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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- A sting involving hydroxychloroquine, push scooters, and COVID-19
- A home for complaints about retractions of homeopathy papers
- A spider researcher using legal threats and public records requests to prevent retractions of his work
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 32.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “PEPIOPs – prolific editors who publish in their own publications.” Dorothy Bishop explains.
- “Approximately 40% of researchers admitted having committed at least one of the nine listed forms of scientific misconduct, and 17.51% admitted having committed at least one of fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism.” From “A Survey of Researchers in Three Chinese Tertiary Hospitals.”
- Following reports about hundreds of problematic papers, “China’s research-misconduct rules target ‘paper mills’ that churn out fake studies.”
- “A UC San Diego doctor…violated a litany of university policies while developing and researching his experimental brain treatment…”
- A journal “has a policy banning the word “error” in the title of a letter to the editor correcting an error appearing in the journal.”
- “Corruption allegations plague Romanian site of huge European laser project.” Alison Abbott reports for Nature.
- “The Spandidos Ménage à Trois,” in which two authors and a publisher find each other.
- “Excel Kept Messing Up the Names of Genes, So Scientists Renamed Them.”
- “In the [obstetrics] OB and [maternal-fetal medicine] MFM literature, retraction of scientific articles is increasing, and is most often related to scientific misconduct, including article duplication and plagiarism.”
- Attorneys for University of Kansas chemist Feng “Franklin” Tao have filed motions to dismiss the federal case against him for fraud and making false statements stemming from his interactions with China.
- “Peer review of grant applications at [the Swiss National Science Foundation] SNSF might be prone to biases stemming from different applicant and reviewer characteristics.”
- “Fake news should not become an overused catch-all term for every news item which does not report every fact in detail.”
- “Murdoch denies demise of major is payback for whistleblowers.”
- “Whistleblowers irked as fishy research probe finds no misconduct.”
- “The perils of preprints.”
- “Universities should improve their mechanisms to ensure the quality of graduate theses and hold faculty accountable for breaches,” according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Education.
- Was there “a statistical omission tantamount to data falsification” in a study of a pesticide widely used in the US?
- “Jeffrey Epstein’s Harvard Connections Show How Money Can Distort Research.”
- “The results indicate that the underrepresentation of women-led publications in reference sections is also characteristic of papers published in [the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience] JoCN over the past decade.”
- Women’s manuscript submission rates continue to fall during the pandemic.
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