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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Drug company withdraws court motion requesting retraction of papers critical of its painkiller
- “Yep, pretty slow”: Nutrition researchers lose six papers
- “We didn’t want to hurt them. We are polite”: When a retraction notice pulls punches
- Who owns your thesis data? We do, says one university, prompting retraction
- Clinical trial paper that made anemia drug look safer than it is will be retracted
- Authors yank ketamine study, hoping it will go away without attention, and journal obliges
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 125.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “The federal government tried to stop the publication of an academic paper that found it needed to drastically increase its spending on threatened Australian wildlife.”
- “Researchers are afraid to talk with the press, and some choose to shift their research areas. That will get much worse.”
- Want to meet the “mega” reviewers who review more than 100 manuscripts per year?
- “How the Centre for Journalology hopes to fix science.” What a center in Ottawa has been up to since 2014.
- “Academic journal is criticised for publishing special issue funded by tobacco industry.”
- “Our findings reveal that retracted articles may receive high attention from media and social media and that for popular articles, pre-retraction attention far outweighs post-retraction attention.”
- The president of the University of South Carolina has resigned after being found to have plagiarized in his commencement address.
- “[T]he interim results from the phase 3 trial of the Sputnik V vaccine again raise serious concerns.”
- A Northeastern professor leaves his post after scrutiny of dozens of his studies.
- “Two surnames, no hyphen: Claiming my identity as a Latin American scientist.”
- “Scholars should model the constructive criticism of ideas, not yell ‘you’re wrong’ during each other’s talks.”
- “I am well aware that this post won’t make me popular.” On “slow scholarship.”
- “So…when is it appropriate to retract?” An editor reflects.
- Legal threats and retractions: A 17-month saga.
- “Trends and Characteristics of Retracted Articles in the Biomedical Literature, 1971 to 2020.”
- “What’s peer review? 5 things you should know before covering research.”
- PLOS “will launch five new journals, and has introduced a new business model that aims to spread the cost of publishing more fairly.”
- “Promises during television interviews and praises at award ceremonies are not enough to safeguard the mental, physical and social health of researchers who speak out for the public good.”
- “Five Key Attributes of an Effective Title.”
- “Starting a Novel Software Journal within the Existing Scholarly Publishing Ecosystem: Technical and Social Lessons.”
- “Scientific Publishing Is a Joke.”
- “This paper suggests that scapegoating a few individuals for faulty science is a myopic approach to the more profound problem with peer‐review.”
- “European regulators urged to crack down on missing clinical trial results.”
- “HCMC university academics dismissed for plagiarism.”
- What can we learn from the Wakefield autism-vaccines retraction?
- A woman is charged “with conspiring to falsify clinical trial data” on an asthma drug.
- “Review articles cause ‘dramatic loss’ in citations for original research,” with exceptions.
- “Love DORA, Hate Rankings?”
- “Journals risk being used in place of regulators when they publish studies of novel vaccines that have not yet been authorised by a major regulator.”
- “What we got wrong: the Guardian’s worst errors of judgment over 200 years.”
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