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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- A clinical trial about COVID-19 by a convicted felon
- A journal that published a critical letter and then said it was a mistake
- A retraction with ‘rectitude‘
- A group that tried to publish the same paper three times
How many papers about COVID-19 have been retracted? We’ve been keeping track, as part of our database. Here’s our frequently updated list.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- A large study in The Lancet of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 has earned a correction after more than 180 scientists signed a letter criticizing it. More from Andrew Gelman.
- A company allegedly “fabricated phony scientific studies…to substantiate their false claims” about COVID-19.
- The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “has warned a drug company for data falsification” and environmental issues.
- “Scientific misinformation persists when retractions and corrections are not promptly issued, are not sufficiently detailed, and fail to connect to the misinformation.”
- “We use network models to think about why retractions often fail.”
- “The preliminary nature of what I’ve seen published in top journals is eye-opening. It forces us to rethink what peer review means, what rigor means, and what prestige means.”
- “The problem is that good science, which requires scrutiny and replication, simply cannot move at the speed of the rolling news cycle.”
- “British psychologist Hans Eysenck has always been controversial for his social views. His scientific integrity is now also under attack – again.” More here.
- “Disability rights activists are pressuring a law school journal to retract a paper that they claim justifies ‘ableism and eugenics’ in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
- “Reasons to Worry Less About the Explosion of Preprints.”
- “[I]n recent years,” says a report, “all the major publishers have made their own investments in preprint platforms.”
- A look at open peer review.
- “Subsequently, on the same day, this paper was alerted to allegations — first made public on social media — that parts of the same piece by Ravi were similar to sections of a paper, ‘Roadmap to Responsibly Reopen America’, published on April 23, by Paul Romer, University Professor, New York University, and 2018 Nobel Laureate in Economics.”
- “Coronavirus studies appear at lightning speed. Too soon maybe?”
- “The speed of coronavirus science has consequences.”
- “When does fast science become problematic science? COVID-19 is testing us on that question and many more,” says the Los Angeles Times.
- “Post-Publication Peer Review for Real:” Researchers say the approach taken by one neuroscience journal could succeed where others have failed.
- “We also found a better affinity to Nature by the general audience and a better affinity to Science in former USSR scholarly allies.”
- A study of retractions in the life sciences, using PubMed, which the author says is, to the best of her knowledge, “the biggest dataset on retractions in biomedical literature to be studied.” We’d humbly suggest looking at our database, which is far more comprehensive, next time.
- “A Vigilante in Statistical Badlands:” How a JAMA paper on dialysis came to be retracted.
- “It is also interesting to note that several preprints received negatively by the scientific community are amongst the most tweeted.” A preprint about preprints during COVID-19.
- “Concerns have been raised about the treatment of Chinese academics deemed to have strayed from official narratives about the Covid-19 pandemic.”
- “An academic who doesn’t have the ability to challenge the research findings of their colleagues because those questions threaten the university’s funding doesn’t have intellectual freedom.”
- “However, the results may have been influenced by the (re)search bubble effect. In other words, using the Google search engine may have influenced study results due to underlying, highly personalized algorithms…”
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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “has warned a drug company for data falsification” and environmental issues.
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Since this current problem is a server side issue (and will probably be resolved shortly) – there’s precious little RetractionWatch can do about this, as it’s not one of their servers …
They could, however, return to moderating comments. There’s too much philodoxy, and too little philosophy, in many of the readers’ replies these days. It wasn’t always like this.
number of responses has reduced as well. i was following retraction watch since beginning. now a days, you see some posts without any comments. It is a trend! moderation helps but prevents people from commenting freely. this is what happening on pubpeer too.
“A study of retractions in the life sciences, using PubMed, which the author says is, to the best of her knowledge, “the biggest dataset on retractions in biomedical literature to be studied.” We’d humbly suggest looking at our database, which is far more comprehensive, next time.” – i don’t remember of reading a manuscript without a physical address. of course, this is a practice many newspapers and magazines follow. However, in this manuscript, author hasn’t listed any affiliation nor a physical address. Very odd (at least for me). We have seen many “ghost writers” recently…
The author’s name Bhumika Bhatt and her picture on this preprint match those on LinkedIn post https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhumika-bhatt-phd/ which states her background as: “Molecular Biology | Data Science – San Francisco Bay Area, [formerly at] Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute”