Retracted papers

[Nick]

Retraction of mathematics papers is far less common than in certain other areas of research, but it happens occasionally. Here is a new one, from The Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical Society:

The argument claiming a renorming of a Banach space with separable second dual to have WUR dual is built upon a false application of Goldstine’s Theorem. The author, have noticed this gap in the proof, has retracted the article

Details: http://retractionwatch.com/2015/08/1...es-math-paper/

[only_human]

No specific mathematical paper retraction news in this post but for the more general category of science, "When scientists falsify data, they try to cover it up by writing differently in their published works. A pair of Stanford researchers have devised a way of identifying these written clues."

Stanford researchers uncover patterns in how scientists lie about their data

"We suggest that language can be one of many variables to differentiate between fraudulent and genuine science."

The results showed that fraudulent retracted papers scored significantly higher on the obfuscation index than papers retracted for other reasons. For example, fraudulent papers contained approximately 1.5 percent more jargon than unretracted papers.

"Fradulent papers had about 60 more jargon-like words per paper compared to unretracted papers," Markowitz said. "This is a non-trivial amount."

The researchers say that scientists might commit data fraud for a variety of reasons. Previous research points to a "publish or perish" mentality that may motivate researchers to manipulate their findings or fake studies altogether. But the change the researchers found in the writing, however, is directly related to the author's goals of covering up lies through the manipulation of language. For instance, a fraudulent author may use fewer positive emotion terms to curb praise for the data, for fear of triggering inquiry.