Max Planck. Nobel Prize winner, father of quantum theory, unimpeachable scientific legacy. So why did a journal retract two of his papers from the 1940s?
Physics historian Yves Gingras stumbled across Planck’s name on Retraction Watch’s list of Nobel laureates with retracted papers. He’d never heard of any scandal involving Planck. Nobody had. He teamed up with Mahdi Khelfaoui to figure out what happened.
The journal, Naturwissenschaften (now The Science of Nature), didn’t just retract the papers. It deleted them entirely — blank pages, empty PDFs, and a note saying “withdrawn due to article violation.” The editor-in-chief, Suzanne Scarlata, told Science she didn’t even know about it. “That’s crazy,” she said. “I think it just happened with their algorithm.”
Turns out it’s a copyright issue. The first paper was also published as a booklet and in an anthology. The second confused an algorithm because a different scientist published a critique with the same title months earlier. An automated system almost certainly flagged both as duplicate publications.
Here’s the real question: should modern standards for self-plagiarism apply to 1940s academic work? Back then, publishing the same ideas across journals was normal practice. The publishing landscape was fragmented by language and geography. Scientists shared knowledge however they could.
