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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Ivermectin papers slapped with expressions of concern
- More than 100 of an anesthesiologist’s papers retracted
- KCL investigation finds misconduct in Lancet Neurology paper
- Philadelphia-area lung researcher up to six retractions
- Biotech’s ‘cell squeezing’ technology paper earns expression of concern
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 211. There are now more than 32,000 retractions in our database — which now powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, 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):
- “What they’re doing is sort of weaponizing any corrections or any retractions or any sort of doubt — the kind of skepticism you want — and turning it into why they’re right.”
- “In a victory for medical journals, Pacira loses a libel lawsuit over ‘faulty scientific research’ allegations.”
- “Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists misconstrued misinformation as a new problem, in terms of both nature and scope, even though empirical evidence for these assumptions is thin, at best.”
- “Therefore, more focus should be given by journals and their Twitter accounts to discredit all their retracted articles.”
- “Peer review will only improve if journals’ decisions are audited.”
- The FDA has denied a citizen petition demanding that Cassava Sciences halt simulfilam trials because the requests are not an appropriate subject for such a petition. Background on expressions of concern involved in this case.
- “Essential Elements Of Clinical Trial Sponsor Oversight For Mitigating Scientific Misconduct & Fraud.”
- “Times Higher Education is expanding, but what is it becoming?”
- “According to Kalichmann the practice of knowing and intentional research misconduct, while it certainly does happen, is likely much less common than questionable research practices.”
- “Research in medicine needs someone with the power to investigate and uncover misconduct by professionals and organisations who abuse people’s trust.”
- “Why a Crowd-Sourced Peer-Review System Would Be Good for Philosophy.”
- “The case for hard retraction.” A researcher says some papers should disappear completely.
- “Students use AI rewrite tool to beat plagiarism checks.” Sounds like a job for the Problematic Paper Screener.
- “While early studies expressed concern about the unusually large number of retractions, the retraction rate may eventually normalize over time.”
- During the pandemic, some researchers “were willing to modify norms to address social need and urgency.”
- “When is a paper published?”
- A co-author of a now-withdrawn paper on COVID-19 and ivermectin has distanced himself from it. For background, see our post.
- A review of a book on predatory publishing.
- “The fall of Eric Lander and the end of science’s ‘big ego’ era.”
- “Preprints and open peer review come of age.”
- “It is good to anticipate criticism but better to actually receive it.”
- “34 Harvard Professors Retract Support for Letter Questioning Results of Comaroff Investigations.”
- “Do You Know How Many Great Ideas and Findings Never Get Published?”
- A reminder: You can get free retraction alerts from Zotero, thanks to our partnership.
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