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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Why you shouldn’t try to republish a paper you had retracted for plagiarism
- A Duke engineering professor who had seven papers corrected for failure to disclose a significant conflict of interest
- Continuing investigation into a paper claiming to link obesity and dishonesty
- A retraction and corrections for a high-profile education researcher
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 32.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- A priest with 23 retractions from the scholarly literature “plagiarized when ghostwriting for Canada’s most senior Vatican figure,” says a new book.
- The Journal of Trial and Error “seeks to normalise research failure.” It will “highlight where studies went wrong – but it may struggle to attract submissions,” Times Higher Education reports.
- “We found 192 OA journals that vanished from the web between 2000 and 2019, spanning all major research disciplines and geographic regions of the world.”
- Press, Play, Connect: On the Medical Library Association’s podcast, Sally Gore interviews Elizabeth Suelzer about retractions.
- “How the Publish-or-Perish Principle Divides a Science: The Case of Academic Economists.”
- “Is a Replicability Crisis on the Horizon for Environmental and Resource Economics?”
- “[I]t is important to reassess the role of medical journals in addressing the health effects of systemic racism.”
- A new paper on bisexuality is “simply part of the process of science self-correcting,” says one author.
- “An epidemic of acronyms is turning journal articles into alphabet soup,” according to a new analysis in eLife.
- Ecologist Kevin Lafferty wants your help in redesigning the scientific paper.
- “The public takes it for granted that they can count on research results being true, but unfortunately that is not always the case.” An interview with the head of the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.
- “National Sun Yat-sen University on Wednesday said that it would revoke the master’s degree of Kao-hsiung City Councilor Jane Lee (李眉蓁), the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate in the Kaohsiung mayoral by-election on Saturday last week, as it has found that her thesis was largely plagiarized.”
- “Nearly half of the 600-odd PhD dissertations submitted by different scholars in Magadh University (MU) from September 1, 2018 to to June 30, 2020 failed the mandatory plagiarism test.”
- “Results of the study showed a lack of appropriate [research ethics] RE education for graduate-level pharmacy programs in Jordan with only 40% of the programs partially discuss selected topics related to RE.”
- “Most of the charge levied for making articles open access is driven by the market power of big publishers rather than the reputation of a journal, a study has suggested.”
- “However, as former journalist Simon Linacre argues, the fourth estate needs to have its own house is in order first, and ensure they are not tripped up by predatory journals.”
- John Comaroff, a Harvard anthropology professor, is placed on paid leave amid allegations of sexual harassment first reported by The Harvard Crimson.
- “The heads of department articulated integrity as a ‘non-problem’ in their own local context, rather, it was other departments and other countries that experienced lack of research integrity.”
- “One failure to replicate a scientific study doesn’t mean there’s a crisis,” say the authors of a study. Tom Beckers, one of the researchers whose work didn’t replicate the study called the response “bizarre,” while Simine Vazire called it “disappointing.”
- “NIH and NSF should consider withholding financial support for new grant applications for the institution until a satisfactory post hoc institutional report is completed.”
- “What about how research is done allows research misconduct to occur?”
- “South Africa’s incentive system for publications needs to be overhauled to reduce the ‘perverse’ incentives it creates, like promoting quantity over quality, a paper has argued.”
- “[C]ultural traits contribute to our perceptions of research misconduct and subsequent bias in that context.”
- A look at the “street research market” of advertising for academic services in Iran.
- “Maximizing peer review efforts more important than ever.”
- A journal “sounds like the sort of thing Silvio Berlusconi subscribes to.” A winery newsletter sounds like…Retraction Watch.
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