Weekend reads: Automated peer review; ‘journal editors resign in protest;’ attention to retracted papers

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Retraction leads to review change at SAGE journal
• ‘This has been a nightmare’: One paper was retracted. The other still lingers.
• Journal run by new AMA president-elect caught in special issue scam
• Extensive correction adds to five flagged papers for UPenn professor
• An Elsevier book plagiarizes an abstract published by…Elsevier

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 237. There are more than 34,000 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):

• “Is the future of peer review automated?”
• “Journal Editors Resign in Protest.”
• “This is striking as we also find that retracted papers are pervasive across mediums, receiving more attention after publication than nonretracted papers…” Our Ivan Oransky comments on the study.
• “The retraction of health sciences articles did not decrease over time in Brazil and Portugal.”
• “The Replication Crisis and the Problem With Basic Science.”
• “Is Twitter-Famous Princeton Historian Kevin Kruse a Plagiarist?”
• “IHU: ANSM imposes severe sanctions on Didier Raoult’s institute.”
• “Disgraced Windpipe Surgeon Convicted In Sweden For Harming Patient.”
• “Fill in the Blank Leads to More Citations.” And a follow-up.
• A study retracted after “a report by the PRIMeR group out of the University of Sydney (Australia) led by Professor Jennifer Byrne.”
• “This article has been retracted at the request of the authors due to a mistakenly identifying the scale used as the Wong-Baker FACES Pain Scale, when in fact it was the Universal Pain Assessment Tool that was used.”
• “Let’s end the rocky marriage between academia and commercial publishers.”
• “Why Won’t Academia Let Go of ‘Publish or Perish’”?
• “Professor at Japan’s Univ. of Fukui accused of bogus peer review scheme.”
• “Peer reviewer duels.”
• “Reports from junior reviewers, women and reviewers from Western Europe are generally more developmental than those from senior, men and reviewers working in academic institutions outside Western regions.”
• “The peer-review system, which relies on unpaid volunteers, has long been stressed. COVID-19 is making it worse—a lot worse.”
• “If you see something, say something, because this does happen,” [science integrity sleuth Elisabeth] Bik cautioned.”
• “Renowned journal rejects papers that exclude African researchers.”
• Should a 1979 paper on ‘conversion therapy’ be retracted?
• The New York Academy of Medicine disavows a 1964 report on homosexuality.
• “Data irregularities surface for study of microRNAs in autism.”
• “A retracted paper highlights chemistry’s history of trying to avoid the expensive, toxic — but necessary — catalyst.” Our coverage from last year.
• “Sydney Morning Herald retracts Rebel Wilson article following backlash claiming the publication planned to ‘out’ her.”
• “Unfortunately retraction seems to be a sufficiently common outcome for a scientific paper that we as a research community need to take it more seriously…”
• NYU’s trustees have “approved the termination for cause of Chuanshu Huang, MD, PhD, a tenured faculty member” for failing “to disclose that he acted as a principal investigator and [co-PI] on outside research activities” on behalf of a university in China.
• “Is There an Epidemic of Research Fraud in Natural Medicine?” And more commentary.
• “Retraction Watch continues to be a valuable resource on retracted journal articles and hijacked journals.”

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, 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].