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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Pro-tip: When claiming to use a dataset, make sure it collects what you say it does
- Vice-chancellor of university in Pakistan loses paper for plagiarizing from a thesis
- Should a researcher who was no longer at an institution when a study began be a co-author?
- Prominent behavioral scientist’s paper earns an expression of concern
- Science Majorana paper earns an expression of concern
- ‘A very unfortunate event’: Paper on COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy retracted
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 147.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “[T]rust in science, although desirable in many ways, makes people vulnerable to pseudoscience.”
- Reviewer 2 strikes again? “Biogen pulled Aduhelm paper after JAMA demanded edits.”
- “The co-first authorship order was determined via the best of three rounds in Super Smash Bros.”
- “Dalit Scientists Face Barriers in India’s Top Science Institutes.”
- “Academic conclusions differ wildly even on same data, study finds.”
- “Research integrity is the cornerstone of good science.”
- A journal reaffirms its commitment to research integrity.
- “Six months: That’s how long it took materials scientist Amalie Trewartha to reclaim her work.”
- UK universities “should sue predatory publishers over tsunami of spam,” says Richard Kell, the former head of a research council there.
- In South Korea, only 40% of faculty members “are aware of what research misconduct is and the process of investigating it.”
- “U.S. Drops Visa Fraud Cases Against Five Chinese Researchers.”
- “When Ivan Oransky co-founded the scientific research watchdog blog and database Retraction Watch in 2010, he guessed there would be about 30 or 40 journal retractions per year.” There were 400.
- “A Caltech scientist has apologized for damaging a sacred site. Is it enough?”
- “I know it’s bad but I have been pressured into it”: QRPs among psychology students in Canada.
- A new edition of The College Administrator’s Survival Guide — which one dean called “a personal Bible” — is out.
- A JAMA Network Open paper looks at rates of retraction in cardiology.
- XKCD on flawed data.
- How many retractions of COVID-19 papers will the literature end up with?
- “We discuss ten errors in randomized experiments from real-world examples from the literature and outline best practices for their avoidance.”
- “Predatory Journals: A One Stop Shop For Resources.”
- A writer admits to plagiarism in a profile of Scarlett Johansson.
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“The co-first authorship order was determined via the best of three rounds in Super Smash Bros.” Further down on the author contributions. “Both YB and BZ contributed equally and have the right to list their name first in their CV.” Hopefully YB and BZ don’t make use of that “right”. Listing names in an order different from the academic record will only lead to trouble. Just because your PI thinks it’s ok doesn’t mean it is.