Weekend reads: “Hot-crazy matrix” paper; “comfort women” controversy; COVID-19 vaccine misinformation

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Eleven papers corrected after nutrition prof fails to disclose patent, company ties
• Leading evidence-based group blames pandemic for 9-month delay pulling flawed cancer review
• Editors decide not to retract microplastics article but “they feel that it is barely justified”
• 20 ways to spot the work of paper mills
• Why “good PhD students are worth gold!” A grad student finds an error

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 84.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

• “The Hot-Crazy Matrix paper.” Elisabeth Bik takes a look at a controversial paper that was subject to a retraction request last May.
• “Harvard Professor’s Paper Claiming ‘Comfort Women’ in Imperial Japan Were Voluntarily Employed Stokes International Controversy.”
• “Why did a German newspaper insist the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine was inefficacious for older people—without evidence?”
• “Keele University accepting funds for researcher who shared vaccine misinformation.” More background.
• “I remember going to Drew’s office and commenting that I didn’t understand why his work was not being published in Nature, Cell or Science, the leading basic science journals. His responses were that no one believed the data.”
• A researcher with 18 retractions — and who sued to prevent some of them — wants to be a university rector.
• “The widely used academic database Scopus hosts papers from more than 300 potentially ‘predatory’ journals that have questionable publishing practices, an analysis has found.”
• We apologize for missing this important retraction from a New England journal.
• “A ruling in Mann’s favor could have implications for anyone publishing smears based on falsehoods…”
• “Illicit centipede raises thorny question: Should journals have refused to publish a paper about it?”
• “Science’s strength and credibility does not come from being right, it comes from a relentless commitment to getting it right.”
• “COVID-19 has triggered a huge amount of research, but also a “deluge” of research waste.”
• “How the pandemic changed editorial peer review – and why we should wonder whether that’s desirable.”
• “How Scientometrics Became the Most Important Science for Researchers of All Specialties.”
• “A better approach for dealing with reproducibility and replicability in science.”
• More than 500 Elsevier journals “will now display the self-reported data of their editors’ gender.” (press release)
• “Scientific fraud or false claim? China confronts a research crisis.”
• “You’ve tweeted about your hot new paper! Don’t expect many clicks.”
• Nagoya University has found that a student — whom they do not name — falsified data.
• “Attitudes towards plagiarism among faculty members in Egypt: a cross-sectional study.”
• “Expanding Research Integrity: A Cultural-Practice Perspective“
• “In this study we document in detail how national‐level codes diverge on almost all aspects concerning research integrity—except for what constitutes egregious misconduct.”
• “A new continental platform for the open access publishing of journals, monographs and textbooks in Africa has been developed by South Africa’s University of Cape Town (UCT) through its library service.”
• “Assessing the climate for research ethics in labs: Development and validation of a brief measure.”
• “Medical Residencies Use Automatic Matching. Professorships Should, Too.”
• A citation request from 100 years ago — by Enrico Fermi.

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