《撤稿观察》批准刘实评论揭露谢灿学术不端和自然子刊虚伪

 

《撤稿观察》最近发表一篇题为“Ask Retraction Watch: What to do when papers omit relevant citations?”的文章，刘实及时发表了一篇评论（见刘实在《撤稿观察》发评揭露引用不端）。

在此之后，刘实又上贴了一个评论揭露北大谢灿学术不端和自然子刊虚伪。该评论经过《撤稿观察》审核，最后被批准发表如下：

 

Shi V. Liu February 23, 2016 at 5:20 pm

Last year Nature published three pieces of news reporting a “credit robbery” as a result of “rushing into publication”. Dr. Zhang’s group in Tsinghua University of China submitted a paper on magneto-genetics over one month later than Peikin University’s submission of magneto-sensing paper by Dr. Xie’s group but Zhang’s paper was published online first. This was treated by some high-rank Chinese scholars as a research misconduct because they thought Zhang’s paper using a magnetic protein provided by Dr. Xie should never be published earlier than Xie’s paper even though the two papers are on different subjects. The two top universities actually sent request to the journal publishing Zhang’s paper to retract the paper.
However, after an open investigation done by Scientific Ethics which is edited by me, it was found that Dr. Zhang did not commit those alleged misconduct (http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_502041670102wvho.html ). His assignment of authorship and attribution of credit are both within the normal of internationally accepted standard and practice. In the end the online version of the paper was not retracted and the print version of the paper was published normally (http://www.scibull.com:8080/EN/abstract/abstract510109.shtml ).
Ironically, Dr. Xie’s paper published later after Dr. Zhang’s paper intentionally neglected Dr. Zhang’s paper. Thus, Dr. Zhang wrote to the journal asking for a remedy of this deficiency. However, the journal refused to do anything about this.
With permission of Dr. Zhang, I am posting (part of) his communication to the journal. I welcome all kinds of opinions on this so that we can better resolved this kind of problem in the future.
Dear Editors of Journal Name,
I am puzzled with your persistence on no need for ANY citation for a quite NEW scientific term “magnetogenetics” and even more upset with your insistence on Xie’s “freedom” for deliberate ignorance of my intellectual contribution by wording an important ending paragraph of his magneto-sensing paper in a dishonest way. Xie’s behavior actually mounts up to a plagiarism: the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own. This is a typical misconduct as defined by the ORI (Office of Research Integrity). Stopping this misconduct should be an intrinsic responsibility of your journal and refusing my request for doing so may bring severe liability to your journal.
As to your assessment on Dr. Liu and Scientific Ethics I can only say that your knowledge on him and on Scientific Ethics is very limited. If you Google for him and that journal you will easily find that Dr. Liu has published many articles on various aspects of scientific ethics, mostly in Scientific Ethics, which is the only journal in this world that is dedicated to publications on scientific ethics.
Scientific Ethics was established in 2006. Its publications were cited in peer-reviewed papers and even in Editorials of well-established journals such as J. Cell Biology and J. Exp. Medicine.
I am providing you some links to papers that have cited Dr. Liu’s publications on scientific ethics in Scientific Ethics. Please note an acknowledgement of Dr. Liu’s publication was added into an Editorial after the authors who are editors of a respectful journal found Dr. Liu had published a relevant paper earlier.
Again, the demand for asking Dr. Xie to give citation to a relatively new and thus unfamiliar scientific term is a normal requirement by internationally accepted standard. The plea for your journal to inform Dr. Xie to include a Note-Added-in-Proof for referring our published work is well justified because it is our paper that directly related to the paragraph that Dr. Xie added, after he learnt the importance of magnetogenetics from me.
So please show your scientific integrity by performing an ethical duty of asking the author of your journal to PROPERLY citing RELEVANT publication(s).
xxxxxxxxx
Sincerely yours,
Sheng-Jia Zhang
P.S.
http://iai.asm.org/content/79/10/3855.full
http://iai.asm.org/content/79/10/3855.full.pdf+html
ADDENDUM IN PROOF
It has recently been brought to our attention that previous independent analyses have also concluded that articles in journals with higher impact factors are more likely to be retracted (Liu, S. V. Top journals’ top retraction rates. Sci. Ethics 1:91–93, 2006; Cokol, M., I. lossifov, R. Rodriguez-Esteban, and A. Rzhetsky. How many scientific papers should be retracted? EMBO Rep. 8:422–423, 2007).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1973959/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1973959/pdf/7401053.pdf
EMBO Rep. 2007 Sep; 8(9): 792–793.
doi: 10.1038/sj.embor.7401053