Automation might be to blame for Springer Nature’s retraction of two papers that a Nobel Prize winner published more than a century ago.
Science reported last week that both papers written by Max Planck, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1918, were published in Naturwissenschaften, a German journal now owned by Springer Nature, in the 1940s. While they were both retracted in 2011, it wasn’t until last month that two Canadian historians based at the University of Quebec decided to look into the reasons behind it.
One of the papers, originally published in 1942, is now just a blank white page with a notice from Naturwissenschaften’s website citing “copyright violation” as the reason for the retraction of the paper; Mahdi Khelfaoui, a historian of science at UQ Trois-Rivières, noticed that it had appeared in two other books and journals. While self-plagiarism is frowned upon in modern academic circles because it can inflate a scholar’s citation score, it was a more accepted practice in the pre-internet age.
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