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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- A poultry researcher who’s up to 14 retractions
- A swift expression of concern in Science
- A researcher who objected to being left off a list of bogus co-authors
- An update on a professor’s legal threats against us
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 32.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “I do peer review and I want you to pay me four hundred and fifty dollars. I’ll even say please.” A sleuth starts a movement.
- “Peer review is the backbone of scholarly research, but it faces a number of challenges pertaining to bias and unfairness. There is an urgent need to improve peer review.”
- “Western peer reviewers most sought after and ‘fatigued’”: “Forty per cent of German, US and UK reviewers complain of too many review requests.”
- “What would you do if, as the Dean of Research at a major university, a group of students, postdocs, and junior faculty reported that they had been pressured into writing reviewer critiques for a senior faculty member?”
- “A research professor from the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute has resigned amid allegations he sexually mistreated a colleague.”
- “PIs who expect you to work hard, to read widely, and to think deeply about your project are not necessarily toxic. This all might be your fault.”
- “Dismissing plagiarism as a low-level academic misdemeanour ignores the potentially deadly consequences of letting cheating go unchecked, says David A. Sanders.”
- “A Taiwanese doctor, Wu Jo-hsuan, recently reported via Facebook that she had been asked by the editorial team at Eye and Vision, a medical journal published by the group, to add the word ‘China’ after ‘Taiwan’ in her paper, or have her article rejected for publication.”
- “Will Anti-Racist Law Reviews Publish Anti-Anti-Racist Articles by Anti-Anti-Racist Authors?”
- “However, we found modest evidence that research with greater political slant—whether liberal or conservative—was less replicable, whereas statistical robustness consistently predicted replication success.”
- “44% of Tamil Nadu’s soft skills text book plagiarised: Profs.”
- “A 26-year-old film editor’s descent into coronavirus vaccine conspiracy theories.”
- “And Zotero includes plug-ins that find PDFs using the Open Access database Unpaywall, and that flag retracted articles, thanks to a partnership with the Retraction Watch blog.”
- A study “has found that more than a third of Nigeria’s education research output published between 2010 and 2018 appeared in predatory journals…”
- “Decisions by journal editors about whether to accept or reject a paper are still influenced by whether the periodical already has enough studies to fill its forthcoming print editions…”
- “Massive fraud investigation targets prominent Brazilian health researcher,” Emiliano Rodriguez Mega reports for Science.
- “Don’t be a prig in peer review,” says Jeff C. Clements, looking “reviewer comments that used ‘being critical’ as a justification to be mean.”
- Don’t “assume that scholars publishing in ‘questionable’ journals are naïve, gullible or lacking in understanding,” says a review of factors shaping such decisions.
- “Anti-vax fraud: Brian Deer on how he exposed Andrew Wakefield.”
- “Covid-19 Research Scandals Illustrate What’s Wrong With Science,” according to an interview with Stuart Ritchie. Read an excerpt of his book here.
- Images of coronavirus skin disorders in medical journals were “overwhelmingly of white people.”
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Adding China may be too much. But adding “Republic of China” is OK, if the journal has a strict format for authors’ address. Some Taiwan researchers just mix politics with academic issues.
Given that the pressure comes from the journal not the authors, I think it’s the journal mixing academic and political concerns.
And as stated in the article, the authors were asked to add “China”, implying “People’s Republic of China” or mainland China, rather than “Republic of China”. Elsewhere the article reports Taiwanese authors being asked to identify Taiwan as a “province of China”.
Why does China only represent People’s Republic of China?
Moreover, the author can choose not to submit her ms to the journal.
In the first place, the author should add “Republic of China” in her address. Nothing is wrong.
Re: China
This is a pretty standard disclaimer used by journals: “XXX Journal remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.”
Well, this explains things;
“Editorial policies
The editorial policies of Eye and Vision are determined jointly by its Editorial Board and Springer Nature in accordance with the legal and regulatory requirements of China. Unless otherwise stipulated in these guidelines, all manuscripts submitted to Eye and Vision should adhere to BioMed Central’s editorial policies.”