Here we go again!
“Nature retracts controversial superconductivity paper by embattled physicist”.
This is the third high-profile retraction for Ranga Dias. Researchers worry the controversy is damaging the field’s reputation.
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.
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”. (The Nature news team is independent from its journals team.)
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 year2 and Physical Review Letters retracted one this August3. 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.
For earlier adventures of “physicist” Ranga Dias of the “University” of Rochester, see “arXiv Preprint Server Cancels Papers, Bans Researcher over ‘Inflammatory Content’” (2022-03-16) and “Nature Retracts Room Temperature Superconductivity Paper” (2022-09-28).
Sure, the “humanities” departments in academia have become a sewer of moonbattery, but at least the “hard sciences” are still healthy. Right? Right?
“The highly qualified expert reviewers we selected raised a number of questions about the original submission, which were largely resolved in later revisions,“ says Karl Ziemelis, chief physical sciences editor at Nature. “What the peer-review process cannot detect is whether the paper as written accurately reflects the research as it was undertaken.”