Weekend reads: Image duplication software debuts; papers that plagiarize Wikipedia; ‘Time to Get Serious About Research Fraud’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• A review of a French hydroxychloroquine study that found it was “fully irresponsible“
• An expression of concern for a paper that claimed the Koran had predicted the Higgs Boson
• An infectious disease researcher that a U.S. federal watchdog said had “recklessly” faked data in grants worth millions
• The retraction of a big Nature study on a tiny “dinosaur”
• An author retracting a Nature commentary because of concerns about the section’s sponsorship

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 25.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• A tool for detecting image duplication sounds potentially useful, with lots of room for improvement. The reaction on PubPeer reminds us of what happened with statcheck in 2016.
• “Plagiarism of Wikipedia articles in the scholarly literature has received little if any attention thus far.” Five cases. And two more.
• “It’s Time to Get Serious About Research Fraud.”
• “Fake journals in the age of fake news: the dangers of predatory publishing.”
• “Jargon and metrics for evaluation: Are they valid or instead promote questionable practices?”
• “The vast majority of medical journals now allow articles to appear as preprints before they are peer reviewed and officially published, a new study finds.”
• “Will the pandemic change the research culture or how results are made available in the future?”
• “The Kuomintang (KMT) candidate for the Kaohsiung mayoral by-election Li Mei-jhen (李眉蓁) has been accused of plagiarizing speech notes and an academic paper for most of her master’s thesis.”
• “A visiting Chinese researcher at Stanford University has been charged with visa fraud for allegedly hiding her employment by the Chinese military.”
• “Publishers: let transgender scholars correct their names.”
• “In the long run, science tends to be self-correcting, because fraudulent or invalid research may be retracted, and mistaken hypotheses or theories may be refuted by new data or experiments. However, this self-correcting process may take years or even decades, and the public often cannot wait for science to produce the correct solution to a problem, especially during a health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic.”
• “The best time to argue about what a replication means? Before you do it.”
• “Are replication rates the same across academic fields?”
• “We keep expecting to receive high quality articles from those who argue for this as of yet non-evidence based therapy, clarifying the scientific rationale behind this preference.”
• “Pakistan’s publication counting adds up to too little.”
• “How Often Do the Iranian Medical Journal Editors-in-Chief Publish in Their Own Journals?”
• “How to Identify Flawed Research Before It Becomes Dangerous.” (Michael Eisen, Robert Tibishrani)
• The University of Southern California paid its former president more than $7.6 million when he stepped down.
• “That’s what it’s like to fight back against a prevailing dogma with new evidence, said Vig — it’s wearying.”
• “Matovic: I Committed Plagiarism Unknowingly, I’ll Retire if Ousted.”
• “To any journalists reading this who cover COVID-19 science: please keep an eye on Retraction Watch’s list of retracted or withdrawn papers. If something seems too good to be true, push on it.” Here’s that list.
• “The only way to solve this problem and to protect patients is for the Health Minister to insist that all doctors who wish to act as journal editors and peer reviewers do so with their name and qualifications attached to the final published paper.”

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