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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Publisher retracts 14 papers by doctor who ran afoul of U.S. FDA for marketing supplements
- Nature Communications retracts much-criticized paper on mentorship
- Texas bone researcher faked data in Nature paper, says federal watchdog, as university rescinds professorships
- After legal threats from Herbalife, Elsevier journal retracts — and then removes — a paper
- ‘I thought I had messed up my experiment’: How a grad student discovered an error that might affect hundreds of papers
- ‘Misconduct on a grand and terrible scale’: Dental scientist up to 26 retractions
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 40.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “Memorial Sloan Kettering Gave Top Doctor $1.5 Million After He Was Forced to Resign Over Conflicts of Interest.”
- “The situation with retracted SRs is critical worldwide, and in particular in China.” A new preprint looks at how often systematic reviews have been retracted.
- “The Australian National University (ANU) was scrambling to “clarify” the marks of several hundred computing students, after an entire class was reportedly penalised because unidentified classmates had cheated on an assessment task.”
- “Retractions are on the rise in medical research, and we get to the bottom of it with Ivan Oransky, cofounder of RetractionWatch.com.” (The Carlat Psychiatry Report Podcast)
- “Whether you can make paper corrections should depend on the merit of the corrections, not the popularity of the blog where you complain about it.”
- “The University of North Sumatra (USU), located in the provincial capital of Medan, has opened an investigation into rector-elect Muryanto Amin for alleged plagiarism.”
- “The monitoring of websites such as Retraction Watch can be an important part of information surveillance,” say two officials in the U.S. Office of the Surgeon General.
- “The results of the unrestricted growth of science calculations show that the overall growth rate amounts to 4.02% with a doubling time of 16.8 years.” How publication rates grow.
- “People tend to have opinions on preprints and whether they help or hinder progress in research. I’m an unabashed preprint advocate.”
- Entertainer “Hong Jin Young has issued an apology after Chosun University came to the tentative conclusion of plagiarism regarding her master’s thesis.”
- “Retraction of COVID-19 Pharmacoepidemiology Research Could Have Been Avoided by Effective Use of Reporting Guidelines.”
- “Here is how I found myself as the first non-health professional Guest Editor of a prestigious peer-reviewed journal.”
- “There is a need for measures at different levels…to implement adequate protocols for the protection of patient’s rights regarding publication of their photographs in academic journals.”
- Of the total submissions, around 15% are plagiarised, he alleged. ‘However, this average ratio for India is high—approximately 20-25%.'”
- In a survey looking at publishing pressures among researchers, “3% admitted to scientific misconduct; 51% reported being were aware of colleagues’ scientific misconduct.”
- A painstakingly documented analysis of allegations of cheating in Minecraft.
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