Weekend reads: Harvard sued over retracted paper; ‘retraction with honor’; critiquing our fake peer review coverage

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Papers in Scientific Reports – and their expressions of concern – raise questions
• 250th COVID-19 retraction is for faked ethics approval
• Papers in Croce case with “blatantly obvious” problems still aren’t retracted after misconduct investigation: sleuth

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 250. 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):

• The American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) is suing Harvard for defamation over a retracted paper. Our coverage of the retraction from last year.
• “There should be no shame in an honest retraction, though there will always be regret.”
• “Indeed, without Retraction Watch’s interventions, it is unclear to us whether a fake review discourse would have emerged at all…” A critique of our coverage of fake peer reviews.
• “A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease.”
• OSU “found plagiarism and data falsification in work from” Carlo Croce’s lab.
• “Research integrity in the age of ‘fake news’: A challenge to the humanities.”
• A U.S. House subcommittee held a hearing on paper mills and research misconduct. Charter. Recording.
• “Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă Plagiarized His PhD Thesis. Among the Sources He Copied from – Two Other Doctorates.” 
• “Reproducibility in psychology ‘hinges on author role in replication.’”
• “Some researchers have decided to provide their products without financial compensation or expectations of authorship on resulting papers, prompting a flurry of new work.”
• “National Taiwan University launches probe into alleged plagiarism by DPP candidate.”
• Eight New York Times columnists reflect on getting things wrong.
• “Reporter Says Taliban Forced Her to Publicly Retract Accurate Articles.”
• What “indicators of research fraud that could be included in a screening tool to identify potentially problematic studies warranting closer scrutiny?”
• “[T]he microwave effect, in which pre-existing ideas and theories are “reheated” by more recent articles where little of the original idea is modified.”
• “I support the principle of trialling payment for peer review…” And “No to paid peer review.” A longstanding debate continues, this time in the pages of The Lancet.
• “Retracted articles, also in a pandemic?” A look at retracted COVID-19 papers.
• “The ascending trend in the retraction of publications in the 10 countries is worrying…”
• “Concerns were raised because of the unusual phrases used in the article (mind tumours, fluffy rationale).”
• A look at “artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled image fraud in scientific publications.”
• “Great citations: how to avoid referencing questionable evidence,” from Dmitry Malkov.
• “We regret the error as much as we regret making Neal Katyal sound more important than he is.”
• “Prominent medical writer’s typo warns sex with ‘me’ can lead to monkeypox.”

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].