The Warda and Han paper has been officially retracted, and the editor has made an official statement, as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.
The paper has drawn a blizzard of criticism in the blogosphere about the peer-review process at the journal, Proteomics. The editor of the journal, Michael J. Dunn, a professor at University College Dublin’s Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research, told The Chronicle last week that the paper had passed peer review.
Today’s announcement says that the two authors of the article, who are scientists at Inje University, in South Korea, agreed to the retraction. Initially only one of the authors had asked for a retraction.
In the news announcement, Mr. Dunn said: “Clearly human error has caused a misstep in the normally rigorous peer review that is standard practice for Proteomics and should prevent such issues arising.”
The plagiarism is bad all right, but my main concern was that such a blatantly goofy paper made it through peer review. How? All Dunn is saying is that it did pass review, which suggests that somehow, someone read it and didn’t pull the alarm, and even approved it. Was it a lazy reviewer? Or was it some other kind of hole in the process? “Human error” is an awfully vague label.
We may not ever get an answer, but you know everyone will be scrutinizing Proteomics papers critically. Other journals, too, of course — a reader just sent me another freaky paper that I’ll describe tomorrow.
That’s almost as bad as the quote from the surgeon who amputated the wrong leg…
“whoops….my bad”.
(don’t ask me to back up that quote)
Where is the announcement actually published? I looked at the news section of the Proteomics site and didn’t see anything.
I’d have to say that situations like this make a fairly solid case for transparency in the peer review process. I’m not really a part of the scientific community, so perhaps I simply don’t have the background information to understand why the reviewers are anonymous in the first place?
There may be no announcement, but the “Early View” page of the issue marks the article as “Retracted“.
Here’s a list of senior editors: how about everyone picking one address and asking them for the private scoop on how it happened?
I’m not optimistic more will be voluntarily forthcoming.
Dunn’s contact with the publisher Wiley is one “Hans-Joachim Kraus.”
Dunn and Kraus use the journal as a bit of a “mutual jerk” society, Dunn using his editor’s note to praise Kraus for an award by Wiley and then Kraus using the Note to wish Dunn a Happy Birthday.
Without external pressure from Wiley, which I doubt will be forthcoming, nothing will be easy to find out here.
A retraction without any text? I’ve never seen any journal do that. There’s always at least a sentence explaining the reasons for retraction. Unsatisfying indeed.
At the very least it was retracted in record time after public outcry.
Now that’s interesting: one of the senior editors was one of the scientists whose work was plagiarized! I’ve been in contact with her – I’ll drop her a line.
As you say, very unsatisfactory indeed. Smacks of a cover-up job. However, in terms of actually getting the full story, I get the impression you’re fighting an uphill battle here. Having been on the butt end of some pretty awful practices in the peer-review process, there is one thing for certain: journal editors never back down. Ever. They have a duty to publish reliable science for sure, but their bigger duty is to protect their editors, editorial board members, and reviewers. There’s nothing an editor likes worse than having to send a paper back to a reviewer, saying “I think you screwed up this time”. They risk that person (who by virtue of their being asked to review, is an “expert” in the field) badmouthing the journal and refusing to publish their work in it.
An editors job is to find a balance between keeping the readers happy and keeping the reviewers and ed-board members happy. As a result, most scientific journals accept less than 25% of the papers they receive. In this case, I think the balance got tipped a bit to far in the direction of appeasing the reviewers.
You will not get much success e-mailing everyone on the ed-board. These are unpaid volunteer academics, who will not say anything bad about the journal because they need “editorial board member” on their CV. One or two might resign in protest but I suspect the majority will remain quiet. They’re also way too busy to respond to unsolicited emails from bloggers.
WATERGATE!!! WATERGATE!!! WATERGATE!!!
COVERUP!!! COVERUP!!! COVERUP!!!
STONEWALL!!! STONEWALL!!! STONEWALL!!!
BUSH BEATING!!! BUSH BEATING!!!
I would say more but am out of capital letters and exclamation marks.
They owe the scientific community an explanation, not a stonewall while beating around the bush coverup.
Dunn is an idiot. It is not the crime that got Nixon and Clinton, it was the coverup. Miscreants always screw that part up. Guilt doesn’t make for good decisions.
My best guess is the worst case scenario. Dunn the closet creo picked his buddies, the closet creos reviewers to push a pseudoscientific mess pasted together by 2 foreigners who were expendable if the mythology hit the fan.
Where are Woodward and Bernstein? Time for the leakers to come forth and slip the truth under the internet door. Who knew and when? Inquiring minds want to know.
Write Proteomics off. This journal seems like a sandbox for bored semiscientists to play in.
