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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- “The most horrific time of my career.” What do you do when you realize years of your published work is built on an error?
- “Confrontation is an important element of physics progress:” Paper on black holes retracted
- Springer Nature journal retracts BMI, honesty paper. The first author calls the move “deeply unfair.”
- Journal expresses concern over study of potential treatment for autism
- “There can be no justification for such studies”: Paper on artificial eyes for dogs earns expression of concern
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 75.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “Many scientists citing two scandalous COVID-19 papers ignore their retractions.”
- “Retracted Covid-19 papers and the levels of ‘citation pollution’: a preliminary analysis and directions for further research.”
- An epidemiologist who critiqued a JAMA Network Open paper on children and COVID-19 says a corrected version “has gone from an error-filled useless analysis to a slightly less error-filled useless analysis.”
- “Six AI tools programmed to automatically measure the rigour and reproducibility of COVID-19 preprints are reporting major gaps when it comes to how thorough, transparent, and accessible the information is.” Read the paper here.
- “How the Pandemic Fueled Scientific Discovery and Collaboration.” A Wall Street Journal podcast interviews our Adam Marcus.
- “Trump officials reassigned by White House after publishing controversial climate papers without approval.”
- “How can the Biden administration reduce scientific disinformation? Slow the high-pressure pace of scientific publishing.”
- “Under my alternative vision, research scientists would be told to publish one-third less and devote the extra time to volunteer refereeing of what they consider to be the most important online postings.”
- In 2021, “China will continue to struggle to evaluate its scientists’ work.”
- “But many in the biomedical community say the figures, published today in Scientific Reports, are a gross overestimation, and that the study itself is deeply flawed.”
- “It hurts when a paper is rejected. It smarts when a reviewer says that a proposal is not sufficiently well thought through. But it is essential.”
- 426 retractions — including 179 from Elsevier journals — in our database are because publishers published the same papers twice.
- “Science indicators have been transformed into tokens of value or impact from ‘70s to ‘90s under the pressure of financial shifts.”
- “How prevalent bullying is in STEM? Who is most often targeted by bullies in science? Why aren’t bully supervisors held accountable more often?“
- An Austrian minister resigns following allegations of plagiarism in her thesis.
- Work by a newly installed Turkish rector is under scrutiny by journals for plagiarism.
- “Rise of the zombie ants: Why hype is creeping into scientific papers.” Gemma Conroy reports for Nature.
- “How has the frequency of ‘but see’ citations changed over time in ecology and evolution?”
- “What were Wiley’s motivations in acquiring Hindawi? How will Hindawi and its assets be managed once the acquisition is complete?”
- “How to (almost) fail a PhD: A personal account.”
- Who is more likely to be concerned about biases in ecological research — more junior scientists, or more senior researchers?
- “The current system creates a toxic ecosystem for research in which short-term individual interests and institutional goals override long-terms ones.”
- “Scholars have condemned ‘unlawful’ attempts to sell their PhD theses without permission on Amazon’s Kindle service.”
- “A Miami pediatrician has pleaded guilty to falsifying clinical trial data for an asthma medication for children…”
- What explains scientific misconduct?
- “[T]he uptake of preprint research by online media presents new challenges.”
- “Research misconduct and questionable research practices have been the subject of increasing attention in the past few years. But despite the rich body of research available, few empirical works also include the perspectives of non-researcher stakeholders.” Part 1 and Part 2.
- The New Yorker has “added an editor’s note saying three leading figures in the article made false claims.”
- “On Tuesday, the New York Times acknowledged errors in how it rolled out the retraction of key episodes in its 2018 ‘Caliphate’ podcast series.”
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