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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- A tale of (3)2 retraction notices: On publishers, paper mill products, and the sleuths that find them
- White House official banned from publishing in PNAS following retraction
- Imagine learning you’re an author on a paper after it’s retracted for plagiarism
- ‘It’s time to devise a more efficient solution’: Science editor in chief wants to change the retraction process
- On second thought: journal reverses course on paper it agreed to retract last year
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 254.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):
- “Who Cares About Publication Integrity?”
- “A Watermark, and ‘Spidey Sense,’ Unmask a Forged Galileo Treasure.”
- “Authors publishing repeatedly in predatory journals: An analysis of Scopus articles.”
- “And the result is not very satisfying to people who fear that misconduct occurred. It happens over and over and over.”
- “Reviews of physical sciences research tend to be consistently detailed regardless of a journal’s impact factor, the study shows.”
- “China now insists the pandemic didn’t start within its borders. Its scientists are publishing a flurry of papers pointing the finger elsewhere.”
- Taiwan’s National Security Bureau “chief will not teach at [National Taiwan University] NTU in new semester amid plagiarism row.”
- “Taiwan president grilled over DPP candidate’s plagiarism scandal.”
- Taiwan People’s Party “lawmaker denies plagiarism accusation.”
- “Sony camera feature hopes to make digital images immune to secret manipulation.”
- “[W]hile progress has been made, there is still a significant mismatch between aspiration and the practice of open science in an important area of the COVID-19 literature.”
- A look at retractions in radiology.
- “Ghosts, brands, and influencers: Emergent trends in scientific authorship.”
- “Has Peer Review Created a Toxic Culture in Academia? Moving from ‘Battering’ to ‘Bettering’ in the Review of Academic Research.”
- “Promoting trust in research and researchers: How open science and research integrity are intertwined.”
- “The Struggles of a Ghanaian Researcher: Avoid Becoming the Prey of Predatory Publishers.”
- “‘The scandal isn’t what’s illegal, the scandal is what’s legal’: application of Kinsley’s rule to science.”
- A medical journal retracts a crossword. And the answer key, of course.
- “Do biomedical researchers differ in their perceptions of plagiarism across Europe?”
- Doubts about a study of weight loss in rats.
- “But even respectable journals have a little carnivorous dinosaur in them.”
- “Papers in high-impact journals ‘have more statistical errors,’” according to a new study.
- “Persistent plagiarism allegations: Kookmin University criticized for currying favor with new government.”
- “Why scientists might cheat (and how to prevent it).”
- The Australian Research Council (ARC) “bans preprints, again.”
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Thanks Retraction Watch for giving attention to the thoughtful article by Prof. Raymond De Vries “Why Scientist Might Cheat.”
Given that title refers to “Cheating,” it is useful to remember that at least 1% of scientist are also sociopaths. In that regard, in being people first, scientists are no different than lawyers, televangelists, and even members of congress. (Somewhere I recall that 7% of images submitted in insurance claims might be false, so image falsification is not unique to scientists.)
Yet discussions about research misconduct rarely take the opportunity to point out that science is virtually unique by being the only profession that is also interested in correcting the record. And revelations of misconduct are also the result of competition that Prof, De Vries right points out as a contributing factor..
Considering the partisan challenges to Science today, when reporting misconduct today one ought find a way to remind nonscientists that the some weaknesses of science also reveal its strength.