Unusual Retract-Republish Case in the Journal "Vacuum"
Recently, the 5GH Team uncovered an unusual Retract-Republished case in the journal "Vacuum".
A group of authors from Shanghai Institute of Technology (上海应用技术大学) retracted their article [1] and republished it as the article [2] in the SAME journal "Vacuum", with SAME title and SAME content.
There are several abnormalities in this Retract-Republish case:
(1) The publication process for the article [1] was unusual. According to the record on the journal's website, the article [1] was submitted on March 9th, 2023. But the following review and revise process took extremely short time, the the authors submitted the revised version of article [1] to the journal on March 25th, 2023, 16 days after their original submission. The article [1] was accepted a day latter, and it was online on March 28th, 2023, 19 days after the original submission.
(2) The retraction to the article [1] was unusual. According to the Retraction Notice [3], the article [1] was retracted at the request of the authors. But the reason for the retraction seemed to be nonsense. The Retraction Notice reads:"the corresponding authors found a mistake which consisted in the publication of wrong SEM images (Fig. 2) in the manuscript", which was not reasonable to retract an article. Further, the republication of the article [2] was earlier to the retraction of the article [1], and this was not a standard procedure in academic publishing.
The 5GH Team address that this unusual procedure does not necessarily imply that the authors engaged in academic misconduct. Indeed, the journal/publisher bears the responsibility.
Reference
[1] 10.1016/j.vacuum.2023.112056
