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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- A paper on vaccines in Nigeria retracted because its author list omitted key contributors
- A French university rescinding a PhD for misconduct
- Ten retractions for an itinerant legal scholar who faked his affiliation
- Two more journals pushing back against Impact Factor suppression
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 25.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “Another botched peer review—this one involving a controversial study of police killings—shows how devil’s advocates could improve the scientific process.”
- What happens when clinical trial participants lie: “I wanted free Botox, so I participated. And I got paid — so why wouldn’t I?”
- “Genius or Fraud? Kid’s PhD-Level Science Project Raises Eyebrows.” More here.
- “We have good reason to believe that this article is garbage, and you should not trust it. But we’re not going to do anything about it that might hurt our impact factor, or embarrass us by getting us into Retraction Watch.”
- “This whole process is like pulling teeth. There has to be a better way to handle cases of obviously shoddy science than this.” Background, including a study that claimed high heels made women more attractive, here.
- “KU Leuven asks researcher Catherine Verfaillie to introduce an extra safety check in her lab, after the university has examined papers with problematic images.”
- “Scientific Journal Pulls Over a Dozen Papers by Chinese Researchers.”
- A comparison of how institutions in China and Europe handle cases of reserach misconduct.
- “The first rule of appealing editors’ publication decisions: nobody talks about appealing editors’ publication decisions.”
- “While retractions may contribute to distrust in science, Oransky argues they shouldn’t. Retractions ‘are a sign someone is paying attention,’ he says. ‘It’s when you deny that problems happen that you lose trust.'”
- A guide to the seven kinds of toxic PIs.
- Misconduct allegations have pushed a psychology hero off his pedestal.
- The University of Illinois wins the second “This Image Is Fine” Award from scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik.
- “[H]ow unusual is it for a single author to dominate the profile of publications in a journal?”
- “An especially subtle type of disguised plagiarism is translation plagiarism, which occurs when the work of one author is republished in a different language with authorship credit taken by someone else.”
- “Retracted studies, at least we hope, aren’t that common.”
- “Rushing Science in the Face of a Pandemic Is Understandable but Risky.”
- “Is It Time to (Finally) Get Serious about Submission Charges?”
- “The Hong Kong Principles for assessing researchers: Fostering research integrity.”
- A retraction is corrected.
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