Weekend reads: Fraud in gaming vs. fraud in science; ‘a scholarly screw-up of biblical proportions’; pregnant male rats

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• ‘A fig leaf that doesn’t quite cover up’: Commission says philosopher engaged in ‘unacknowledged borrowings’ but not plagiarism
• Britney Spears story prompts apology from Nature and author. Update.
• Journal retracts paper claiming two deaths from COVID-19 vaccination for every three prevented cases. Earlier, and earlier still.
• Ten journals denied 2020 Impact Factors because of excessive self-citation or “citation stacking”
• A scientist critic was sued, and won — but did not emerge unscathed. This is his story.
• How well do databases and journals indicate retractions? Hint: Inconsistently.

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 134.

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

• “If you haven’t heard about this historic low point for scientific publishing, I don’t blame you. Aside from the specialist website Retraction Watch, which exists to document these kinds of events, not one English-language media outlet covered it.”
• A famous fraud case, 40 years later: Why retractions in medicine are just the tip of the iceberg.
• “A Scholarly Screw-Up of Biblical Proportions.” Here’s what we wrote about this bizarre case in 2016.
• Prolific litigator Carlo Croce — who has also had 10 papers retracted — has lost a court appeal in a bid to be reinstated as a department chair at The Ohio State University.
• “Study that Impregnated Male Rats Stirs Controversy.”
• Has COVID-19 changed the world of retractions? An interview with our co-founder, Ivan Oransky.
• “However, [research misconduct] RM is standardly seen as an undertaking of individual scientists, not as something that could be committed by an organization such as a corporation or university.”
• A law firm has filed suit against a biotech whose CEO is facing scientific misconduct allegations.
• “Misleading Presentations of Clinical Trial Results with Dr Victor Montori.”
• “‘Adverse effects may be “reframed;’ trials may be inventively designed ad hoc to enhance the putative ‘efficacy’ of a new drug; ‘surrogate’ endpoints help avoid quantitative definition of outcomes of interest,” writes whistleblower Nancy Olivieri.
• “The total number of retracted [systematic reviews] SRs is increasing worldwide, in particular in China,” according to a newly published analysis.
• “When is ‘self-plagiarism’ OK? New guidelines offer researchers rules for recycling text.”
• A journal editor resigned “after his publisher vetoed a call to boycott Chinese science.”
• “Women are markedly underrepresented in leading authorship and editorial board positions in sport sciences, despite a ~0.5% annual increase in female first authorship in the past two decades.”
• “For the first time in oral health science, it was found that women show higher representation as first and last author positions in peer reviewed publications versus pre-prints.”‘
• “[R]edaction caused applications from White scientists to score worse but had no effect on scores for Black applications.”
• “How autism scientists are tackling brain imaging’s replication problem.”
• “In the originally published version of this manuscript, requested author amendments to Table 1 were inadvertently omitted prior to publishing, seriously undermining the accuracy of the article.”
• “Rising reliance on predatory publishing as research expands.”
• “Should I include studies from ‘predatory’ journals in a systematic review?” Some guidance for authors.
• “Research Integrity ‘Whistleblower’: Don’t Ignore Outsiders, Train Senior Investigators.”
• “A Saskatoon surgeon who publicly made claims concerning COVID-19 vaccines has been suspended…”
• “No study is ever flawless: A scoping review of common errors in biomedical manuscripts.”
• “Impact factor abandoned by Dutch university in hiring and promotion decisions.”
• “We find that, often, those who received false information simply fail to receive retractions because of social dynamics.”
• “Why ex post peer review encourages high-risk research while ex ante review discourages it.”
• A look at retractions in anesthesiology.
• “After completion of this study and submission of this report for publication, the prior study was retracted at the request of the authors…” Background here.

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