Weekend reads: Media star loses doctorate for plagiarism; journal editor resigns for AI concerns; university removes dean for fabricating data

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 65,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to 650, and our mass resignations list has more than 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.

I Support Retraction Watch

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Continue reading Weekend reads: Media star loses doctorate for plagiarism; journal editor resigns for AI concerns; university removes dean for fabricating data

RFK Jr. has various stances on retractions. Critics say he’s ‘politicizing’ them

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s letter demanding answers from a journal that recently retracted an article about vaccines has drawn significant attention. But the inquiry isn’t the first time Kennedy has used his platform to try to influence retraction decisions, with one critic calling out a pattern by Kennedy of “politicizing” the process.

Scholars say Kennedy, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has shown an inconsistent ideological approach to retractions. Last year, he called for the retraction of a study that failed to find vaccines cause harm. His recent letter to Toxicology Reports — which includes reference blunders with an 80-year-old paper and outdated COPE guidelines — criticizes the retraction of a paper tying infant deaths to vaccines. While critics call his motives political, one researcher says a key component of Kennedy’s letter – a call for more publisher transparency – aligns with improving the retraction process.   

In the June 11 letter to Lawrence H. Lash, editor-in-chief of Toxicology Reports, Kennedy demanded “a full explanation” from editors for removing a 2021 study linking sudden infant death syndrome to vaccines. We reported the retraction on May 26.

Continue reading RFK Jr. has various stances on retractions. Critics say he’s ‘politicizing’ them

Some Wikipedia citations to retracted papers persist for years, study finds

Retracted scientific papers cited on Wikipedia tend to linger on the popular website for years, according to a study examining nearly 1,200 citations. 

The study’s authors, led by Ph.D. candidate Haohan Shi from the Media, Technology, and Society Program at Northwestern University, used the Retraction Watch Database to compile a list of retracted papers and cross-referenced that list with Wikipedia citations. Of the 1,181 retracted citations identified, just over half were added to Wikipedia before the paper was retracted; a fifth were added after retraction but without any reader warning; and just over a quarter explicitly noted the retraction.     

They also measured how long it took the Wikipedia community to correct citations added before the paper was retracted. The team found that while many corrections occurred swiftly, the median time for a correction was 3.68 years. 

Continue reading Some Wikipedia citations to retracted papers persist for years, study finds

Journal investigating paper on cognitive impact of generative AI

A paper about the effects of generative AI use on confidence in work tasks is under investigation after critics raised questions about the study design, data analysis and ethics approval for the research.

The study, published in April in Technology, Mind, and Behavior, included 1,923 adults recruited online from the United States and Canada to perform a battery of work-like tasks assisted by AI. It garnered a press release from the American Psychological Association, which publishes the journal, and coverage in Time and Futurism.

Sandra Grinschgl of the University of Bern in Switzerland, who studies technology-driven cognitive offloading, got an alert about the study shortly after it came out. She told Retraction Watch she was initially puzzled by the vague descriptions of data collection from online participants in the study. When she looked closer at one of the bar charts, she noticed the lengths of the bars didn’t match the actual value of the labels.

Continue reading Journal investigating paper on cognitive impact of generative AI

Economist outs another Indian university’s rankings-boosting scheme when they refuse to pay him

Mohd Asif Shah

On May 9, a university administrator in Afghanistan threatened in a LinkedIn post to expose what he called a publishing scam by private universities in India.

“These institutions contact academicians globally, promising payment for publishing research papers that will boost their national and international rankings,” Mohd Asif Shah, dean of the faculty of economics at Kardan University in Kabul, alleged.

The following day, Shah elaborated in a new post: “Four years ago, Woxsen University asked me to publish papers and file patents under their affiliation. I agreed, delivered, and they proudly displayed those publications on their website. Now, after four years, they are denying payment for that work.” He also complained his “patent incentives were being unilaterally reduced” from 40,000 Indian rupees (US$420) to 17,500 rupees (US$184) per patent — “a reduction of over 56%.”

Continue reading Economist outs another Indian university’s rankings-boosting scheme when they refuse to pay him

Publisher investigating two more papers on glyphosate safety over ghostwriting claims

Mike Mozart/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Tayor & Francis is investigating two papers about the weed killer Roundup following claims the articles were ghostwritten by the company that developed the herbicide.

The review comes after an Elsevier journal last year retracted a paper about Roundup linked to court documents that revealed company employees wrote the article but were not named as coauthors. Authors of the two latest papers under scrutiny stand by their work and deny any ghostwriting occurred.

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is highly contentious, with critics arguing the substance is carcinogenic and supporters contending the chemical is safe. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently weighing whether states can hold companies liable for failing to include cancer warnings on products containing the substance. 

Continue reading Publisher investigating two more papers on glyphosate safety over ghostwriting claims

Weekend reads: Uneven sanctions for misconduct; protein name confusion in hundreds of papers; the Journal of Research on Research

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 65,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to 650, and our mass resignations list has more than 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.

I Support Retraction Watch

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Continue reading Weekend reads: Uneven sanctions for misconduct; protein name confusion in hundreds of papers; the Journal of Research on Research

Science flags paper that found AI chatbots help debunk conspiracy theories 

Science has issued an expression of concern for a highly publicized study looking into whether conversations with AI chatbots could convince conspiracy theorists to abandon their beliefs. The move came after the authors of the paper found inconsistencies in their dataset, but a reanalysis shows the findings still stand, they say. 

The September 2024 article found conversing with an AI chatbot called DebunkBot reduced people’s belief in a particular conspiracy theory by an average of 20%. The research was featured in news stories in The New York Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic. 

This February, the authors — Thomas Costello of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, psychologist Gordon Pennycook of Cornell University in New York and cognitive scientist David Rand at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — won the Newcomb Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes Science, for the work. It has been cited 192 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

Continue reading Science flags paper that found AI chatbots help debunk conspiracy theories 

New system for flagging retracted papers finds scores of them in Cochrane reviews

Cochrane has implemented a new system for checking whether any of its thousands of published reviews include retracted studies in their analyses, the organization announced today. The effort already has turned up dozens of reviews that do and will now get closer scrutiny to ensure their results and recommendations hold up.

Cochrane publishes systematic reviews on health-related topics that evaluate the strength of evidence on particular treatments and interventions. Professional organizations and policymakers use the more than 9,500 reviews when developing recommendations. Recently a study of anesthesia clinical trials found a high rate of the studies with faked or flawed data, and another revealed that retracted studies included in systematic reviews — 17% of which were Cochrane reviews — had a large impact on clinical guidelines derived from them. 

Last year, Cochrane rolled out a feature in its database of reports of clinical trials, called CENTRAL, to flag retracted studies. The publisher pulls data on retracted papers from the Retraction Watch Database, via CrossRef. Now, they have extended the process to routinely identify systematic reviews that rely on retracted papers.

Continue reading New system for flagging retracted papers finds scores of them in Cochrane reviews

Journal retracts depression treatment study with findings called ‘too good to be true’

In the fall of 2024, Matt Williams was grading papers at Massey University in New Zealand when he noticed something off in a study one of his students had cited.

The study, published in 2016, reported overwhelming evidence suggesting that eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, is an effective treatment for depression. But the roughly 85% drop in symptoms of depression linked to the therapy struck Williams as implausible. 

“That’s way too big to have that kind of effect,” Williams recalled thinking as his first impression of the study. “Because I love to procrastinate instead of continuing marking, I then looked up the paper and started reading it.”

Continue reading Journal retracts depression treatment study with findings called ‘too good to be true’