Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Paper suggesting vitamin D might protect against COVID-19 earns an expression of concern
- Widely cited COVID-19-masks paper under scrutiny for inaccurate stat
- Dear journal: Here’s the information you left out of your retraction notice. You’re welcome.
- Following Retraction Watch and PubPeer posts, journal upgrades correction to a retraction
- Researchers publish the same COVID-19 paper three times
- Amulets may prevent COVID-19, says a paper in Elsevier journal. (They don’t.)
- Our bads: Publisher error leads to double retractions for psych researchers
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 37.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- Just in time for Halloween: “In a dark twist on the familiar aphorism – ‘publish or perish!’ – Karswell is also in the habit of actually doing something many scholars must have fantasised about: murdering peer reviewers who have advised academic journals and societies against his work.”
- “Sexism in science, research is challenged.”
- “Inside the Bizarre Publishing Ring That Linked 5G to Coronavirus.”
- “Although most retractions were appropriately handled by journals, the gravest issue was that median time to retraction for articles retracted for falsification/fabrication was nearly 5 years, earning close to 6800 post-retraction citations.”
- A look at research misconduct in Japan.
- “But the COVID-19 pandemic has placed a spotlight on the biomedical research process and amplified the adverse ramifications of poor public communication. We need to do better.”
- “Where Are The Self-Correcting Mechanisms In Science?”
- “Do journals and corporate sponsors back certain views in topics where disagreement prevails?”
- “A Lesson of the Pandemic: All Prints Should Be Preprints.”
- “Scientific fraud vs. financial fraud: is there a scientific equivalent of a ‘market crime‘?”
- “Based on these findings, this study concludes that the conventional marketing literature has been already contaminated by predatory marketing journals.”
- “On average, more recent papers have longer reference lists and cite more high Impact Factor papers and fewer non-journal publications.”
- “I wrote in my last editorial about the need to submit to and work for the most credible journals in our fields. I am going to add a requirement that manuscripts should only be submitted to journals that promote active discussion of published work.”
- “Physician Behind Surgisphere Scandal Switches Medical Licenses.”
- Studies of acute respiratory distress syndrome “with nonsignificant primary endpoints often included spin in the abstract.”
- “Fact or fantasy? Tales from the linguistic fringe.”
- “An increase in retractions of research publications is an issue for Medical Physics.”
- “Fake news and fake research: Why meta‐research matters more than ever.” Pediatricians weigh in.
- Could open science save lives during a pandemic? These authors say it could.
- What motivates researchers to perform pre-publication peer reviews?
- “We found that cues related to information about open science content and independent verification of author claims were rated as highly important for judging preprint credibility, and peer views and author information were rated as less important.”
- A university in Japan has revoked a PhD for plagiarism.
- “Academic mobbing is even more damaging than you think,” says one academic.
- “Delete offensive language? Change recommendations? Some editors say it’s OK to alter peer reviews.”
- Ever wondered which research journals cite the most retracted work? An analysis from scite.ai.
- “Peer review can be an important filter, but it also misses a lot. I think the real mistake is treating any single study as definitive.” Why the hydroxychloroquine myth persists.
- “Most of us have the impression that it is rare for a paper to be retracted and that retractions are primarily due to honest mistakes. Retraction Watch has crushed that myth.”
- “We argue that in the Russian context, a plagiarized PhD thesis is likely to indicate that a governor both is inclined to dishonest behavior and possesses poor managerial capabilities…”
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].