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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- On COVID-19 PCR testing paper, “the criteria for a retraction of the article have not been fulfilled”
- Engineering professor up to nine retractions for image problems
- Litigious OSU professor loses appeal in federal defamation case
- Okinawa researcher suspended for faking data denies committing misconduct
- Mathematician ranked as Clarivate “highly cited researcher” has third paper retracted
- Okinawa university suspends researcher for six months following findings of plagiarism and faked data
- Researcher to overtake Diederik Stapel on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard, with 61
- Journal pulls two studies that listed an author without his permission
- Springer Nature to retract chapter on sign language critics call “unbelievably insulting”
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 83.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “A historian committed research misconduct when she claimed that a Jewish concentration camp prisoner had a lesbian affair with an SS guard, a university investigation has ruled.”
- “Nature is investigating if a 2018 article by QuTech researchers about majorana particles should be retracted.”
- “Our results reveal a subset of journals where a few authors, often members of the editorial board, were responsible for a disproportionate number of publications.”
- “While increasing awareness of text recycling has led to the proliferation of policies, journal editorials and scholarly articles addressing the practice, these documents tend to employ inconsistent terminology…”
- “Academic scholarly publishers may benefit from publishing research on specific issues important to different regions of the world in order to expand their audience and gain new potential resources.”
- “A Student Stole My Academic Work, Copied My Tattoos and Gave Talks Pretending To Be Me.”
- “Shocking lapses in scientific standards show why renewed scrutiny of existing literature and new anti-fraud measures are needed, says David A. Sanders.”
- “Unethical Practices in Research and Publishing: Evidence from Russia.” More here and here.
- “Changing Journal Impact Factor Rules Creates Unfair Playing Field For Some.”
- “From an experiment with 1668 participants, we find that both providing accuracy assessment and rationale reduce the sharing of false content.”
- “The ethics approval took 20 months on a trial which was meant to help terminally ill cancer patients. In the end we had to send the funding back.”
- “5 Things We Learned About Peer Review in 2020.”
- Is it time for a mass rebellion of peer reviewers? asks a former editor of the British Medical Journal.
- “We have unwittingly evolved a toxic scientific ecosystem; existing interdisciplinary theory may help us intelligently design a better one.”
- “A recent analysis that claimed no evidence of gender-based peer review outcomes fails to account for several factors.” And a response from the authors of the original study.
- Springer Nature has added an editor’s note to a plagiarizing article we wrote about last week.
- In which an author calls his critics “trolls.”
- “How willing are researchers, journals, universities, funding agencies willing to actually correct the record and actually talk about it?”
- “An automated tool is targeting an issue that has plagued science for decades: “retracted studies cited in newly published papers without acknowledgement that they have been pulled from the literature.”
- “A quick post after stumbling upon a paper that got retracted years ago, but the publisher isn’t going to tell you.”
- “Biased grant reviewers ‘should be put on notice.'”
- “In this respect the operation of the scientific record resembles libel laws, and the contrast in the application of libel laws in the UK and USA is illuminating.”
- “Are too many scientists studying Covid?”
- “Distortions, deviations and alternative facts: reliability in crystallography.”
- “The Coming Publication Apocalypse.”
- A look at retraction trends since 2012.
- A retraction in Fresh Fruit Portal suggests a COVID-19 story was rotten to the core.
- “Correction: A previous version of this story implied that a planet blows up in “The Empire Strikes Back.” No planets blow up in that particular Star Wars film. This story has been updated.”
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