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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- How to find evidence of paper mills using peer review comments
- Journal retracts a paper it published with a missing table after author fails to provide it
- Which takes longer to produce: An infant who can sit on his own, or a retraction?
- Publisher retracts 350 papers at once
- Authors whose Springer Nature book was retracted for plagiarism solicit chapters for another
- A U.S. federal science watchdog made just three findings of misconduct in 2021. We asked them why.
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 213. 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):
- “How Much Published Crap Will We Put Up With?”
- “A Randomized Approach to Awarding Grants.”
- “Problems in Science Publishing.” Episode four of a podcast featuring our Ivan Oransky and many others.
- “Elsevier’s work with fossil fuel companies ‘drags us towards disaster’, climate researcher says.”
- “DOJ ending Trump-era ‘China Initiative’; national security program fueled Asian ‘intolerance, bias.'”
- “Corruption in higher education is holding Indonesia back.”
- “If we are not already cyborg researchers, then the promise is that we soon will be.”
- “The giant plan to track diversity in research journals.”
- “Women outnumbered among editors of top journals in neuroscience, but not in autism.” And a Q&A with the study’s lead author.
- “Sci-Hub downloads show countries where pirate paper site is most used.”
- “Science proves to be messy on the fly.”
- “Russian invasion of Ukraine threatens hundreds of clinical trials.”
- “A practical decision tree to support editorial adjudication of submitted parallel cluster randomized controlled trials.”
- A French agency finds deviations in practices by hydroxychloroquine champion Didier Raoult.
- The Delhi High Court blocked the publication of a letter alleging plagiarism by an historian.
- A podcast interview of our Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky.
- “The C.D.C. Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects.”
- “Addressing the Continued Circulation of Retracted Research as a Design Problem.”
- “Eponyms in science: famed or framed?”
- “Why does it take so long to resolve publication ethics cases?” Renee Hoch, Senior Editor & Manager of the PLOS Publication Ethics Team, explains.
- “KRMS News would like to apologize to both our listeners and the Lodge for not reporting on both sides at the time of the story’s release.”
- “Fake Data Pretend:” An ode, via R.E.M.
- A former Fukuoka Dental College professor faked data and plagiarized. The college did not name the faculty member.
- “Just about every academic out there encounters academic misconduct at some point in their career, and knowing how to address it would be really helpful before it happens.”
- Sorry, scam journals, but you’ll have to try harder. At least harder than the “International Journal of Current Research” did.
- Another scam email: Pay $4,500 — down from $5,500! — to attend our Dubai workshop and we will nominate you for an honorary degree.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].