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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- a letter about coronavirus retracted from a Lancet journal because it turned out not to be a first-person account, as claimed
- the retraction of a letter about a vaping paper because the author made up a graduate degree
- three more expressions of concern for Hans Eysenck, despite a university’s call for retractions
- a ten-year ban for a former OSU and Academia Sinica researcher
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “It is inappropriate for higher education institutions to set paper publication requirements,” according to a new policy in China.
- A single paper mill seems to have churned out 400 fake papers, according to sleuths.
- Plagiarism detection systems “clearly do not find all plagiarism and at times also identify non-plagiarized material as problematic,” says a preprint.
- “The most common reason for plagiarizing was lack of time (16.1%), and the most common consequence was the perception that ‘those who plagiarize are not respected or seen positively‘ (71.4%).”
- “Scientific fraud is thankfully rare,” says a commentary in Tumor Biology — a journal that had to retract 107 papers at once for fake peer review.
- “That’s a lot of paper. It’s not a chart. Or mortgage forms. Or Family and Medical Leave Act paperwork. It’s a research protocol for a study I’m involved in.”
- “There are four archetypal figures you can meet studying scientific fraud. I’ve met them. Now you can, too.”
- “Sloppy science is often not intentional, but due to lack of knowledge.”
- “A University of the Fraser Valley faculty member was rapped for academic misconduct sometime over the last three years, but the university won’t disclose any details on the identity of the instructor or his or her specific misdeeds.”
- “The financial model of Elsevier has become untenable for the scientific community and, we argue, in violation of the scientific ethos.”
- “New research [in PNAS] finds that women worldwide publish at the same rate as men, but they leave science earlier.” (Andrea Widener, C&EN News)
- “A lack of standardized practices affects the integrity of legal scholarship,” says a new paper. Are fixes on the way?
- “Can Preprints Shake Up Biomedical Publishing?”
- “Biologist exits prestigious post years after violating sexual-harassment policy.”
- “Does science self-correct?” asked our Ivan Oransky in a presentation in Berlin last Saturday.
- Why don’t researchers report scientific misconduct when they witness it? A new paper takes a look.
- “Federal judge rules clinical trial sponsors must publish a decade’s worth of missing data.”
- “Journals, funders and scholars must work together to create an infrastructure to study peer review.”
- The BMJ is “launching a new collaboration with Maastricht University on the responsible conduct of publishing scientific research.”
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