Weekend reads: A paper mill; ‘science needs to clean its own house;’ is the COVID-19 retraction rate ‘exceptionally high?’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• The retraction of a controversial paper on race and police killings
• The case of the stolen journal
• An expression of concern for a 77-year-old paper
• A judge ordering a Stanford researcher to pay the legal fees of a scientist he sued for defamation

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 22.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Paper mill? Journals published more than 100 papers from China that appear to have used identical images.
• “Science must clean its own house. And those who help it do so should be commended, not condemned.”
• Is there really an ‘alarming’ and ‘exceptionally high’ rate of COVID-19 retractions?
• “Journal editors need to be doing better at being on top of the evidence in real time when they lob another study at us.”
• The U.S. National Science Foundation “has taken action in 16–20 cases in which foreign ties were not properly reported.”
• “A researcher who worked at U.S. universities was charged with illegally using grant funding to develop scientific expertise for the Chinese government, the Justice Department said Thursday.”
• Cabell’s has labeled a journal hijacked after a guest post on Retraction Watch.
• A university in North Carolina paid a professor $504,000 to retire. Background here.
• “The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) has lost its application to appeal against a Fair Work Commission decision that found it had unfairly sacked an academic for not publishing enough research papers in peer-reviewed journals.”
• A paper about whether tweets are linked to more citations “contains serious omissions and neither the authors, nor the journal’s editorial office, are willing to explain or defend this paper,” says Phil Davis.
• A potential way to mitigate malicious or “torpedo” reviews, as well as reviewer de-anonymization.
• “These solutions are as of yet immature, flawed or in need of major revision but do have some potential in overcoming the rising threat of academic fraud.”
• A Duke University project hopes to create guidelines for acceptable text recycling in research papers.
• “The Pandemic Is Pushing Scientists To Rethink How They Read Research Papers,” reports Richard Harris at NPR.
• “How to Read Covid-19 Research (and Actually Understand It).”
• “The close-knit computer engineering community has been rocked to its foundations by a scandal that has so far sparked three investigations.”
• “We show that historically there has been an extensive imbalance of gender for both first and corresponding authors, and that there is no strong trend towards parity since 2005.” A study of trends in chemistry.
• “Findings revealed that male academics – especially childless ones – were the least affected group, whereas female academics, especially Black women and mothers, were the most impacted group.” A look at papers published by researchers in Brazil during the pandemic.
• “As opposed to “mega-corrections” of Retraction Watch notoriety, this must be a ‘micro-correction.'”

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