I retracted a paper and I feel fine
Riccardo Rurali, ICMAB-CSIC, Spain
Monday, 30 November 2026, 12 PM
Sala d'Actes Carles Miravitlles and ONLINE (Register here)
Abstract
Some time after the publication of my paper on the “Giant Thermal Switching via Phase Transition in MoTe2” (J. Phys. Chem. Lett. (2026) 17 (4): 1262), a group at IIT Bombay contacted me pointing out a lack of reproducibility of some of our results. Since then, we started working together to find out the reasons of the discrepancy and after several weeks of intense testing and double-checks, we concluded that our results, used in the original publication, were flawed. No misconduct or wrong-doing by anybody, but still flawed, leading to the unavoidable decision of retracting the paper.
If you want to hear an inspiring story (the guys at IIT Bombay worked selflessly just to help us finding what the problem was and we didn't back out when it came to challenge our own results), I’ll tell how it all went down. And also, what did we learn about the retraction process and how is science doing (and how are we doing)
Short bio
I am a staff scientist and director of the Materials & Simulation Department at the Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona (ICMAB), a research institute of the Spanish national council of research (CSIC), where I also served as Deputy Director from 2015 to 2023. I graduated in Electrical Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 1996 and obtained my PhD in Materials Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2003 with a PhD Thesis on the theoretical modeling of defects in SiC. I continued my research career with a 2-year postdoctoral stay at the Université Paul Sabatier, in Toulouse (France). I returned to Spain to join the Computational Nanoelectronics group at the Universitat Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona first with a Juan de la Cierva contract, then with a Ramón y Cajal contract, both granted by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación. In the latest years I focused my research activity on nanoscale thermal transport and particularly on the dynamical tuning of the thermal conductivity of materials.
