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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Author objects to “irrelevant reviewers” as journal retracts four papers
- Meet the hijacked journal that keeps rising from the ashes
- Engineering researcher who cast blame on co-author will soon have 12 retractions
- Lawsuit prompts retraction of book chapter on outdated birth surgery
- Exclusive: Former associate dean and ‘highly cited researcher’ was demoted by university
- Do you use the Retraction Watch Database? We can really use your help.
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 249. 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):
- “Peer review is frustrating and flawed – here’s how we can fix it.”
- “France will require Ph.D.s to take a research ethics oath.”
- An “increasing number of adjectives and adverbs were used and the readability of scientific texts have decreased.”
- “Automated screening for fraud of all submitted trials is challenging due to the widely varying presentation of baseline tables.”
- “AI-enabled image fraud in scientific publications.”
- “Improving plagiarism detection in text document using hybrid weighted similarity.”
- “Scientists should get credit for correcting the literature.”
- The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology’s Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee will be holding a hearing on paper mills and research misconduct next week.
- “Handle plagiarism claims with care.”
- “Uber paid academics six-figure sums for research to feed to the media.”
- “Insights from full-text analyses of the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine.”
- “We find that the model identifies, with high prediction scores, citations that were likely added during the peer review process, and conversely identifies with low prediction scores citations that are known to represent causal knowledge transfer.”
- “[C]urrent cardiovascular science reports frequently do not provide sufficient materials, protocols, data, or analysis information to reproduce a study.”
- “Wall Street Journal Adds Editor’s Note Directly Refuting Paper’s Lead Editorial on Abortion Story.”
- Which papers about COVID-19 have been retracted faster — preprints, or peer-reviewed articles?
- “Gone but Not Forgotten: Retracted COVID-19 Papers Still Cited.”
- “Retractions aren’t a panacea for bad research.”
- “Look, impact factors are a crock of the proverbial…” A look at impact factors among autism journals.
- “Statistical robustness of RCTs in high-impact journals has improved, but was low across medical specialties.”
- “‘Sane in Insane Places,’ 50 Years Later.” What to do “about a famous—but flawed—research paper?”
- “Machiavellianism is associated with producing but not necessarily with falling for bullshit.”
- Two retractions from major publishers, in several acts with overlapping timelines.
- Publishing during the pandemic: “Expedited publishing or simply an early bird effect?”
- “Embattled spider biologist [Jonathan Pruitt] resigns [McMaster] university post.”
- “So how much of published science can be trusted, and how accurate are publicly expressed views of the honesty, or lack of it, of those who undertake scientific research?”
- “The Sarasota Herald-Tribune…was forced to issue an apology and retract a column defending the Proud Boys, a violent white nationalist group, following public outrage and a revelation that the author is married to a member of the extremist organization.”
- “Researchers talking about reviewer 2.” A cartoon.
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“Wall Street Journal Adds Editor’s Note Directly Refuting Paper’s Lead Editorial on Abortion Story.”
“The Sarasota Herald-Tribune…was forced to issue an apology and retract a column defending the Proud Boys, a violent white nationalist group, following public outrage and a revelation that the author is married to a member of the extremist organization.”
Excellent – I’m glad you Progressive propagandists are no longer even trying to hide your politicisation of this supposedly science-related site. Progressivism is a totalitarian cancer and it’s good that your readers can watch it slowly destroy this site.
I agree. Retraction Watch should stick to scientific retractions. If they want to get political, they should at least strive to be even-handed. But this site contains no coverage of two of the greatest lapses in journalistic coverage since the Iraq War, which has resulted in substantial editorial notes, corrections, retractions, etc.
1. False confirmation and attribution of the Steele dossier to Belarusian emigré Sergei Millian, when in fact it appears to have been a concoction of Steele himself after conversation with a Democratic operative. The WaPo made an unprecedented correction (essentially rewriting the entire article) when this was discovered:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/media-washington-post-steele-dossier/2021/11/12/f7c9b770-43d5-11ec-a88e-2aa4632af69b_story.html
2. The Hunter Biden laptop has now been acknowledged to be legitimate (i.e., not Russian disinformation) by Politico, the NYT, the WaPo, and the WSJ. When the New York Post originally reported on this story, Twitter & Facebook took the unprecedented step of banning all sharing of the Post’s story on their platforms. In the lead-up to an election. But the emails reported by the Post on Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and China (in which his father has been implicated) have now been confirmed as authentic:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-biden-laptop-data-examined/
Neither of these massive and consequential press errors is mentioned anywhere on RW.
Suggestion to RW editors: please stick to science.
Why are you defending Nazis and domestic terrorists?
One thing that might ameliorate the peer reviewing process would be fewer shenanigans by the publishers, who are acting out the fable of the goose that laid a golden egg.
The issues around peer review may be serious but they are, nonetheless, largely symptomatic. Predatory journals and predatory practices by historically reputable publishers put pressure on the system as a whole. What comes to mind here is the phrase “Please fix my horn – my brakes don’t work.”
I get requests that go straight to junk, some by auto-filter. Some requests are generated by scripts. There are other publishers that I refuse to work with in any capacity (meaning, I have to check who owns a journal before replying), but they get a reply explaining the policy.
If your gardener can’t keep up with the weeds, one solution might be to stop planting them.
P.S. There is never an “obligation” to do pro bono work for a wealthy client. Specific circumstances come into consideration. It’s complicated.
Just a quick correction for you request for help RE: RW DB:
“… and plant to continue to do so…”
Should probably be:
“… and plan to continue to do so…”
On the topic of “fixing peer review”, another case of peer-reviewers rejecting a paper while plagiarising it:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09544062221103075
An “increasing number of adjectives and adverbs were used and the readability of scientific texts have decreased.”
The strange multiplication of Buzzfeed-style prepositional phrases with no actual verbs as headlines.