Weekend reads: Paying for publication?; deeper looks at citation practices; preprints and retractions

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• ‘I needed a publication in order to submit my thesis’: Author admits to stealing a manuscript
• Science issues expression of concern nine months after one of its reporters uncovers potential misconduct
• Publisher cancels special issue honoring plagiarizing dean following Retraction Watch inquiries
• Preprint on discrimination against women reinstated by Elsevier server after removal for legal threats
• Journal retracts a paper, then publishes it in an issue 11 months later

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 211.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):

• An emeritus professor suggests paying for results — and per publication — instead of paying for plans.
• “Citation bias: questionable research practice or scientific misconduct?”
• “Citation counts reinforce the influence of highly cited papers and nudge us towards undervaluing those with fewer.”
• “Given the crucial importance of citation-based measures in science, the developed concept of giants may offer a useful new dimension in assessing scientific impact that goes beyond sheer citation counts.”
• How often do preprint servers note downstream retractions of published papers, and vice versa?
• Yes, preprints can sow misinformation. But so can journal articles and “impressive-looking homemade charts.”
• “We found that 17% of respondents (approximately 1 in 6) admitted to 1 or more forms of scientific misconduct and that 94% admitted to 1 or more QRPs relevant to quantitative research.”
• “The rate of retraction in the field of veterinary and animal health has increased by ~ 10-fold per 1000 articles since 1993, resulting primarily from increased publication misconduct, often by repeat offenders.”
• “We are overall heartened at the lack of any notable difference in Epidemiology’s editorial decisions or time to decision in relation to imputed or inferred gender.”
• “There is a relative imbalance of author voices in medical education.”
• “Analyzing sentiments in peer review reports: Evidence from two science funding agencies.”
• “[I]t was determined that at least 19 opinion pieces were plagiarized between 2020 and 2021. The name of the student is not being released, following the advice of the university‘s student affairs officials.”
• “ResearchGate responsible for illegal content on its site, German court rules.”
• “The reproducibility debate is an opportunity, not a crisis.”
• The Physician Sunshine Act “paradoxically, fuelled further commercial surveillance and marketing.”
• “Do tweets help autism research papers take flight?”
• “Most autism intervention studies lack data on race, ethnicity.”
• “It’s why people can cite retracted papers” or not retract them in the first place. “There are just no sanctions for any of that.”
• “Time to celebrate science’s ‘hidden’ contributors,” including “Street children in Africa and a site engineer at a marine-biology research station.”
• “If you don’t want to be in agony over the correctness of your papers, please and for real: find something else to do.”
• “Arkansas jail’s ivermectin experiments recall historical medical abuse of imprisoned minorities.”
• “Savarkar Biographer Vikram Sampath Accused of Plagiarism.”
• “Course corrections needed in peer review publication process.”
• “The State of the Version of Record.”
• “The authors retract this Letter upon discovering structural misassignments in which compounds identified as unsaturated piperazines (6aa–6ai, 6bb–6fb) are actually [3.9]-bicyclic aziridines (Figure 1).”
• “On the Occasion of the Symposium ‘Scientometry, Citation, Plagiarism and Predatory in Scientific Publishing’, Sarajevo, 2021.”
• BrowZine and LibKey users learn when they come across retracted studies “in library services like databases and discovery platforms, or when the article is found searching open websites like PubMed and Wikipedia.”

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