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Science

Nature Retracts Controversial Superconductivity Paper By Embattled Physicist 36

Posted by msmash from the ticket-closed dept.
Nature has retracted a controversial paper claiming the discovery of a superconductor -- a material that carries electrical currents with zero resistance -- capable of operating at room temperature and relatively low pressure. From a report: The text of the retraction notice states that it was requested by eight co-authors. "They have expressed the view as researchers who contributed to the work that the published paper does not accurately reflect the provenance of the investigated materials, the experimental measurements undertaken and the data-processing protocols applied," it says, adding that these co-authors "have concluded that these issues undermine the integrity of the published paper."

It is the third high-profile retraction of a paper by the two lead authors, physicists Ranga Dias at the University of Rochester in New York and Ashkan Salamat at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Nature withdrew a separate paper last year and Physical Review Letters retracted one this August. It spells more trouble in particular for Dias, whom some researchers allege plagiarized portions of his PhD thesis. Dias has objected to the first two retractions and not responded regarding the latest. Salamat approved the two this year. "It is at this point hardly surprising that the team of Dias and Salamat has a third high-profile paper being retracted," says Paul Canfield, a physicist at Iowa State University in Ames and at Ames National Laboratory. Many physicists had seen the Nature retraction as inevitable after the other two -- and especially since The Wall Street Journal and Science reported in September that 8 of the 11 authors of the paper -- including Salamat -- had requested it in a letter to the journal.
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Nature Retracts Controversial Superconductivity Paper By Embattled Physicist More

Nature Retracts Controversial Superconductivity Paper By Embattled Physicist

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  • Either they are very sloppy or else they are fraudsters.

    • Re:Two possibilities (Score:4, Interesting)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday November 07, 2023 @02:49PM (#63987966)

      People adding their names to scientific papers they're barely associated with has been an issue for the past several decades - and likely longer than that. I remember controversies around the number of authors on some Physical Review papers in the early 1980s - some submitted papers had 50 co-authors!

      • Its tricky. Often there are very fuzzy boundaries to who "worked" on a project, especially if its a big project. There have been papers with far more than 50 authors - but lets say ATLAS at CERN discovers something - how do you decide which of the thousands of people who were involved in the work should be authors.

        This sometimes causes people writing papers to add names, and not even verify that the other authors want to be on the paper. There were several cases where I found my name was on a paper

    • How is that plagarism??? Most phd theses are just bolted together papers or manuscripts with some glue language. The whole point is to publish them. So how can a person possibly plagiarize their own phd thesis?

      Or did he plagiarize someone else's phd thesis?

      • Re:Plagiarizing your own phd thesis????? (Score:4, Informative)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Tuesday November 07, 2023 @07:25PM (#63988633)

        "Plagiarized his PhD thesis" means parts of his PhD thesis were plagiarized, i.e. copied from other people without attribution.

        It's not relevant here, but it is possible to plagiarize yourself, and it's a pretty important concept in science. If you publish the results of an experiment and mention them in subsequent publications you're supposed to properly reference the original so that readers a) can find it and b) know that it's one experimental result, not several.

  • So, did they publish their articles, and later errors or inaccuracies were found? But isn't that a common practice in science? Someone puts forward ideas, supports them with arguments and facts, and sometimes gets confirmation or refutation. Plagiarism in a dissertation is certainly unclear, but if they are unable to write it themselves, they could use https://essays.edubirdie.com/dissertation-writing-service [edubirdie.com] to ensure the absence of plagiarism. Especially since detecting plagiarism is very easy now. So, it

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