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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- An exclusive about a case of misconduct at the University of Arizona
- The retraction of a paper on HPV vaccines and preterm birth
- A group of stem cell researchers up to nine retractions
- A retracted retraction, and an apology from the publisher
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 33.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “Frozen Meat Against COVID-19 Misinformation: An Analysis of Steak-Umm and Positive Expectancy Violations.”
- “Researchers acting under government orders expunged from a scientific paper the prevalence rates of the new coronavirus infection” in 10 cities in India, The Telegraph reports.
- “The 2020 Lasker Awards will not be given this year owing to the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.”
- At least 15 doctors whose names were on a petition supporting hydroxychloroquine advocate Didier Raoult say they were forged.
- “What do you do if you suspect research misconduct?”
- “Could Einstein Get Published Today?”
- Among retractions from countries in Africa, “Plagiarism was the most frequent form of misconduct, followed by duplication.”
- “What to do with a clinical trial with conflicts of interest.”
- When it comes to COVID-19 research, “Researchers, public health authorities, and healthcare workers should be equipped to identify such agnotological strategies, distinguish them from scientific fraud, and avoid drawing misleading inferences based on an irrational adherence to hypotheses and a lack of criticism of implausible results.”
- “These results suggest that Transparent Peer Review is feasible across journals in different subject areas, although there is more editorial effort involved in securing sufficient peer reviewers under Transparent Peer Review.”
- “The state media announcement of the ban on 24 September called the researchers and their work ‘anti-China'”.
- “Plagiarizing academic papers can now negatively affect an individual’s social credit history in China.”
- “The fact that peer review is imperfect, like any human endeavor, is no secret or surprise.”
- “New models of peer-review are putting emphasis back on good science; innovation is increasing diversity and reducing bias.”
- “Responding to Peer Review as an Early Career Scholar.”
- How language in retraction notices obscures culpability.
- Can altmetrics predict which papers will be retracted? asks a new study of PLOS ONE papers.
- “We must be careful not to dismiss all work on [heart stem cells] because of one laboratory’s misconduct.”
- In a survey of Chinese graduate students, “Quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed disciplinary differences in knowledge of subtle plagiarism, stance on plagiarism caused by inadequate academic ability and due to perceived low risks, and non-condemnatory attitudes toward plagiarism.”
- “However, supporters of the populist right-wing party AfD tend to believe that the [replication] ‘crisis’ shows one cannot trust science, perhaps using it as an argument to discredit science.”
- “Dealing with inappropriate-, low-quality-, and other forms of challenging peer review, including hostile referees and inflammatory or confusing critiques.” A how-to.
- How can journals build trust in peer review? An interview with journal editor Mario Malički.
- “Medical journals must be as transparent as they require their authors to be,” says a BMJ article, with a look at retractions for failure to disclose conflicts of interest.
- “Are preprints a problem? 5 ways to improve the quality and credibility of preprints.”
- A look at echo chambers and self-referential peer review.
- The race to publish during the COVID-19 pandemic “also reveals abusive behaviors such as verbal insults and threatening towards juniors at every scientific level: laboratory members, graduate students and postdocs.”
- “Talking about failure normalizes it and proves it’s nothing to be ashamed of,” say two graduate students.
- “No future study is expected but it is believed that many researchers will tackle the problem and will write hundreds of papers the next several months just to satisfy their lust for paper writing.”
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