Journal of Chemistry
Volume 2018 (2018), Article ID 9301245, 1 page
https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/9301245

Expression of Concern

Expression of Concern on “Physicochemical Parameters and Bioactive Compounds of Strawberry Tree (Arbutus unedo L.) Honey”

Journal of Chemistry

Received 4 April 2018; Accepted 4 April 2018; Published 13 June 2018

Copyright © 2018 Journal of Chemistry. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Journal of Chemistry would like to express concern with the article titled “Physicochemical Parameters and Bioactive Compounds of Strawberry Tree (Arbutus unedo L.) Honey” published in Journal of Chemistry in 2015 [1] due to possible errors in the reporting.

The journal received a claim of authorship from the Ph.D. cosupervisor of the first author, which the authors disputed. The claimant provided manuscript drafts that reported results done on honey samples collected in January 2010 from one beekeeper in the Algarve, while the published article reports results done on samples collected from December 2010 to March 2011 from several beekeepers in the Algarve. The data in the published article are nearly identical to those in the drafts provided by the claimant despite describing different samples. The authors acknowledge the drafts are genuine, but say the research was done again on new samples of honey.

Journal of Chemistry asked the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (PUCV) and Universidade do Algarve (University of the Algarve) to investigate. The University of the Algarve’s investigation was inconclusive, and the PUCV ended their investigation when the first author left that institution. As neither institutional investigation provided conclusive results, the journal’s editors would like to inform readers of possible mistakes in the reported experimental results.

References

P. A. Ulloa, M. Maia, and A. F. Brigas, “Physicochemical parameters and bioactive compounds of strawberry tree (Arbutus unedo L.) honey,” Journal of Chemistry, vol. 2015, Article ID 602792, 10 pages, 2015.