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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- ‘Regrettably it took too long to investigate and retract this paper.’
- Congratulations! Your already-published article has just been rejected
- Antiviral: ‘TikTok Doc’ loses paper on faculty development over concerns about harassment suit
- How hijacked journals keep fooling one of the world’s leading databases
- Two Japanese universities revoke PhDs, one for plagiarism and one because of cell line contamination
- Reporter prompts corrections in Nature, New York Times after researcher fails to disclose ties to Cargill
- Elsevier retracts entire book that plagiarized heavily from Wikipedia
- Anesthesiology researcher guilty of misconduct in more than 140 papers: Investigation
- Imperial College London researcher fired for research misconduct
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 126.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “Gibberish papers still lurk in the scientific literature,” a new study reports. Several of the papers were retracted earlier this year.
- “Journals are retracting more and more papers because they’re not by the authors they claim to be.”
- “More than a decade ago, a prominent academic was exposed for having faked her Cherokee ancestry. Why has her career continued to thrive?”
- “Publishers grapple with an invisible foe as huge organised fraud hits scientific journals.” A look at paper mills in Chemistry World.
- “For the first time, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has expelled a member who had been found guilty of sexual harassment.”
- “Journals must stop blocking critical comments.”
- “The rising menace of scholarly black-market Challenges and solutions for improving research in low-and middle-income countries.”
- “Swiss misconduct code targets self-citation and authorship abuse.”
- “The open-access movement has spawned predatory journals that are proliferating, expanding, and damaging science.”
- “Why do scientists lie?”
- “A narrative review of fabrication of results in science.”
- “Few people realise that there’s no common standard for what must be disclosed and how far back, she explains, nor that disclosure is a two step process.”
- “‘Breach of Research Ethics’ in East Lansing Survey on Policing Perspectives.”
- “Senior leaders at the Environmental Protection Agency improperly meddled in the work of career scientists when reviewing the approval of certain pesticides in 2018…”
- “Unreliable social science research gets more attention than solid studies,” says a new study.
- “The global rise in academic authors reporting multiple institutional affiliations reflects the unanticipated influence of research assessment on academia.”
- “We conclude that the universities with a higher ranking tend to have a lower rate of retraction,” says a new study.
- “German politicians suffer higher degree of embarrassment from plagiarism than from sex scandals.”
- “Journal Citation Indicator. Just Another Tool in Clarivate’s Metrics Toolbox?”
- A letter on COVID-19 vaccines for children is retracted.
- “For Whose Benefit? Transparency in the development and procurement of COVID-19 vaccines.”
- “Retractions and post-retraction quotes in the COVID-19 infodemia: is the Academy spreading misinformation?”
- “Suborning science for profit: Monsanto, glyphosate, and private science research misconduct.”
- “Too often, the right-of-reply elicits a generic opinion piece that seems focused more on reputation-management than on science.”
- “Collusion Rings Threaten the Integrity of Computer Science Research,” argues Michael Littman. Earlier: The case that prompted the essay.
- “An investigation by the Higher Education Academy has found most plagiarism policies in universities in the UK have been extensively copied.” (satire)
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The last news item regarding “plagiarism policies in universities in the UK have been extensively copied” may have been satire, but in two separate, unpublished conference reports of studies carried out by a couple of my students, we reported text overlap in plagiarism policies from US academic institutions:
Kimball, T. M., & Roig, M. (March, 2010). Identical and near-identical text in academic institutions’ plagiarism policies. Psi Chi Poster presented at the 81st Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Brooklyn, NY.
Troutman, M. & Roig, M. (2013, March). Extensive similarities in academic institutions plagiarism policies. Poster paper presented at the 84th Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, New York City.
In the second paper, we wrote “We believe that these instances of text similarity suggest a deliberate act of (mis)appropriation of text from other policies without any form of attribution”.
Miguel, sorry if I am misunderstanding something, or if I am just asking a stupid question.
How do you see a “correct” attribution in a policy document? Is it always possible, let alone necessary?
Well, some documents allow a preamble, where preceding documents may be acknowledged, but I don’t think that is always the case.
Otherwise I am struggling to understand how the papers that you cite are not satire as well.
Elaphoglossum, anyone should be free to interpret anything as satire. But, you do raise an important question that I do not believe has been adequately addressed by relevant stakeholders and that is the extent –if any- to which traditional academic practices of citation and attribution should be applied, even if only informally, to nonacademic works, such as internal documents, policy statements, and other works produced by an academic institution. My own opinion is that whether such works require some form of attribution should depend on a number of factors, including the purpose of the work and, especially, the expectations of the intended audience. Here is an example: In the US, most institutional research misconduct policies are derived from the one created by the federal government’s Office of Science and Technology and my sense, based solely on casual reading of some, is that most such institutional policies acknowledge this fact either directly or indirectly, and rightly so and for a variety of reasons beyond ‘attributional’ etiquette. Well, given that the policies in question were about misappropriating the work of others and that the intended audience such policies is even larger than that of research misconduct policies, it seems to me that some form of attribution should have been included in those instances in which we found similar language. Admittedly, definitions and, especially, procedures for handling instances of cheating are, by tradition (?) very similar across certain tier universities (e.g., traditional honor code, no honor code), but It seems to me that any obvious borrowing from other policies, especially specific language, should be acknowledged somehow, though not necessarily with a formal citation. After all, doing so, would be consistent with the academic values that such policies are intended to convey.