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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- 25,000: That’s how many retractions are now in the Retraction Watch Database
- A longtime whistleblower explains why he’s spent more than a decade trying to get a paper retracted
- Beam us up! Elsevier pulls 26 Covid-19 papers by researcher with a penchant for Star Trek
- Author, Author! Or perhaps we should say Fake Author, Fake Author!
- Paper about calculating ocean currents runs aground
- Paper claiming Muslim patients are “particularly sensitive” retracted
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 117.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “Were people really as brutal in their peer review reports as are usually claimed?”
- “Scandal over COVID vaccine trial at Peruvian universities prompts outrage.”
- “A homeopathy researcher is facing investigation after she was filmed admitting ‘unethical behaviour.'”
- A bill would let academics “refuse publishing the results of studies if the facts gathered are in conflict with their beliefs.”
- “Contrary to the idea of halo effects, our study shows weak and inconsistent evidence of country- or institution-related status bias in abstract ratings.”
- “In the discipline of archaeology, harassment is occurring at ‘epidemic rates,’ says Stanford scholar.”
- “It is plausible that many dissertations riddled with plagiarism were, in fact, produced by ghostwriters.”
- At a recent World Conference on Research Integrity, “19% of the 308 presenters preregistered their research.”
- “In most scientific fields, journals act as the main venues of peer review and publication, and editors have time to assign papers to appropriate reviewers using professional judgment.” But do they?
- A whistleblower has posted allegations of misconduct at Nanyang Technological University and the National University of Singapore. The universities deny these allegations.
- A professor recommended for demotion based on plagiarism charges has sued, saying some of the evidence was faked.
- “Servier found guilty of fraud, manslaughter in long-running case over deadly weight-loss pill.”
- “The potential value of rapid publication should be weighed against the potential harm of inadequate validation of the final output.”
- “How pandemic-driven preprints are driving open scrutiny of research.”
- “Why Learned Societies and Academic Publishers Can Benefit from Hiring PhDs.”
- “A Top Medical Journal Said ‘No Physician Is Racist.’ Now Scientists Are Boycotting.”
- At Florida State, a professor “known to prey on Asian female students was allowed to do so for 30 years.”
- “Do you obey public-access mandates? Google Scholar is watching.”
- “Essay mills ‘infiltrating university websites.'”
- “My cat Chester’s dynamical systems analysyyyyy7777777777777777y7is of the laser pointer and the red dot on the wall: correlation, causation, or SARS-Cov-2 hallucination?”
- “Prey tell, what makes a publisher predatory?”
- “How to safeguard online data collection against fraud.”
- “Let’s do better: public representations of COVID-19 science.”
- “A simple guide to ethical co-authorship.”
- “Always remember to remove comments if you are going to submit your article source file to a preprint server.”
- “A former major general has left his role as chief operating officer of a UK university after being jailed for fraud.”
- Nearly three-quarters of researchers surveyed in Iran had witnessed research misconduct in the past year, according to a preprint.
- “Today, of course, ‘That lie probably has circled the Earth several times before truth puts its boots on, because everybody has a platform now. The algorithms are built to expressly amplify the lie and make it reverberate.'”
- “Ageing wines in space? Sending dormant vines into space? Is this at all scientifically interesting?”
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I was puzzled by the item ‘A bill would let academics “refuse publishing the results of studies if the facts gathered are in conflict with their beliefs”,’ for two reasons. Firstly, although that is indeed what Newsweek said, I don’t see it in the text of the bill, which I gather has just been signed into law. Secondly, in what sense are academics, in the state of Arkansas or anywhere else, not currently legally free to refuse to publish facts they disagree with?
If it’s not in the text of the bill it’s a moot point, but it could be read as giving them a veto over their co-workers publishing.
I could not read all if the article you linked to with “Nearly three-quarters of researchers surveyed in Iran had witnessed research misconduct in the past year, according to a preprint”, but from the abstract it was clear that this should have said ‘nearly three quarters of respondents’, i.e. about one tenth of researchers.
Indeed, that’s an important distinction and the respondents could easily not be representative of the larger population of researchers, if only through the self-selection bias of having enough interest in the issue to finish the survey.
Not everyone is equally placed to witness misconduct, and who is sampled matters…