Retraction

The purpose of this study is to review the publications retracted due to fraud written by authors with affiliation in Italy in the period 2000-2020. For the identification of retracted publications, Retraction Watch Database has been used and Web of Science and Pubmed databases have been used for their verification and review. A total of 112 retractions were obtained due to fraud related the criteria defined in the methodology. The results obtained establish that the main cause of retraction due to scientific misconduct has been plagiarism, which represents 77.68% of the retractions reviewed. 20.54% of retractions are associated with data falsification/fabrication and 1.79% with both causes. There is an average of 5.6 articles retracted per year in the period analyzed. The most frequent type of retracted works are research articles in the area of Life Sciences and Biomedicine. It is noteworthy that 37% of the articles continue to be cited after their retraction.

Background and aims: Retractions are published in journals in
order to correct, ensure the accuracy and integrity of literature
and avoid of misconducts. Hence, retraction is an important
mechanism in scientific accreditation especially in health subject.
In the recent years, the numbers of retracted scientific articles
have been increased but compared with the growth of total publications,
it has allocated very small portion. In this study, the
retracted articles indexed in PubMed have been assessed.
Methods: In this descriptive study, all retracted articles were
searched in PubMed with limitation to publication types but
without date limitation considered. Then retrieved data were
analyzed.
Results: The results of this survey showed a total of 9211
retractions published during 1959 to 2016. According to these
findings, the least retraction was published in 1959, 1966 and
1973 with one retracted article each year and the most retractions
were 871 retractions in 2013. In addition, of 1781 journals
published retractions, THE JOURNAL OF BIOLOGICAL
CHEMISTRY (298 (3.24%)), PROCEEDINGS OF THE
NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED
STATES OF AMERICA (181 (1.97%)), SCIENCE (NEW
YORK, N.Y.) (153 (1.66%)) and NATURE (129 (1.4%)) allocated
the most rate of retractions. Furthermore, the assessing of
indexing cituation of these findings showed 87.08% were in
Medline, 11.26% in PubMed-not-Medline and 0.79% in In-DataReview.
Moreover, the most rate of publication types of retractions
were related to “JOURNAL ARTICLE”, “SEARCH
SUPPORT, NON-U.S. GOV’T”,” RESEARCH SUPPORT, N.I.H.,
EXTRAMURAL”, “COMPARATIVE STUDY “and”
RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED TRIAL”, also the highest rate
of Mesh subject headings in retracted articles were belong to
“CELLS, CULTURED”, “OLECULAR SEQUENCE DATA”,
“TREATMENT OUTCOME”, “CELL LINE, TUMOR”. Finally,
the majority of retracted articles were English (98.5%), then
French (0.39%), German (0.33%) and Chinese (0.31%)
Conclusion: Retractions publish in two types of self-reported by
author or editors discernments. Also two main reasons for retraction
are “misconducts” and “unintentional mistakes” of authors
that the second reason has the largest numbers of retractions.
Therefore, notifying of retracted articles and raising awareness of
readers and authors are the best mechanisms for controlling
of negative effects of retracted articles. However, publishing of
retraction in journals reflects how much importance they are considering
to the accuracy of published information.

This study provides the first wide-scale, apparent time, instrumental description of the Canadian Shift in mainstream Toronto English. The Toronto data suggest that the general pattern of the shift-which affects the front lax vowels /ɪ, ɛ, ae/-involves simultaneous retraction and lowering. Findings also indicate that retraction, instead of lowering, has been the primary direction of more recent change, although little, if any, change has occurred in the speech of Torontonians since the WWII era. In light of these findings, a unified account of the Canadian Shift across speech communities in Canada is proposed that re-interprets the seemingly disparate results of previous studies.

The micro-Wilhelmy method is a well-established method of determining surface tension by measuring the force of withdrawing a tens of microns to millimeters in diameter cylindrical wire or fiber from a liquid. A comparison of insertion force to retraction force can also be used to determine the contact angle with the fiber. Given the limited availability of atomic force microscope (AFM) probes that have long constant diameter tips, force-distance (F-D) curves using probes with standard tapered tips have been difficult to relate to surface tension. In this report, constant diameter metal alloy nanowires (referred to as "nanoneedles") between 7.2 and 67 µm in length and 108 and 1006 nm in diameter were grown on AFM probes. F-D and Q damping AFM measurements of wetting and drag forces made with the probes were compared against standard macroscopic models of these forces on slender cylinders to estimate surface tension, contact angle, meniscus height, evaporation rate, and viscosity. The surface tensions for several low molecular weight liquids that were measured with these probes were between -4.2% and +8.3% of standard reported values. Also, the F-D curves show well-defined stair-step events on insertion and retraction from partial wetting liquids, compared to the continuously growing attractive force of standard tapered AFM probe tips. In the AFM used, the stair-step feature in F-D curves was repeatably monitored for at least 0.5 h (depending on the volatility of the liquid), and this feature was then used to evaluate evaporation rates (as low as 0.30 nm/s) through changes in the surface height of the liquid. A nanoneedle with a step change in diameter at a known distance from its end produced two steps in the F-D curve from which the meniscus height was determined. The step features enable meniscus height to be determined from distance between the steps, as an alternative to calculating the height corresponding to the AFM measured values of surface tension and contact angle. All but one of the eight measurements agreed to within 13%. The constant diameter of the nanoneedle also is used to relate viscous damping of the vibrating cantilever to a macroscopic model of Stokes drag on a long cylinder. Expected increases in drag force with insertion depth and viscosity are observed for several glycerol-water solutions. However, an additional damping term (associated with drag of the meniscus on the sidewalls of the nanoneedle) limits the sensitivity of the measurement of drag force for low-viscosity solutions, while low values of Q limit the sensitivity for high-viscosity solutions. Overall, reasonable correspondence is found between the macroscopic models and the measurements with the nanoneedle-tipped probes. Tighter environmental control of the AFM and treatments of needles to give them more ideal surfaces are expected to improve repeatability and make more evident subtle features that currently appear to be present on the F-D and Q damping curves.