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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- A new member of the 100-retraction club;
- A reviewer caught stealing from an unpublished manuscript;
- A publisher who decided to retract two papers after waiting more than a year for a university’s investigation to be completed.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “The response from the NRA (National Rifle Association) was less vitriolic than the response from the True Health Initiative.” An ugly fight in nutrition research, exposed.
- A high-profile journal of finance in China is facing criticism for publishing essays by the son of the editor — a Party official — when he was just 10 years old.
- A prof is charged with “spending $96,000 in federal grant funds at adult entertainment venues and sports bars.”
- A “scientist arrested in 2014 for embezzling more than 34 million yuan (US$4.3 million) of research funds has been sentenced to 12 years in prison.”
- A professor has admitted to stealing more than $200,000 in cancer research grant funds.
- “My advisor is an advocate for shooting colors in the sky. His spirit is magical yet perpetual, just like the space.” Really.
- A Scottish bishop is accused of committing plagiarism in his doctoral dissertation.
- “A new study has found that specialized journals publish more Nobel-winning physics papers than higher impact journals such as Science and Nature.”
- Compliance with a 2007 law that requires clinical trial sponsors to report their results “is poor, and not improving.”
- “Further public accountability of the trialists, but also our government organizations, has to happen.” Why do the FDA and NIH let researchers get away with not publishing results?
- “Predatory nursing journals continue to persist, yet fewer may now be in existence.”
- “In short, the most common outcome for those who commit fraud is: a long career.” Our Ivan Oransky contributed a chapter to a new book, Gaming the Metrics: How the increasing reliance on metrics to evaluate scholarly publications has produced new forms of academic fraud and misconduct.
- “Western Australia’s Murdoch University is withdrawing a multi-million-dollar claim filed against one of its own academics for damages caused by his appearance on an Australian Broadcasting Corporation program last year, just days after it confirmed it had terminated its contract with a major recruiter of Indian students.”
- “Scientific and Academic Integrity in Portugal: A National Enterprise.”
- A randomized trial of a lab-embedded discourse intervention to improve research ethics.”
- “Unprecedented recall of papers from Russian journals must also spark broader debate on academic culture, say research integrity scholars.”
- “Importantly, we show that this overcitation of men and undercitation of women is driven largely by the citation practices of men, and is increasing with time despite greater diversity in the academy.”
- “The female authorship proportion was 48% (63% for primary healthcare and 33% for general internal medicine, P-value < 0.001).”
- A university responds to claims that a paper by one of its research groups could not be replicated, but says it has “appointed an external panel to review research conducted by Oona Lönnstedt during her PhD at JCU, to determine whether there has been any research misconduct.”
- “How many image duplications in a paper would be acceptable?” asks Elisabeth Bik.
- “How to tackle academic misconduct among China’s top scientists.”
- “If the fate of genius is self-plagiarism, what chance does anyone else have?”
- “Bloomberg has retracted an incorrect article published today with the headline ‘Trump’s SALT Cap Fuels a Wealth Exodus From High-Tax States’ because time frames in the Bank of America analysis on which the story was based were inaccurate.”
- “Academic journals must become more ‘activist’ if they are to survive, seeking to ‘change the direction of society’ rather than ‘passively waiting’ for manuscripts, according to the editor-in-chief of The Lancet.”
- “Was the public re-release of data excerpts from an unpublished manuscript on human germline gene editing ethically justified?”
- Press release exaggerations were less frequent after a paper on the subject.
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