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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- An editor invited me to submit a commentary, then he rejected it – and named and blamed me in an editorial
- University of Fukui professor called out for fake peer review, loses “love hormone” paper
- Crystallography database flags nearly 1000 structures linked to a paper mill
- University’s story changes: It requested 33 retractions, not ‘several’
- Exclusive: OSU investigation finds dishonesty and “permissive culture of data manipulation” in cancer research lab
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 253. There are more than 35,000 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):
- Fifty years ago this week, the Associated Press exposed the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
- “Is Psychological Science Self-Correcting?”
- “The peer review system is broken. We asked academics how to fix it.”
- What journals demand of peer reviewers, vs. what they demand of themselves.
- “Research Reliability: Federal Actions Needed to Promote Stronger Research Practices.” A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
- “Support Europe’s bold vision for responsible research assessment.”
- “Stop misusing data when hiring academics.”
- “German Museum Will Have to Return Dinosaur Fossil to Brazil.” Earlier, a retraction.
- A look at retractions in dentistry. (The authors did not use the Retraction Watch Database and note that relying on PubMed is a limitation.)
- Lin Chih-chien, “candidate for mayor of [the Taiwanese city of] Taoyuan, denied accusations of plagiarism in his master’s thesis on Sunday morning.”
- “An Editor’s Journey Ends, but the Journal’s Mission Continues.” An editor in chief reflects on 30 years.
- “When A Science Journal Does The Right Thing.” Our coverage of the case from 2019.
- Biogen agrees to a $900 million settlement after being accused of “paying doctors kickbacks to prescribe multiple sclerosis drugs.”
- “Top Russian university officials’ predatory publishing record points to deeper malaise.”
- How should the BMJ “deal with published content that may be offensive or harmful?” Earlier: Us in WIRED in 2020.
- “Could machine learning fuel a reproducibility crisis in science?”
- “What an Alzheimer’s Controversy Reveals About the Pressures of Academia.”
- “Cassava Sciences faces U.S. criminal probe tied to Alzheimer’s drug,” Reuters reports.
- “Can peer review survive social science’s paradigm wars?”
- “Hold Animal Use Committees Accountable for Their Failures.”
- “The End of Journal Impact Factor Purgatory (and Numbers to the Thousandths).”
- “Reporting in the Margins of Error:” If you’re in New York on Sept. 16, come see a conversation between Angela Saini and our Ivan Oransky.
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].