Weekend reads: Chair leaves post during investigation of double-dipping allegations; geoscientist fined; prof claims another’s papers are hers

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Our co-founder Ivan Oransky presented oral evidence to the UK Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee on Wednesday. (His panel begins at time stamp 11:15. Coverage here.)
• AHA “regrets any confusion” and is reviewing meeting policies after outcry over Covid-19 vaccine abstract
• Engineering researcher who suddenly left postdoc has ninth paper retracted
• Authors retract, resubmit “very poorly conducted” meta-analysis of COVID-19 treatment
• Abstract linking COVID-19 vaccines to heart trouble risk earns expression of concern
• Journal retracts three papers — including two on COVID-19 — because ‘trainee editor’ committed misconduct
• Exclusive: Shell employee confesses to graduate student misdeeds

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 199. There are now more than 31,000 retractions in our database — which now powers retraction alerts in EndNote, Papers, and Zotero. 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):

• “LSU Health chair leaves post while under investigation, denies double-dipping.” The move follows reporting on allegations by Retraction Watch.
• “Top German geoscientist fined after facing charges of fraudulent expense claims.” More detail here.
• “‘Pay-to-participate’ autism stem-cells paper retracted.”
• Jonathan Pruitt “removed from Canada 150 Chairs website, funding halted.”
• A professor in Turkey has been claiming that another researcher’s work is hers because their names are similar.
• In the latest “hoax,” an education advocacy group does the fact-checking a journal didn’t.
• “[W]e develop methods of fabrication detection in biomedical research and show that machine learning can be used to detect fraud in large-scale omic experiments.”
• “Addressing the preprint dilemma.”
• “There is concern from within the health science community about systemic failings that might facilitate the production and spread of false or misleading science information.”
• “Former Temple U. Dean Found Guilty of Faking Data for National Rankings.”
• “Court Orders Immediate Reinstatement of Sacked [University of Ibadan] Lecturer.”
• “There are many examples of waste throughout the entire research process, from the questions being asked all the way through to the completeness and transparency of how the completed research is communicated and disseminated.”
• “International bodies find [Khawaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology Vice Chancellor] guilty of plagiarism.”
• “More transparency in the peer review process will help researchers to study peer review and improve its quality and fairness.”
• “University Dean’s article withdrawn over plagiarism claim.”
• “When your default position is disbelief and discounting, with your thumb always pressing on one side of the scale, you’re at risk of error.”
• “Can we recognize these, you might call them negative results, as important publications?”
• “Bullciting” and “obfusciting”: “Citations and the Ethics of Credit.”
• “Human geneticists curb use of the term ‘race’ in their papers.”
• “Plagiarism continues to plague public universities.”
• Paul Ginsparg of arXiv and Brian Nosek of the Center For Open Science win in two categories of the inaugural Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research.
• Elisabeth Bik awarded the John Maddox Prize “for standing up for science in the face of harassment, intimidation and lawsuits.”
• “Editors of [social sciences and humanities] journals preferred the benefits of anonymized peer review over open peer and acknowledged the power they hold in the publication process…”
• Leading breeder of beagles for research slammed by animal welfare inspectors.”
• A look at retractions in eye research, using the Retraction Watch Database.
• “Hence, journal reporting guidelines in themselves are not a quick fix to repair shortcomings in biomedical resource documentation...”
• “Concealing the identity of the principal investigator only partially closes the success gap between white and African American or Black researchers in NIH grant applications.”
• A skeptic debunks a reincarnation story.
• We’d like to hire a full-time editor in 2022, our Ivan Oransky explains in a letter to readers. Can you help us raise the funding?

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