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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- The retraction of a 30-year-old paper cited by creationists;
- A chemistry paper retracted after ten years of being in limbo;
- An accounting paper corrected for methodology that “does not generate the results;”
- The story of what happened when reviewers asked authors to change their study design.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “Should we mind if authorship is falsified?”
- “Microbiologist and image manipulation expert Elisabeth Bik tweeted that she had found evidence that authors had manipulated scientific images and plagiarised content in [more than 200] published papers, after receiving a tip-off about the university.”
- The inventor of a popular acne treatment “Exploited Prisoners, Children, and the Elderly. Why Does Penn Honor Him?”
- “The idea sounded fishy to Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman. She was not about to put her name on a ghostwritten article for a medical journal.”
- “I (inadvertently) misrepresented others’ research in a way that made my story sound better,” a leading statistician admits.
- “Academics and universities that “fetishise” publication in certain journals are the root cause of poor incentives in science – not the design of assessments such as the UK’s research excellence framework, an event on reproducibility has been told.”
- “It was hard to imagine that they could have made this worse, but they did.” President Trump weaponizes scientific transparency at the EPA.
- “A TED Talk by [MIT] principal research scientist Caleb Harper was removed from the…organization’s website.”
- “[T]he scandal didn’t involve money, mismanagement or other issues many might associate with such scandals — it was anonymous allegations about plagiarized emails that led to the resignation.”
- A paper “is retracted due to omission of the figures, by a publisher’s mistake.”
- “The number of South Korean academics accused of naming children as co-authors on research manuscripts…continues to grow.”
- Our co-founder Ivan Oransky has been commended by the judges for the Maddox Prize for his work on Retraction Watch.
- “In light of the recent athletic admissions scandal, the on-going and growing concussion crisis, and new reporting from The Athletic, we call on the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and all NCAA member institutions to release two decades of data on LD/ADHD rates within their athletic programs, properly anonymized.”
- The Loss of Confidence Project “is encouraging psychologists to report the research findings they no longer consider to be true.”
- “For the second time in France, within a 15-year interval, we have shown that the ICMJE criteria were ignored and that honorary authorship was frequent.”
- A look at retractions by Croatian authors.
- “The play, written by Pulitzer Prize winner Wendy Wasserstein, centers around an accusation of plagiarism by Laurie, an aging female professor, toward Third, a young male college student.”
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Plagiarizing sources in internal emails definitely does not seem like grounds for resignation to me.