“Without external pressure from Wiley, which I doubt will be forthcoming,”
Oh, I don’t know. I’d say a few judicious notes to a few librarians having to cut budgets should do the trick. With of course follow up to Wiley that you’re recommending your institute’s library drop the journal, I’m sure there might be some form of appeasement from the publisher. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that being published alongside crap such as this would totally devalue anyone’s research, so there might not be too big a scramble for new publications in this journal…A transparent and open look at what went wrong in the review process might vindicate the journal, who knows, they should certainly try to figure out just when the weird stuff and plagiarism was injected into the text. I wouldn’t completely rule out the role of whoever translated the paper into English though, but it should certainly never have made it past peer review.
I’d put my money on the translator. Id be they handed the final paper to a translator to polish up their English (no pun intended). I would guess, if you find that translator, you’ve found your lying fundie culprit.
Lies for Jesus, how could it be any other way?
“Mistakes were made.”
Say, did anyone catch the paragraph that appears in the Chronicle comments, on the posting for the first retraction announcement?
Here is the approved press release, courtesy of the Kelly lab at Washington U., which I like a lot better than the Chronicle report:
Proteomics Editor and Publisher Retract Journal Article
Weinheim, Germany, February 12, 2008– The following article from the journal PROTEOMICS “Mitochondria, the missing link between body and soul: Proteomic perspective evidence” by Mohamad Warda and Jin Han , published online on January 23, 2008 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com), has been retracted as a result of an agreement by the authors, Proteomics Editor-in-Chief, Michael J. Dunn, and publisher Wiley-VCH.
The article has been retracted because it contains apparently plagiarised passages from several previously published articles. The article will be withdrawn shortly from Wiley InterScience EarlyView; it will not appear in print.
“We are fully aware of the considerable interest and controversy that the article by Warda and Han has engendered, both with respect to the issue of plagiarism, as well as the controversial viewpoints expressed by the authors,” said Editor-in-Chief, Michael Dunn. “Clearly human error has caused a misstep in the normally rigorous peer review process that is standard practice for Proteomics and should prevent such issues arising.”
As soon as the problems with the article were brought to their attention, the Editor-in-Chief, Michael J. Dunn, and the publisher, Wiley-VCH, immediately instituted the appropriate procedures to rectify the situation.
Re #15:
Is Maya dead or alive?
From #16: “We are fully aware of the considerable interest and controversy that the article by Warda and Han has engendered, both with respect to the issue of plagiarism, as well as the controversial viewpoints expressed by the authors,”
Controversial viewpoints? Pseudo-scientific viewpoints would have been a better way of putting it, IMO.
I wonder what officials at Inje University have to say about the affair. Has anyone tried to contact them?
MH-
‘Korea Times’ ran with the Harvard Crimson article, and also tried to contact the authors. It’s certain everyone over there knows what is up.
I have contacted the BBC website about this. This needs to get into the mainstream media. Allowing it to languish in the blogosphere will doubtless lead to more speculation with little impact on the real problem here – corrupt practices that the journal thinks they can sweep under the rug by pulling it off the website. I would urge anyone else to do the same, and get this into the mainstream media, which will have the desired effect, namely Dunn’s resignation. As an author with prior work published in this journal, I am VERY worried about the effect this will have on the journal’s reputation.
As I see it, the problem on the journal’s end is not the plagiarism — that is indeed hugely unfortunate, but I’m not sure that most journals have procedures in place to catch that. The main problem I have with the editors is that they allowed a piece with such an unscientific premise to slip through peer review. But that is much more difficult to convey in the current environment than the charge of plagiarism. As I see it, the right outcome has been achieved for the wrong reasons.
I don’t think it is reasonable to demand the resignation of the editor because the journal didn’t catch plagiarism, but I do think it is reasonable to demand his resignation over the process that let such content make it to publication. But to make that argument is to make the editor a perhaps unwilling martyr for the ID crowd.
Thanks for that, Jay.
Virgil, Ben Goldacre might like to look into it as well. I think this matter requires an investigative journalist.
There’s nothing an editor likes worse than having to send a paper back to a reviewer, saying “I think you screwed up this time”.
Oh, I imagine it’s considerably more disagreeable to have your journal stained by an absolute howler slipping through the peer-review process. This reflects badly on Proteomics even more than the Hwang Woo-Suk affair did on Science, IMHO. It’s one thing being duped by somebody lying through their teeth, but quite another to get caught publishing material that is so outwardly dubious in its content.
