Weekend reads: Questions swirl over kidney transplant papers from China; author apologizes for paper of whether women performed medical procedures as well as men; reports detail widespread fraud in UK lab

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

Retraction Watch came back online on Wednesday of this week, after a 10-day outage for technical issues that may have involved a DDOS attack. That meant there was no Weekend Reads for two weeks, so to catch up, we posted one yesterday, and are posting another today. Here’s what’s been happening elsewhere:

• A journal flagged a paper on kidney transplants because of concerns about where the organs came from. And a journal will retract seven papers after their authors couldn’t provide evidence that the kidneys used weren’t from Chinese prisoners.
• “I want to apologize.” An author says he’ll retract a study of whether women performed medical procedures as well as men. The article has been temporarily removed.
• Newly released documents have revealed widespread fraud in the lab of a leading UK geneticist, Peter Aldhous reports. (BuzzFeed News) Here’s our previous coverage.
• “Journals’ Plagiarism Detectors May Flag Papers in Error,”reports Diana Kwon. (The Scientist)
• “Some star psychologists don’t disclose in research papers the large sums they earn for talking about their work. Is that a concern?”
• “A database of all the retracted studies. But what is the point of it?” Retraction Watch in a cartoon, by Science of Cookies. (in French)
• Why do authors keep citing papers by a fraudster?
• “Mice are not people: Fighting spin in medical science.” (Kelly Crowe, CBC)
• Bishops have “formally withdrawn works it published with former Vatican spokesman Fr. Thomas Rosica in the wake of a plagiarism scandal.” Rosica is now on our leaderboard.
• A study on interval training for fat loss has earned an expression of concern following questions in a blog post.
• The U.S. NIH’s probe of grant recipients’ foreign ties has led to far more firings than have been made public, reports Jeffrey Mervis (Science).
• “Until any charges are proven, I stand with all international scientists working in America.” A journal editor weighs in on probes of Chinese authors in the U.S.
• “Data suggest that single authorship is continuing to decline across the world, but will it always have a place?”
• “One out of seven health sciences librarians in this study experienced impostor phenomenon.” (JMLA)
• “Research integrity professionals in Singapore have responded to a high-profile case of research misconduct by launching a professional network to discuss research integrity.”
• The “large number of roles and tasks” peer reviewers are asked to do “warrant further discussion and clarification in order not to overburden these key actors.”
• “It seems obvious to me that traditional academic publishers should not be the only institutions that regularly publish scholarly content.”
• “Everything You Need to Know About Peer Review — The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.”
• “[T]here’s a lot of human ability going to waste…” What do rankings of published papers by country tell us? asks Derek Lowe. (In The Pipeline)
• Research integrity is “Doing the Right Thing, Even When No One Is Watching.” (Helen Lach)
• Why Simine Vazire wanted to be editor of Psychological Science. (She wasn’t chosen.)
• “We found that bioRxiv-deposited journal articles received a sizeable citation and altmetric advantage over non-deposited articles,” says a paper deposited on bioRxiv.
• “A year after the Osmania University (OU) made plagiarism check mandatory for PhD thesis, the varsity observed an average 30-40% similarity index in every thesis submitted by research scholars.”
• “Male principal investigators (almost) don’t publish with women in ecology and zoology,” a new study finds.
• “India culls hundreds more ‘dubious’ journals from government approved list.” (Gayathri Vaidyanathan, Nature) And: “Why India is striking back against predatory journals.” (B. Patwardhan, Nature)
• A Belgian university faces charges it covered up for a professor accused of fraud and harassment.
• A researcher in Spain has published two studies that make use of our database of retractions.
• “Correction of the literature after retraction of multiple publications by a research group should include searching for reviews and meta-analyses that cite the retracted publications,” write Andrew Grey and colleagues.
• Academic spam emails “are a common distraction…that may impact faculty productivity.”

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, sign up for an email every time there’s a new post (look for the “follow” button at the lower right part of your screen), or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].