The move surprised few, but Nature magazine retracted the paper It claims major progress in high-temperature superconductivity. This is the second paper the journal has retracted over the objections of Ranga P. Diaz, a University of Rochester faculty member who led the study. Or at least his apparent refusal to respond to Nature on the issue suggests that he opposed the retraction.
Diaz’s research on superconductivity has focused on hydrogen-rich chemicals that form under extreme pressure. Other research groups have shown that pressure forces hydrogen into crystals within the material, where it promotes the formation of electron pairs that enable superconductivity. This allows these chemicals to become superconducting at high temperatures. Diaz’s two papers, one describing chemicals that are superconducting at room temperature and extreme pressures, and the other describing superconducting at somewhat lower pressures, which is within the scope of more readily available laboratory equipment. It is said to describe chemical substances that cause
However, as the research community took a closer look at the research, problems with these initial papers became apparent. Díaz’s team appears to have used a non-standard method to calculate background noise in their key experiments, but the details of that method were not provided in the paper. In other words, the data in the paper looked good, but it wasn’t clear whether it accurately reflected the experimental results. As a result, Nature retracted the paper, a decision opposed by all nine authors of the paper at the time.
It was therefore surprising that papers describing similar studies by the same research group were accepted into the same journal. It’s probably not that surprising that a similar problem occurred. In this case, eight of the paper’s 11 authors said they were not at all confident that the paper presented the data in a way that accurately represented what happened in the lab. As the retraction notice states, “As the researchers who contributed to the research, they believe that the published paper accurately reflects the source of the materials investigated, the experimental measurements performed, and the data processing protocols applied. expressed the opinion that there is no such thing.”
Rough translation from academic jargon: “We have little idea how the images of data in the paper were generated.”
As noted above, Diaz, along with two of his colleagues at the University of Rochester, have not responded to the retraction.His spokesperson seems to be told the New York Times “Professor Díaz intends to resubmit the scientific paper to a journal with a more independent editorial process.” It is not clear how this is translated as “I consider what I am concerned about acceptable.”
If anything, nature’s failure here is, at first glance, did Treat the review of the second paper as if it were independent of the first paper. In a sense, it was idealistic, ignoring all social context and focusing solely on what was presented in the paper. But it was naive, given that the early paper was retracted precisely because it did not show the exact circumstances of the experiment.
That may not be Diaz’s biggest concern. His third paper, which he wrote, was published in Physical Review Letters. was also withdrawn (again, over Diaz’s objections).In this case, the graph purporting to show recent data is simply Copied from Diaz’s paper, that was a completely different topic. There are also accusations that his papers contained plagiarized material. The University of Rochester has begun reviewing Diaz’s research, and while the results of those reviews are typically kept confidential, the consequences that arise from them are hard to miss.