Castle made of sand: Self-plagiarism washes away paper on dune particles
A group of geologists in China have lost their paper on the aerodynamics of sand particles because the article was mashed together from previous publications.The article, “The influence of sand diameter and wind velocity on sand particle lift-off and incident angles in the windblown sand flux,” appeared in the May 2013 issue of Sedimentary Geology. It was written by a team from the Key Laboratory of Mechanics on Western Disaster and Environment at Lanzhou University.
Here’s the notice:
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors-in-Chief. This article also contains significant similarity with parts of text, written by the same author(s), that have appeared in-Tian-Li Bo, Xiao-Jing Zheng, Shao-Zhen Duan, Yi-Rui Liang, The influence of wind velocity and sand grain diameter on the falling velocities of sand particles, Powder Technology, Volume 241, June 2013, Pages 158-165-Tian-Li Bo, Xiao-Jing Zheng, Shao-Zhen Duan, Yi-Rui Liang, Analysis of sand particles’ lift-off and incident velocities in wind-blown sand flux, Acta Mechanica Sinica, April 2013, Volume 29, Issue 2, pp 158-165-Tian-Li Bo, Xiao-Jing Zheng, Shao-Zhen Duan, Yi-Rui Liang, Influence of sand grain diameter and wind velocity on lift-off velocities of sand particles, The European Physical Journal E, May 2013, 36:50-Tian-Li Bo, Shao-Zhen Duan, Xiao-Jing Zheng, Yi-Rui Liang, The influence of sand bed temperature on lift-off and falling parameters in windblown sand flux, Geomorphology, Volume 204, 1 January 2014, Pages 477-484.The “slicing” of research that would form one meaningful paper into several different papers represents an 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.
Some of the authors have made waves before. We also found this correction in PLoS ONE of a 2013 article by some of the same authors titled “Incident Angle of Saltating Particles in Wind-Blown Sand”:
Multiple funding organizations and grants were incorrectly omitted from the Funding Statement. The Funding Statement should read: “This research was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Numbers 11072097, 11232006, 11202088, 10972164, 11121202), National Key Technology R&D Program (2013BAC07B01), the Science Foundation of Ministry of Education of China (Number 308022), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Numbers lzujbky-2009-k01, lzujbky-2012-203) and the Project of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Number 2009CB421304). The authors express their sincere appreciation to the supports. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”
We emailed Tian-Li Bo for comment and received a short email:
I’m sorry for this matter to bother you. I agree to retract the paper. We have no other articles need to be retracted.
SOURCE: RetractionWatch