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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Co-authors of paper on COVID-19 and jade amulets blame ‘the online press’ and social media for misinterpretation in retraction letter
- Two and a half years after findings of misconduct, stem cell researchers up to 19 retractions
- Author initiates “a legal process” against a journal and its publisher after a retraction, expressions of concern
- Publisher infected twice with the same anti-vaccine article
- Science retracts paper co-authored by high-profile scientist and former Dutch minister
- Nature Communications looking into paper on mentorship after strong negative reaction
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 39.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “A stem cell research group at the University of Louisville, Kentucky — famous for apparently discovering an exciting new class of stem cells — could be facing new troubles.”
- Two journals retract columns on a Toronto newborn’s death.
- “Journals and researchers are under fire for controversial studies using” facial-recognition technology.
- “When identifying only an association, some authors jumped to recommending acting on the findings as if motivated by the evidence presented.”
- “UCF accused ‘Dr. Coach’ of plagiarism and vowed to revoke his PhD. Now he’s fighting back.”
- “Data Sets Are Foundational to Research. Why Don’t We Cite Them?”
- “A look at citation activity of predatory marketing journals.”
- “We found that only 24% of the 266 Carnegie R1 and R2 Universities had publicly available authorship policies.”
- “Many details hidden in UMass corporate research agreements.”(Daily Hampshire Gazette).
- “Here’s a novel way to boost your resume: photoshop your own name onto a paper written by another research group.”
- “This article has been retracted by the authors, who have taken this decision after being contacted by Gene after serious concerns about the authenticity of the work were raised in an article published on the Science Integrity Digest blog.”
- How does the research quality of registered reports compare to the traditional publishing model? asks a preprint.
- “The Curse of Reviewer 89: An Interview with Filestage’s Niklas Dorn,” by Tim Vines on The Scholarly Kitchen.
- Which journal has won the third “This Image Is Fine” Award from Elisabeth Bik?”
- After allegations of plagiarism and new reports: [Germany’s] Family Minister Franziska Giffey (SPD) renounces her doctorate.” But she deserves a chance, says a commentator.
- “In light of Hong Jin Young’s plagiarism controversy, Chosun University states they will cancel her degree if the plagiarism is proven true.”
- In psychiatry, “[B]iomedical observations are often misrepresented in the scientific literature through various forms of data embellishment, publication biases favoring initial and positive studies, improper interpretations, and exaggerated conclusions.”
- “Why do bad methods persist in some academic disciplines, even when they have been clearly rejected in others?”
- A call for the retraction of a paper on “Deviant Sex Role Behaviors.” Background here.
- We approve of this tweet. (And we laughed.)
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