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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Company’s Alzheimer’s treatment study earns a flag
- ‘A significant departure’: Former Kentucky researcher faked 28 figures in grant applications and papers, say Feds
- Science retracts coral reef recovery paper more than a year after a report on allegations in its own pages
- Doing the right thing: Harvard researchers retract Cell paper after work contradicts finding
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 254. 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):
- “[O]utrage at PhD student’s study featuring comics depicting underage sex.” The paper has been removed while the journal investigates.
- “One interesting publisher practice came to light…which is replacing (or converting) the retracted article with a retraction notice. This effectively erased the scholarly record and had no discernable impact on reducing post-retraction citations.”
- A postdoc “claims her position at UC San Diego was not renewed due to her unwillingness to falsify data.”
- “Plagiarism is prevalent in COVID19 related publications in infection journals among various quartiles.”
- “Journal of Finance Withdraws Article Following Karlstack Investigation.”
- The ‘Prince of panspermia’ is again trying to sue Springer Nature over a retraction.
- “How a scandal in spider biology upended researchers’ lives.” Fallout from the Pruitt case.
- “Pandemic impact on female publishing ‘smaller than thought.'” Study.
- “Procrastination and inconsistency: expressions of concern for publications with compromised integrity.”
- “You’re so Vain, You Probably Think This Article Should Have Cited You.”
- “Surgical publications: detecting and preventing fraud.”
- “Dhaka University claims Tk 1.1m in dues from plagiarism-tainted teacher Samia Rahman.”
- “Why do firms publish? A systematic literature review and a conceptual framework.”
- “Who games metrics and rankings?”
- A candidate for mayor of a Taiwanese city did plagiarize, National Taiwan University finds.
- “Introducing An Incomplete History of Research Ethics.”
- “Failure to retract fraudulent research: an open letter to the Principal of University College London.”
- “After a Retraction Demand Is Refused, What Then?” That and a fake website among US NSF cases.
- “Benchmarking Scientific Image Forgery Detectors.”
- Sleuth Nick Brown follows up on the Danielle Dixson case, a day after a retraction of one of her papers.
- “Measuring the effect of reviewers on manuscript change: A study on a sample of submissions to Royal Society journals (2006–2017).”
- “Exploring Scientific Misconduct in Morocco Based on an Analysis of Plagiarism Perception in a Cohort of 1,220 Researchers and Students.”
- A cancer researcher in India who had five retractions when we last wrote about him in 2019 is up to 11.
- In India, “Clinical trial registry ‘doesn’t exist,’ ‘ghost staff’ runs tests.”
- “From philanthropy to business: the economics of Royal Society journal publishing in the twentieth century.”
- “Research Papers Used to Have Style. What Happened?”
- “Article Processing Charges (APCs) and the new enclosure of research.”
- “Lois Cox of Don Franklin had praised the organization for the other items they provide and was not aware that they provided beer.” A retraction.
- Guess which Nobel Prize winner subscribes to Retraction Watch?
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The conclusions of the PLoS paper are interesting and in line with my own observations. Scientists of my generation tend to push back against traditional gender roles. American men my age tend to be more involved fathers and take a greater role (often equal – though maybe not quite for some families; come on, guys) in the domestic affairs of their families, so I expected men and women to be affected similarly for millenials and younger, at least within my demographic. That was the case in my own family. My wife (also a scientist) and I split the WFH + online school duties down the middle, each spending 2.5 work days per week at home with our kids. It was great to be home with them, but it had an adverse impact on both of our careers. We both lost funding, which may not have happened otherwise (or may have – who knows these days?). Just couldn’t get the grants in on time for a few cycles. Publication rate also dropped for both of us. We’ve recovered some, but nowhere near fully. It has been challenging.