times.

Why Paper Retracted From the Journal?

Journal recently retracted the research paper from the official website and also removed HTML content because of a violation of publication policy. It was surprising at the beginning of the research community that how a reputed journal can publish duplicate content?  The scientific reputation of the journal can be understood by the metrics given below;

The Journal that has five impact factors how can publish this research paper? Which is completely a copy-pasted article of the original research paper published in Nature Journal. The questions obviously will raise on the plagiarism report used by the technical staff. It is very clear that this plagiarism report could not identify the source by the software also, and then further by peer team members. It happens when we are dependent only on the machine output. The machine can’t observe easily paraphrasing and text recycling.

Predatory journals follow this kind of practices and never retracted the research articles. Does this kind of publications in the reputed journals doesn’t create a doubt in the researchers and authors’ mind? The researchers lose faith and obviously it affects the reputation of the Journal. Just withdraw the paper from the journal list is not sufficient. The publisher should ban the authors and affiliated institutions to publish the research papers in publications house not in a journal but in all related journals of the publishing houses. Also, this note should be on the retracted paper web link. So, the people who are involved in malpractices understand the impact of creating such scientific losses to the community.

Original Article Info

Original article published 01 January 2018 in Nature Journal with the title “Systematic investigation of the impact of operation conditions on the degradation behavior of perovskite solar cells” by the authors “Konrad Domanski, Essa A. Alharbi, Anders Hagfeldt, Michael Grätzel & Wolfgang Tress”. Nature Energy volume 3, pages61–67 (2018). Here, you can read the abstract from Nature article and then after the Elsevier article, you can judge it in a better way.

Precautions to the Readers being a Scientific Author

1. Before citing any research paper in your article check its information on the parent website.
2. If possible check the journal status. Does the journal is providing all information to the authors and readers?
3. If possible check the plagiarism of the new paper which you listed in your account folder for the reference purpose (or in reference software).
4. For the research publications, only Impact Factor matter! No, there are other parameters too, like the last two to four years citation per document behavior of the journal. Paper published by reputed institutions and authors. Total citations and Self-citations, international Collaborations, Peer review team, and editorial team members.
5. In collaborative research articles, all individual authors have to check the plagiarism report before submitting the research paper to the publisher.
6. The author (s) should read the publication policy and Instructions to authors before paper submission to any Journal.
7. In the submission form provide the complete details.

Disclaimer:

This post is written for scientific awareness purposes, no intention of the author of this post and website @apniphysics.com to harm the reputation of any journal(s)/publisher(s)/institute(s) and/or person.

Read Also:

• Effective Keywords are the Route of a Research Manuscript for Search Engines
• Research Problem Writing a Piece of Quality Research Paper Introduction
• Article Writing Format for Beginners to Moderate Learners
• Does Institutional Research Scholars have to Use SEO for Research Papers?
• How to Write a Title and Increase Citation of a Research Paper?