Weekend reads: The researcher who publishes a paper every two days; “are publishers learning from their mistakes?”; overcoming COVID-19 misinformation

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• A journal that took six years to retract a paper.
• A researcher who faked the names of co-authors at Duke and the University of Chicago.
• The retraction and replacement of a paper on chronic fatigue in children.
• The retraction of a paper on algebra because of questions about the “integrity of the mathematics.”
• The retraction of a 1974 paper, “Behavioral treatment of deviant sex‐role behaviors in a male child.”

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 37.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Mark Griffiths: the professor who publishes a paper every two days.” Earlier, Dorothy Bishop took a look at Griffiths’ oeuvre.
• “Are publishers learning from their mistakes?”
• “Despite this lack of clarity, it is argued consistently that males, and those who wrote in a language that is not their mother tongue, were more likely to plagiarise.” A look at plagiarism in dentistry.
• “Initiative pushes to make journal abstracts free to read in one place.”
• “There’s also the argument that the peer review process itself remains unvalidated.”
• “The need for speed has put a spotlight on the messiness of the scientific process, in which breakthroughs are rare and single studies are typically just starting points or contributions to an evolving body of knowledge.”
• “Here are a few ways academic dishonesty keeps me alert at work.”
• “Troubles escalate at Ecuador’s dream research university.”
• “The literature on academic misconduct has seen unprecedented growth over the past 20 years.”
• “Marine biologists clash on limits of research reproducibility.”
• “Here we argue that the emphasis on publication output and impact hinders progress in the fields of ecology and evolution as it disincentivises two fundamental practices: generating long-term datasets and sharing data.”
• “The Court finds that ‘leveling exorbitant settlement demands at nonprofits and public schools does not advance the purposes of the Copyright Act’ after the plaintiff demanded $25,000 for a single Twitter post to a community swim account followed by 44 people.”
• “Publish or perish: women in research call for an end to systemic discrimination.”
• “Our results lead us to conclude that access status accounts for little of the variability in the number of citations an article accumulates.”
• “[H]ow Trump’s COVID-19 coordinator undermined the world’s top health agency.”
• “Scientific Journals Are Denouncing Trump. That’s Normal.”
• In a survey of rheumatologists and other specialists mainly from India, Ukraine and Turkey, “only 18 (17%) perceived their local society journals as trustworthy.”
• A look at how often corrections, retractions, and expressions of concern appear on PubPeer.
• “Institutions can retool to make research more rigorous,” writes Ulrich Dirnagl.
• Paleontologists “were amused to find seemingly benign words blocked and replaced with asterisks during virtual sessions.”
• “We have read and understood BMJ policy on declaration of interests and declare that all three authors have been wrong about covid-19.” An honest footnote.
• “8 common problems with literature reviews and how to fix them.”
• “An analysis of retractions in neurosurgery and allied clinical and basic science specialties.”
• A way to look for data manipulation in trials of bioequivalent formulations of drugs.
• “In our 2008 article, we have misinterpreted the interaction effects. As a result, we overestimate gender inequality.” A study of peer review is corrected.
• “How hot are hot papers? The issue of prolificacy and self-citation stacking.”
• “Nelson Mandela University adjunct professor Christian Adendorff lifted chunks of text for a 2017 Ngqushwa Municipality policy document from the Namibian government — despite getting paid R600,000 to write it…” And: “Petition calls for NMU professor’s axing over plagiarism scandal.”
• “Research Integrity: Understanding our shared responsibility for a sustainable scholarly ecosystem.” A report from Clarivate.
• The U.S. Office of Research Integrity wants your input on ways to “foster research integrity and promote the responsible conduct of research.”
• A wine researcher sends a cease-and-desist letter.
• “The article is a semantic plagiarism of a paper that has already been published…”

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