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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Elsevier retracts papers when it realizes one of the authors hid fact he was guest editor of issue
- UPenn prof retracts three papers for ‘substantive questions’
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 223. There are more than 33,000 retractions in our database — which 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):
- “Until actual science gets its house in order, hysterical worship of ‘The Science’ will remain exactly what it is today: an implausible posture that only emboldens those who would tear down America’s institutions.”
- Cover articles in Nature “actually result in a relative decrease of citations to their authors.”
- “Peru prosecutors to probe plagiarism claim against president.”
- “Exploitation in the name of biomedical innovation cannot be tolerated.”
- “Pursuing research relevance is important, but the risk is that it becomes a form of deference, co-option and control, says Matthew Flinders.”
- “Biologist accused of sexual harassment quits NYU job quest.”
- “The chief executive of plagiarism checker Ouriginal has defended the company’s buyout by rival Turnitin despite it handing the California technology giant a near-monopoly in the market.”
- “This is a fight between two distinguished academics and the University…over a Pig Model…”
- “‘Tainted kids,’ other odd phrases cropping up in autism studies.”
- “A Model Text Recycling Policy for Publishers.”
- One journal’s “commitment to rigorous, constructive and inclusive peer review.”
- “Rigged competitions and university funds used for private expenses” at University of Reggio Calabria.
- A newsletter’s “first official correction of a scientific journal article.”
- NBC News says “it had found instances of plagiarism in 11 articles.”
- “Downstream retraction of preprinted research in the life and medical sciences.”
- Google “has fired a researcher who questioned a paper it published.”
- “The rise of preprints: How COVID-19 has transformed the way we publish and report.”
- “China’s top research organisation has suspended its use of the country’s largest academic database…”
- A look at 102 retractions from Turkey in the PubMed database. Our database includes three times that many.
- Anna Abalkina “investigates illegal activities in the publishing industry” including hijacked journals.
- “Trolling Is Taking a Toll on Science Journalism.”
- The Trump Administration’s “China crackdown ‘hit US scientists’ research quality’” using citations as a proxy, says a study.
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To me at least, the cover vs. citation article is a clear case of correlation being confounded with causation and is bad science.
I strongly doubt that anybody knows what was on the cover of the issues that include the articles they’re citing.
Your first article links to the Washington Examiner, a conservative “news” site that launders right wing talking points by pretending to be a genuine news source. I would trust nothing that they say about science.
You should read the article then. It’s pretty good.
Quote from the article. Note that no sources were cited for this quote.
“Among the discipline’s gravest failures has been the collapse of implicit bias theory, which holds that closet racists will struggle to pair black and brown faces with words such as “good” in laboratory experiments. An obvious example of pseudo-scientific quackery, IBT was shown, in 2017, to suffer from “low test-retest reliability,” another way of saying that replicating results has proven to be impossible.”
Also the article includes many right-wing trigger words such as ‘leftist’.