Weekend reads: COVID-19 issue pulled; an author announces a retraction; FDA sanctions a company for not publishing results

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Editor declines to correct paper with duplicated image after earlier study disappears
• Elsevier journal to retract widely debunked masks study whose author claimed a Stanford affiliation
• Journal retracts paper by ‘miracle doctor’ claiming life force kills cancer cells
• On the perils of scientific collaboration from thousands of miles away
• Mask study was “misleading” and misquotes citations, says Elsevier
• Paper partly funded by controversial stem cell company retracted

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 122.

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

• “Frontiers Pulls Special COVID-19 Issue After Content Dispute.”
• An author announces a retraction.
• The U.S. FDA took action against a company that hasn’t published its results. But it took years.
• “There is evidence that food industry actors try to shape science on nutrition and physical activity. But they are also involved in influencing the principles of scientific integrity.”
• A whistleblower describes her experience in a University of Wisconsin lab. (Password: Whistleblowing1!)
• “Few autism researchers control for the ‘litter effect’ — this needs to change.”
• The Guardian broke the embargo on a study of mantis shrimp.
• “Paying lip service to publication ethics: scientific publishing practices and the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World.”
• “Who pays when a graduate student gets hurt in a British or French lab?”
• “Dozens of mistakes identified in Naomi Wolf’s University of Oxford doctoral thesis raise challenging questions for UK postgraduate education and its examinations process, according to a historian.”
• “For the second time in a year, a professor at NYU’s Politics Department expressed unsubstantiated beliefs about race in America. Now he’s requesting a retraction.”
• “Fake data, paper mills, and their authors: The International Journal of Cancer reacts to this threat to scientific integrity.”
• A researcher in France who pushes for the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 harasses his critics online.
• A new document from the U.S. Office of Research integrity “fails to fulfill the historical purpose of the annual report,” says a onetime staffer.
• A journal in China said that ‘boiled chicken eggs can be turned into raw eggs and hatch into chickens through human superpowers.’” The author later resigned.
• “Big-name scientists surprised to find themselves on journal board,” Dennis Normile of Science reports.
• “Review failure index as the opposite reflection of the retraction rate. A proposal for a new journal metric index.”
• “It’s amazing how much you can learn from the children reviewers.” What one author “learned writing a science paper for a 10-year-old.”
• “Academics must stand up for their publishing rights: Be careful about what you give away in your excitement about signing a contract for a book.”
• “Sceptic communities should question their own biases toward peer review.”
• “Can tweets be used to detect problems early with scientific papers?”
• A journal slaps an expression of concern on a paper it said was the subject of a mistakenly published letter.
• A look at retractions in the Middle East.
• “When the Plagiarist Sends the DMCA Notice.” This happened to us in 2013, and we went to court.
• “Whilst the most popular tweets unapologetically used the h-index as an indicator of research performance, 28.5% of tweets were critical of its simplistic nature and others joked about it (8%).”
• “Do senior faculty members produce fewer research publications than their younger colleagues?”
• “How a fact check led to a rare retraction from Iran’s supreme leader.”
• XKCD describes all of the types of scientific papers.

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