Weekend reads: “Passing the professor,” documented; “tortured phrases;” a “catastrophic failure of peer review”

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• When authors stop responding to requests for data, a journal retracts
• COVID-19 vaccine-myocarditis paper to be permanently removed: Elsevier
• Four years after anesthesiology society’s request, four articles remain unretracted
• Plagiarism of a thesis earns authors a retraction — and a two-year-publishing ban
• Exclusive: Urology researcher demoted after misconduct investigation — then becomes chair at another school
• Report by former Motherisk lab director of cocaine exposure in a child is subjected to an expression of concern

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 188. There are now more than 30,000 retractions in our database. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately?

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

• “A Professor Was Accused of Sexual Harassment and Resigned. At His Next University, It Happened Again.”
• “Joined together States:” Want some examples of “tortured phrases” in papers thanks to fake paper generators? Look no further than this PubPeer comment about this MDPI paper.
• “A catastrophic failure of peer review in obstetrics and gynaecology.” Nick Brown finds numerous issues in a set of papers. Background here and here.
• Hari Koul, a department chair at LSU New Orleans, is under investigation. The news came a day after we reported on Koul’s history at another campus.
• “Whitehead Institute seeks pause on prominent biologist’s defamation lawsuit.”
• “It’s not that, under such conditions, a few bad studies were bound to slip through the net. Rather, there is no net.”
• “Ivermectin for COVID-19: addressing potential bias and medical fraud.” Background here.
• “DNA barcoding paper retracted after its first author flags serious problems.”
• “Falsifying data at work: the new rector of Mendel University has weeks to clarify.”
• “The retraction process is inconsistent and often ambiguous, with more than half of retracted Covid-19 research articles remaining available, unmarked, from a wide range of online sources.”
• “No, it’s not a ‘witch hunt.'” Andrew Gelman reflects on a Retraction Watch post from earlier this year.
• “Although intellectual humility is presented as a widely accepted scientific norm, we argue that current research practice does not incentivize intellectual humility.”
• “How to reply to reviewers’ comments.”
• “Most Infant Formula Trials Lack Transparency.”
• “Male reviewers more than twice as likely as females to voluntarily identify themselves, and signed reviews substantially less critical of authors, analysis finds.”
• Luxembourg’s prime minister is accused of plagiarism in his thesis.
• “This digital-hygiene routine will protect your scholarship.”
• “Predatory publishers’ latest scam: bootlegged and rebranded papers.”
• “Fraudulent research thriving in Pakistan due to HEC’s apathy.”
• “It is time to start paying peer reviewers.”
• “Academic in-group bias in the top five economics journals.”
• “A contextualization of editorial misconduct in the library and information science academic information ecosystem.”
• “Breakthrough or bust? Claim of room-temperature superconductivity draws fire.”
• “In a sea of skeptics, this physician was one of fibromyalgia patients’ few true allies. Or was he?”

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