Is Automation “Distorting” History of Scientific Research?

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. 

The second retracted Planck paper, originally published in 1940, was also removed over a copyright violation, though Khelfaoui and his co-sleuth, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at UC Montreal, told Science that the piece didn’t appear anywhere else. Instead, Planck had written a response to a criticism of his work using the same title as his detractor used. 

“Rather than originating in scientific fraud, these withdrawals appear to result from contemporary digitization and copyright-management procedures applied anachronistically to historical publications,” Gingras and Khelfaoui wrote in a preprinted paper they posted last month on arXiv. “Contemporary notions such as duplicate publication and self-plagiarism are historically situated categories that cannot be applied retrospectively without distorting the historical record.”

While Suzanne Scarlata, a chemist and biochemist at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and editor in chief of The Science of Nature (formerly known as Naturwissenschaften) wasn’t aware of the retractions before Science contacted her, she suspects that Springer Nature’s internal policing software removed the paper and posted the retraction notice without human supervision.

“I think it just happened with their algorithm,” she told the outlet. “It’s a mistake they should probably rectify.”

Springer Nature, which told Science that “detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors,” declined further comment. It also pulled plans for Scarlata to write an editorial about the retractions, according to Science.