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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Authors admit to stealing parts of a paper from a thesis on an unrelated subject
- Should residents and fellows be encouraged to publish systematic reviews and meta-analyses?
- How an ivermectin study that didn’t mention COVID-19 fell under scrutiny
- ‘My egregious delay’: Science journal takes more than three years to retract paper after university investigation
- Courage and correction: how editors handle – and mishandle – errors in their journals
- Two abstracts about unapproved heart technology retracted
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 207. There are now more than 32,000 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 — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “Academic fraud factories are booming, warns plagiarism sleuth.” And: Revealed: The inner workings of one such paper mill.
- “The Attack of Zombie Science: They look like scientific papers. But they’re distorting and killing science.”
- “We have a rule that nobody at Arcadia can publish in a journal.” A look at “Silicon Valley’s New Obsession.”
- “Why was a study about autism cited by a paper on plant beauty?”
- “A Visionary Without a Country.”
- “Prosecutors drop China Initiative case against MIT’s Gang Chen.”
- University of Kansas “diversity leader admits plagiarizing his campuswide message regarding MLK Day, says he was in a hurry.”
- “Locke’s team waited for a peer-review of their own experiment, the results of which were published Thursday in the American Journal of Transplantation.”
- “What can be done to improve research integrity?” And our written evidence for an inquiry by the UK’s House of Commons Science & Technology Committee.
- “Living Science: Authorship then and now.”
- “18 papers co-authored by ICMR ex-researcher flagged for ‘image manipulation’, 2nd case this month.”
- “British newspaper retracted advert for vaccine ‘crimes.’“
- “Should journals introduce new requirements for researchers reporting elemental analysis data?”
- “Medical discoveries have been shared at an unprecedented pace during the COVID-19 pandemic, but so have fraudulent studies, which has led to worries about scientific integrity.”
- “Covid-19: a provisional assessment of retractions of scientific articles” from France.
- Another ivermectin-COVID-19 retraction of a paper with a massive Altmetric score — undated until we asked Springer Nature about it.
- A correction of a correction. It’s not the first.
- “Which should concern me more — being asked to peer review papers about which I have no expertise, or seeing lousy papers on which I have expertise published?”
- “Are We Standing on Unreliable Shoulders? The Effect of Retracted Papers Citations on Previous and Subsequent Published Papers.”
- A “plea to publish less.”
- The upside of a retraction? Earning citations for your salami-sliced and duplicated papers that led to it.
- “Scientific journals must be alert to potential manipulation in citations and referencing.”
- An editor who paid attention to scientific integrity steps down after 20 years.
- “Leading Queensland cancer researcher Mark Smyth fabricated scientific data, review finds.”
- “How Physicians Became Scientists: The introduction of formal peer review to journals aided medical doctors in their quest to bring more scientific rigor to their field.”
- “An Appeal Court in the Lagos Judicial Division has dismissed a case of plagiarism” filed by a university against two of its lecturers.
- “Inside The New York Times’ crossword correction on coal.”
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Although I’m a fan of RW and I think it’s a net positive overall, could the RW founders write an article self-reflecting on their role in cancel culture and the damage they have done to scientific discourse?
Thanks.
What are you even talking about?
By reporting on cases where papers are cancelled for dubious reasons and maintaining a comments section where diverse viewpoints are presented, RW ensures that no one knows about cancelled papers and dissenting views are ruthlessly suppressed.
Succinctly put.
Pleaser define “cancel culture” in a coherent way that isn’t just barfing up talking points from assorting right-wing media outlets.
Good to see the unjust charges against Gang Chen dropped, but I hope he will be leaving America. The American empire is the greatest enemy humanity has ever seen, and science is no objection.