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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- The planned retraction of a paper about homeopathy for COVID-19
- The retraction of a paper linking 5G technology to COVID-19
- Clarivate reversing its decision not to give two journals an Impact Factor this year
- The retraction of 46 papers at once for faked peer review
- The retraction of a paper called “overtly racist”
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 30.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “Self-promotion journals: a new type of illegitimate publishing entity?”
- “An email from a student requesting money in exchange for co-authorship on a new paper set off alarm bells for Sridhar Vedachalam, director of water at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center in Washington, DC.”
- When it comes to COVID-19 papers, “Researchers, peer reviewers, and editors should take action to flatten the curve of secondary articles.”
- “We thus seek to describe one possible origin point for the widespread fraudulent practices that now characterize the pharmaceutical industry.”
- “But academic freedom must continue to protect much research that is immoral in one or another way.”
- The researcher at the center of two high-profile retractions in NEJM and The Lancet was “an unreliable physician,” say colleagues.
- “Theranos whistleblower worries coronavirus drugs rush could open door to bad actors.”
- “Arash Derambarsh’s doctorate, which enabled him to become a lawyer, was withdrawn by the institution’s disciplinary section.”
- “Are questionable research practices facilitating new discoveries in sport and exercise medicine?”
- “The findings indicate that concerns over the influence of industry advertising in medical journals may be overstated, and that accepting fees for reprints may constitute the largest risk of bias for editorial decision-making.”
- “Years from now, we will look back at this pandemic as a historic time of incredible challenges, disruption and anguish. But I hope we will also remember it as an inflection point — the end of restricting knowledge to a privileged few and the dawn of a new era in scientific progress.”
- “Science, uninterrupted: Will COVID-19 mark the end of scientific publishing as we know it?”
- “Why Professors Are Writing Crap That Nobody Reads.”
- “What’s So Abstract About Scientific Abstracts?”
- The PhD degrees of over 500 extension lecturers employed in government colleges across Haryana are under scanner of the higher education department following complaints that these were acquired from private universities without adhering to University Grants Commission (UGC) norms.”
- “It Takes Great Discipline to Read a Scientific Paper – and Even More to Write One.”
- “A nearly $21 million government-funded study to see if a popular, over-the-counter heartburn medication could be a covid-19 remedy has fizzled amid allegations of conflicts of interest and scientific misconduct…”
- “Despite data falsifications that were severe enough to require four retractions or corrections and which led to his demotion at a university and a redo of experiments, a postdoctoral researcher escaped any sanctions by the National Science Foundation…”
- “For the sake of its reputation, BERA should retract this paper.”
- “Mike Adams, whom the University of North Carolina at Wilmington recently paid $504,000 to retire, was found dead at home last week from an apparent gunshot wound.”
- “The many facets of research integrity: What can we do to ensure it?”
- “What do you call a paper that has serious flaws but finally made its way through the peer review process, somewhere?”
- “’The American Physical Society (APS) has a vision of the future of physics publishing, in 2020 or so.’ So begins a 1993 Science article…”
- Retraction: “Are these 100 people killing the planet?”
- A nomination for best paper title ever.
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