Weekend reads: Russian co-authorship ban; predatory conferences; ‘Does peer review improve the statistical content of manuscripts?’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 260. There are more than 35,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNoteLibKeyPapers, 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):

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4 thoughts on “Weekend reads: Russian co-authorship ban; predatory conferences; ‘Does peer review improve the statistical content of manuscripts?’”

  1. Apparently I have to open an account to read the article on banning Russian co-authorship. Forget that. But I have to wonder what is served by explicitly politicizing science — perhaps the last refuge of diplomacy and trust in an increasingly polarized world. I coauthored over 60 papers with Russian collaborators in my research career, and since all of those papers were in the public domain, not one of them “gave Russia an advantage” in Cold War II. My collaborations did, however, give me some insights into Russian culture. How is that “unpatriotic”?

  2. The German research story, re Russian coauthorship? Ridiculous. Did we have people proposing such blanket bans on coauthorship with Soviet authors during the Cold War?

  3. At the moment I see no reference to the story other than the RP News site. DFG has not updated their overview page since March.
    https://www.dfg.de/en/service/press/reports/2022/220317_attack_ukraine/index.html

    RPN may have rewritten some version of this story
    https://www.dfg.de/en/service/press/reports/2022/220317_attack_ukraine/index.html
    with some poetic license. Or perhaps their article has an actual source, but there is nothing in the few lines displayed to the public that would suggest that.

  4. @GLC … you missed the update within your first link, so don’t go just by calendrical dates that are part of URLs. I quote:

    “(08.03.22) As a result of the Russian attack on Ukraine, the Deutsche Forschungs-
    gemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) is suspending its German-Russian cooperation activities. The DFG is aware of the consequences of these measures and at the same time deeply regrets them from the academic perspective. Below you will find information provided by the DFG on what to do in connection with German-Russian funding proposals and cooperation projects.”

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