Remembering Mario Biagioli, who articulated how scholarly metrics lead to fraud

Mario Biagioli

Mario Biagioli, a distinguished professor of law and communication at the University of California, Los Angeles — and a pioneering thinker about how academic reward systems incentivize misconduct — passed away in May after a long illness. He was 69. 

Among other intellectual interests, Biagioli wrote frequently about the (presumably) unintended consequences of using metrics such as citations to measure the quality and impact of published papers, and thereby the prestige of their authors and institutions. 

“It is no longer enough for scientists to publish their work. The work must be seen to have an influential shelf life,” Biagioli wrote in Nature in 2016. “This drive for impact places the academic paper at the centre of a web of metrics — typically, where it is published and how many times it is cited — and a good score on these metrics becomes a goal that scientists and publishers are willing to cheat for.” 

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Chinese funding agency penalizes 25 researchers for misconduct 

In its second batch of misconduct findings this year, the organization responsible for allocating basic research funding in China has called out 25 researchers for paper mill activity and plagiarism. 

The National Natural Science Foundation of China, or NSFC, gives more than 20,000 grants annually in disciplines ranging from agriculture to cancer research. The NSFC publishes the reports periodically “in accordance with relevant regulations,” the first report, released in April, states. The organization awarded 31.9 billion yuan, or about US$4.5 billion, in project funds in 2023.

The NSFC published the results of its investigations on June 13. The reports listed 11 specific papers and 26 grant applications and approvals. 

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Do men or women retract more often? A new study weighs in

The male/female retraction ratio for Zheng and colleagues’ dataset showed that male first authors have a higher retraction rate than females.  Source: E-T Zheng et al/J of Informetrics 2025

When you look at retracted papers, you find more men than women among the authors. But more papers are authored by men than women overall. A recent study comparing retraction rates, not just absolute numbers, among first and corresponding authors confirms that men retract disproportionally more papers than women. 

The paper, published May 20 in the Journal of Informetrics, is the first large-scale study using the ratio of men’s and women’s retraction rates, said study coauthor Er-Te Zheng, a data scientist at The University of Sheffield. The researchers also analyzed gender differences in retractions across scientific disciplines and countries.

Zheng and his colleagues examined papers from a database of over 25 million articles published from 2008 to 2023, about 22,000 of which were retracted. They collected the reasons for retraction from the Retraction Watch Database, and used several software tools to infer each author’s gender based on name and affiliated country. 

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Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations

Would you pay $169 for an introductory ebook on machine learning with citations that appear to be made up?

If not, you might want to pass on purchasing Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Advanced, published by Springer Nature in April. 

Based on a tip from a reader, we checked 18 of the 46 citations in the book. Two-thirds of them either did not exist or had substantial errors. And three researchers cited in the book confirmed the works they supposedly authored were fake or the citation contained substantial errors.

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Weekend reads: Trump cuts funding for Springer Nature pubs; another nonexistent study for HHS; what RFK Jr. got right about academic publishing

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 60,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

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

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Science issues correction on a paper after repeat experiments and misconduct finding

Science has changed an expression of concern on a 2022 paper to an erratum after removing one of the coauthors — who was found to have committed misconduct — and allowing the researchers to repeat experiments.

The paper, “Structural basis for strychnine activation of human bitter taste receptor TAS2R46,” has been cited 68 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

Two months after publishing the article in September 2022, Science issued an editorial expression of concern, stating a post-publication analysis had found one figure with “potential discrepancies.”

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Swedish regulators drop investigations into Chalmers’ prosthetics lab

Two Swedish agencies have closed their investigations into a high-profile research center at Chalmers University of Technology that was suspended last year for “shortcomings in the operations.” 

The Center for Bionics and Pain Research (CBPR), known for its work on restoring limb function, was scrutinized and ultimately shut down after a university investigation last April found scientists at the center conducted research without sufficient permits, had inadequate quality assurance processes and handled sensitive personal data poorly, and found “shortcomings” in legal agreements for the center’s operations. 

Now, subsequent investigations by the country’s Medical Products Agency, which regulates medical devices and clinical trials, and the Ethics Review Appeal Board have ended, with both agencies declining to pursue further action. 

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Guest post: In defense of direct replication studies (if they even need defending)

Editor’s note: This guest post by Csaba Szabo is a response to a June 3 post by Mike Rossner on replication studies. We sent a draft to Rossner in advance; find his response below.

Csaba Szabo

The recent guest post on Retraction Watch by Mike Rossner takes a peculiar view of reproducibility. Rossner sets the stage talking about the executive order on “restoring gold standard science” and a call from National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya for replication studies to determine “which NIH-funded research findings are reliable.” Then Dr. Rossner takes this position: “Conducting systematic replication studies of pre-clinical research is neither an effective nor an efficient strategy to achieve the objective of identifying reliable research.” 

If systematic in the above statement means “universal,” then, of course, that is impossible, considering the millions of preclinical papers published every year. If, however, systematic means choosing which studies to replicate and then replicating them, then, this is, indeed possible. And this is exactly what Bhattacharya’s statement calls for: “identification of key scientific claims” that require replication. As explained below, this approach can, indeed, work in an effective and efficient manner, especially if it primarily focuses on new manuscript submissions.

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Slovak science academy ‘strictly condemns’ government official’s paper on mRNA vaccines

Peter Kotlár

Slovakia’s national science academy has issued a strong critique of a paper on mRNA vaccines coauthored by a member of the country’s parliament. The group called the work “insufficiently detailed” and “lacking controls,” with data that “may be misleading” and conclusions “not supported by sufficiently robust data.” 

Peter Kotlár, the paper’s second author, is an orthopedist and represents the far-right Slovak National Party. He is also the commissioner for a review of resource management during the COVID-19 pandemic for the government of populist prime minister Robert Fico, himself known for questioning the science around COVID-19.

The paper appeared May 13 in the Journal of Angiology and Vascular Surgery, published by Herald Scholarly Open Access. “The journal in which the study of Peter Kotlár was published, is not evidenced in databases Web Of Science and Scopus,” a spokesperson for the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Monika Tináková, told us. The issues with the paper reflect “the fact that the journal in which it was published is classified as a so-called predatory journal,” the statement, issued last month, reads. 

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COPE integrity officer loses 22-year-old paper for image concerns

The concerning figure from the paper, Fig. 2A, with increased contrast, courtesy of “Mycosphaerella arachidis” on PubPeer.

A journal has retracted a 22-year-old-paper whose first author is the integrity officer for the Committee on Publication Ethics over concerns about image editing that “would not be acceptable by modern standards of figure presentation.”

The 2003 paper, “A recombinant H1 histone based system for efficient delivery of nucleic acids,” was published in Elsevier’s Journal of Biotechnology and has been cited 41 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

Sleuth Sholto David, who goes by the name “Mycosphaerella arachidis” on PubPeer, raised concerns about the image in December 2023, pointing out a “[d]ark rectangle” that appeared to be “superimposed onto the image.” 

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