Weekend reads: Our database of 18,000-plus retractions is launched; inside a trial gone wrong; scholarly publishers bow to censorship

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The week at Retraction Watch featured the official launch of our database of more than 18,000 retractions, along with a six-page package in Science about some preliminary findings. Have a look. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• • • • “We will keep on fighting for him.” ProPublica tells the story of a boy in a clinical trial gone wrong. (Jodi Cohen, Logan Jaffe)
      • “This craven willingness to submit to censorship once again highlights the fact that academic freedom and integrity are simply incompatible with the current structure of the commercial academic publishing industry.” Nicholas Loubere and Ivan Franceschini deplore a recent move by Springer Nature in China. (Hong Kong Free Press)
      • “Private equity,” writes Katie Hafner, “is furious over a paper in a dermatology journal” — a paper now withdrawn. (New York Times) The story is a good example of Elsevier’s flawed “withdrawal” policy.
      • “James Coyne sued me for cyberbullying,” writes Eiko Fried.
      • Nature has added an “editor’s note” to a paper about T cell immunotherapy for brain cancer that has attracted criticism over the past few weeks.
      • “Should Scholars Avoid Citing the Work of Awful People?” asks Brian Leiter. (Chronicle of Higher Education)
      • “The university found that at least of 15 of Liang’s major academic papers written in Chinese involved plagiarism and other forms of misconduct.” A Nanjing University professor is under scrutiny. (CGTN)
      • “So, from this week, Nature will consider such post-publication contributions as Matters Arising — a format designed to peer-review and publish online exceptionally interesting and timely scientific comments and clarifications related to primary research papers published in the journal.” (Nature)
      • “Australia’s former education minister secretly vetoed 11 humanities research projects, overturning recommendations made by the Australian Research Council, it has emerged.” (John Ross, Times Higher Education)
      • Madhuri and Sharma, well-known to our readers, are up to 16 retractions. The whole list.
      • An analysis of pre-registered studies suggests that they are more likely to involve null findings. (Matthew Warren, Nature)
      • “What Does a Successful Postdoctoral Fellowship Publication Record Look Like?” A new preprint takes a look. (arXiv)
      • A founder of Dissernet, which roots out plagiarism in Russian theses, has been accused — perhaps by one of those Dissernet has criticized — of inciting hatred toward Muslims. (Crime Russia)
      • A much-circulated quote that seemed to be suggesting that authors wouldn’t share data or methods didn’t really mean that, Joe Hilgard tells Andrew Gelman.
      • “Journals using alphabetically ordered citations should ‘switch to chronological ordering to minimize this arbitrary alphabetical citation bias,’ the authors say.” (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed)
      • “A book containing 50 of the ‘most touching, best and most inspiring Dutch speeches’ has been removed from the shelves because a speech attributed to former CDA leader and prime minister Jan-Peter Balkenende proved to be a fake, Trouw reports.” (Dutch News NL)
      • “How not to fall for a predatory journal.” (Lee Gagnon, Nature India)
      • A Yale professor accused of sexual misconduct has sued the university for removing him as an endowed chair. (Ed Stannard, New Haven Register)
      • “In the fierce competition for science funding, even a typeface glitch can be fatal,” reports Eric Boodman. (STAT)
      • “The source of that ‘one in five’ figure for psychopathic CEOs (comparable to prison populations) is a 2016 study by forensic psychologist Nathan Brooks, then a PhD student at Australia’s Bond University.” But that study has been retracted, writes Jennifer Ouellette. (Ars Technica)
      • Jose Baselga, the former chief medical officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, has corrected another paper for failure to disclose conflicts of interest, this one from JAMA.
      • What do journal editors think about the future of open access? (Michael Banks, Physics World)
      • “Reconciling the researcher’s integrity and respect for his rights is a universal necessity; it is even more ardent in a country like France which intends, both in terms of scientific research and fundamental rights, to remain a world leader,” say a number of scientists writing in The Conversation. (in French)
      • Former Cornell researcher Brian Wansink has had a 15th paper retracted.
      • Do authors pay attention to open access mandates? ask V. Larivière & C. Sugimoto in Nature.
      • “Nearly every sentence in the first three pages is directly from a paper that [former Fed chief] Bernanke and his co-author, Refet Gurkaynak, wrote in 2001.” A fellow at the London School of Economics “called [a paper by U.S. Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA)] ‘plagiarism.'” (Laura Vozzela, Washington Post)
      • A “Harvard scientist’s never-replicated studies — which may soon be retracted — were the foundation for hundreds of research projects in China.” (Caixin, via Sixth Tone)
      • A deputy minister in the Albanian government has resigned his post following allegations of plagiarism. (Xinhua)
      • “The peer review process is in name only and almost any submission can be published, as long as the fee is paid.” (Ryan Allen, University World News)
      • As Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission inquiry committee clears a researcher of plagiarism, it “has apparently put the high profile cases of plagiarism on the backburner.” (Daily Times, The Nation) Meanwhile, “The executive director of the Higher Education Commission (HEC), Dr Arshad Ali, resigned amid allegations he was involved in plagiarism.” (Kashif Abbasi, DAWN)
      • “Who will protect academics from plagiarism by other academics?” asks Ken Masters. (Times Higher Education)
      • Approve first, study safety later? “Post-marketing research is promoted as a supplementary surveillance tool for new drugs,” write Eleanor Cummins and Nicole Wetsman of practices at the U.S. FDA. “It may just be a shortcut to getting them approved.” (Undark)
      • “Vermont officials have revised a new report on drug-injection sites after learning that one of their sources was an international study that’s been retracted.” The withdrawal was for “methodological reasons.” (Mike Faher, VT Digger)
      • “Many worry, and this recent article argued, that current methodological reforms have created an unnecessarily harsh, destructive, and divisive environment in our critical discourse. We see the exact opposite.” (Chronicle of Higher Education)
      • This is quite a retraction from Foodborne Pathogens and Disease.
      • A paper co-authored by a former University of Liverpool researcher found to have committed misconduct earns an expression of concern. Background here.

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