Alex in #1 & #2 No need to back it up. It happens all the time. Well more often than it should. I’ve worked in healthcare for 27 years and have personnally known the doctors that removed the wrong cancerous lung in one case and did indeed remove the wrong leg in a VA Hospital. It shoots their outcomes to shit in (pardon the obvious pun) a heart beat. That’s the ultimate “human error”. Even when the evidence is stacked against them they will try to put he blame on anyone they can. That’s why I, for one, think the ethics class in med school needs to be multiple semesters. Not all of them, but a good many physicians & surgeons have a problem with basic morality. The ones I’ve known that have ethical issues against them have all been the religous types too.
I think it’s most reasonable to withhold judgement until we find out more about what happened. For all we know some creationist has exploited a flaw that every science journal is subject to.
Sorry to say, but when a well-funded, dishonest religious movement sets its sights on establishing faux scientific legitimacy via publications in scientific journals and positions at scientific institutions, and the True Believing participants take the position that the “greater good” of that goal trumps basic morality, it’s probably time that all scientific publishers and institutions adopt more of a bunker mentality than has been found necessary in the past.
There are probably several orders of magnitude of difference in the size of the problem, between the small fraction of scientists who have traditionally cheated in order to obtain careers or reputations that they didn’t deserve, vs. a social movement who think they are at it to keep God happy.
Alex in #1 & #2 No need to back it up. It happens all the time. Well more often than it should. I’ve worked in healthcare for 27 years and have personnally known the doctors that removed the wrong cancerous lung in one case and did indeed remove the wrong leg in a VA Hospital. It shoots their outcomes to shit in (pardon the obvious pun) a heart beat. That’s the ultimate “human error”. Even when the evidence is stacked against them they will try to put the blame on anyone they can. That’s why I, for one, think the ethics class in med school needs to be multiple semesters. Certainly not all of them, but there are a few physicians & surgeons that have a problem with basic ethics anyway. Its never their fault. The patient had underlying disease or the time-out procedure wasn’t done by the nurse properly or whatever.
Thanks PZ. Catching this is important. Creationists want to complete this. One or two so-called peer reviwed papers would complete their agenda. Thanks!
The Korea Times article
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2008/02/117_18811.html
Yeah, they were sure sneaky hiding that comment about mitochondria being the “missing link between body and soul”…right in the frickin’ title. I’m all for giving an editor the benefit of the doubt, but I can’t imagine any competent head of a journal not seeing that title and going “What the fuck?! I better read this thing myself!”. Unless you’re saying that journal editors don’t typically know at least the titles of the articles printing in their journal?
I would hope that the editor is looking at this now. I think we should be patient – the first thing they had to do was retract the paper, only after that can they really start to look seriously at the process, and why it went wrong. That’s going to take more time, because it will almost certainly mean talking to several people, like the editor, referees, editorial staff etc.
It’s better that this is done properly. I would imagine the editor in chief is aware that if he doesn’t provide a satisfactory explanation for the events, the journal’s reputation is screwed long-term.
Bob
I don’t think we can safely assume that an editor in chief should or does read everything that goes into every issue, or even the titles after the final revised drafts have been submitted. Lots of the work of putting an issue together is and should be done by delegation.
Presumably an EIC would take enough interest to read the list of titles when it has been decided what will go into the issue, but someone may have changed the title after the paper was accepted. As I mentioned previously, the system has not traditionally been required to guard against moles or trojan horses from religious cultists who would gladly trade off their reputation in the world of science in order to score a point for their cult beliefs. I suspect that when the facts come out we are going to have to decide, with a sigh, to stop operating at any level of trust at all, and start investing a lot more effort on triple-redundant follow-up checks.
The Meyer/Sternberg affair should have warned us; let this warn us now.
Neither do I accept the claim that Dunn’s response amounts to a whitewash or coverup. ISTM that refraining from comment until he finds out exactly what happened is precisely what he ought to do.
Moreover, I don’t buy the claim that conscientious reviewers would have caught the plagiarism. I can’t imagine remembering the text of an article I’ve previously read well enough to recognize that someone is quoting or closely paraphrasing it. The only time I ever spot it among students is when my suspicions are raised by running across a few well written sentences in a sea of purple prose or barely coherent ramble.
Until we learn what actually happened, it is irresponsible and perhaps damaging for us to take individuals to task on mere suspicion. Let’s not ruin the career of someone whose innocence was exploited. The tar and feathers can wait until we know who actually deserves them.
I’ve had my share of papers reviewed by lazy reviewers. However, none of those bastards ever waved any of my papers through. A lazy reviewer can always make up some reason to NOT publish the paper. Bad style, spelling and grammar will always do just fine.
I agree with Manni, there’s lazy and there’s not even bothering to read the title or abstract and that’s before we even get to the plagiarism.
I’m sorry but the “this was clearly some sort of accident and we’re all very embarrassed” excuse is getting thinner by the minute – this was a deliberate attempt to insert creationist material into a peer-reviewed journal and I doubt very much it’s the last attempt we’ll see.
