Monday, May 22, 2006

Fraud follow-up

I just received the following email from Phys Rev Letters:

Dear Dr. Natelson,

We are in the process of considering the issues you raise about the
Letter by XXXXX et al. Such consideration often takes a substantial
amount of time. Fortunately, in the present case, in which the paper
at issue was published six years ago, there does not appear to be
cause for time pressure. We will apprise you of our conclusion when
we reach it.


Sincerely,


Reinhardt B. Schuhmann
Editor
Physical Review Letters
Well, I guess we'll see what happens. It'll be interesting to see if anything comes of this. I'm quite sure there's something fishy about the particular paper, but it may be very hard to ever prove.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why don't you give reference to that paper?? Just a "suspicious" figure would not prompt an investigation unless yoursuspicions can be substantiated with some concrete evidence(violation of an established law of physis or contradicting previousrly published data etc.) therefore why not alert other people?

Douglas Natelson said...

Because accusing someone of faking data in a public forum is a hell of a thing to do without going through proper channels. If you really want to see the figure in question, contact me by email and I'll send it to you along with the reference. I think it would be irresponsible, though, to put something up on the web linking someone's name to cheating without first making sure that a real investigation is done by those with the resources and skills to do it right.

Anonymous said...

If you check your email, you will see that I already did. Go through your messages more carefully and you will be able to say who I am. I am not interested in that paper too much frankly...

Douglas Natelson said...

I must've missed it, and I'm traveling so I don't have my entire inbox here. Please drop me a quick line, and I'll show you what I mean.