This has been picked up by the Guardian newspaper in the UK.
An additional observation:
When I looked at the Proteomics Editorial Board, in addition to Editor-in-Chief Michael Dunn, I noticed that one of the Senior Editors is Young-Ki Paik, of Seoul, Korea. So if there were any question of language confusion, the journal did have someone to turn to who could have clarified matters.
I am wondering now if the whole thing was perhaps an accident, literally: someone pushed the wrong button or something.
Oh, I don’t know. I’d say a few judicious notes to a few librarians having to cut budgets should do the trick.
Darn, my institution doesn’t subscribe to this journal, or I would have loved to have done exactly that. :-)
The Guardian article is at http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/02/thanks_to_cjv5040_for_putting.html
It contains some quotes from Warda claiming persecution.
And a second blog entry from the Guardian at http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/02/how_was_this_paper_ever_publis.html
with the Wiley press release.
How long would it be before the cretins/theistards scream PERSECUTION?
Oh, wait….
From #18
Well put – I was letting him off too easily. I am happy that the paper was retracted before appearing in print and the plagiarism (which Warda, astonishingly, denies) from multiple sources was acknowledged. But how this got past peer review with such obvious red flags invoking the supernatural has not been explained. I don’t plan on sending anything to Proteomics until it is.
There’s a piece in the Times Higher Education Supplement,
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=400557&c=1
Unlike the people who are concentrating on plagiarism to the exclusion of the content and peer review issues this makes no mention of the repurposed text.
WTF?
From the Guardian Science blog linked above:
“Some overlap”…?
“Controversial viewpoint”…?
Did these people hire Karl Rove, or something? What would have been so wrong about saying “we discovered that substantial sections of this paper are plagiarized, and it contained unsupportable, unscientific statements” ? In this particular attempt to be politic about it, they have descended into cluelessness. Dunn has given creationists plenty of leeway to yawp that they had a “legitimate” peer-reviewed paper accepted, that they then had withsrawn because of persecution by the orthodoxy. Great, cheers for that, Dunn.
Speaking as a referee and editor I would like to second what Bobby said about editors; time pressures mean EICs simply cannot scan the titles of everything in every issue; a lot of stuff has to be delegated. Tulse is right about the “What the f!*!!” reaction to the title of this paper, but it is too early to tell who in the system that reaction OUGHT to have come from. All we can say is that it ought to have come from somebody in their peer review / editorial system
Also agree with Bobby about the plagiarism, having come across it in my time in undergrad work (repeatedly), PhD theses (a couple of times) and in papers (very rarely). Actually, I would say that a bigger problem for editors these days than plagiarism is people publishing the same data in multiple places. Anyway, plagiarism, as Bobby says, is only easy to spot if the general tenor of what has been written doesn’t match the writer’s known level of expertise. At the scientific paper writing level, there is so much literature out there in every field – and the volume is increasing at an astonishing rate – that it would usually only get spotted if the referee or editor was the author of the plagiarised statement.
Re. the language of the Proteomics editor’s statements: in my view, they should have conveyed a bit more of a direct “Mea (as in “mea” the journal) Culpa”. Some of the language used is way too consciously anodyne. I would have liked to see something more like what Luna the Cat suggested, followed by the sentence “It is obvious that something went badly wrong in our peer reviewing and editorial process with this paper, and we are going to find out what – which is why we are running a full scale investigation right now – and make sure it cannot happen again”
I agree that the statements we’ve gotten so far are insufficient, but I think it’s too soon to summon the firing squad. They do need to find out exactly what happened before saying very much, and for all we know they may have to go through Wiley’s lawyers on their response.
*However*, they would be well advised to come out with a straight “We screwed up, here’s how it happened, and here’s how we’re going to keep it from happening again” ASAP. If I were in that field I wouldn’t even consider submitting anything to that journal until I saw how this plays out. Moreover, if they procrastinate and don’t come out with a transparent statement before, say, a letter about the incident signed by three prestigious scientists appears in Nature, Proteomics will end up as an outlet for Enron stock certificates, Confederate war bonds, Intelligent Design research, and other material of similar value.
I think a part of this major problem belongs to the refrees. They have to check the contents very carefully and spot out the errors. This is their responsibility, which in most cases are free. It might be a reason that could broken the reivewing process. On the other hand, some of prestigeous Journal could seek for assistance from external potential reviewers in addition to their Editorial Board.I had been asked several times to evaluate some articles in Int’l Journal. Although, i was not among their board, i have to precisely judge the comments. In all cases, i denided the publications on scientific merits. The point of concern that their must be an evaluation for the performance of the editorail board in all journals to make sure they are working well or not?