Weekend reads: A bizarre turn in a plagiarism case; lessons of the ‘replication crisis’; special issues redux

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• In 1987, the NIH found a paper contained fake data. It was just retracted.
• ‘A big pain’: Professor up to six retractions for plagiarism and manipulated peer review
• ‘A display of extreme academic integrity’: A grad student who found a key error praises the original author
• Concussion researcher Paul McCrory earns nine more retractions, nearly 40 expressions of concern

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 265. There are more than 36,000 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):

• “Did someone fake nearly 400 pages to harm a professor?”
• “Science has been in a ‘replication crisis’ for a decade. Have we learned anything?”
• “What is going on in Hindawi special issues?”
• “Is it time to review, the review?” A five-part series in Cosmos.
• “Women researchers are cited less than men. Here’s why—and what can be done about it.”
• “Influence of the first-mover advantage on the gender disparities in physics citations.”
• Apparently, neither the peer reviewers nor the editors of this journal noticed that “there is no cell line named IM-9I.”
• “How to Make Experimental Treatment Less of a Gamble.”
• “Perhaps it is time to move on from the idea of journals being the keepers of scientific record.”
• “Princeton dismisses Kevin Kruse plagiarism allegations as ‘careless cutting and pasting.’”
• A journal has retracted a paper a month by a veterinary researcher a month after we reported they would do so.
• “Radiology researchers reported that scientific fraud and other undesirable practices such as publication bias and honorary authorship are relatively common.”
• “Scientific fraud, publication bias, and honorary authorship appear to be non-negligible practices in nuclear medicine.”
• “Moroccan Researchers Move Against Plagiarism After Study Finds It Widespread.”
• “Perceived publication pressure and research misconduct: should we be too bothered with a causal relationship?”
• “Why research integrity matters.”
• “Can AI-estimated article quality be used to rank scholarly documents?”
• “We survey approaches to prevent or discourage the manipulation of peer mechanisms.”
• “[H]ow a dispute over authorship can escalate into employment claims of…unfair dismissal, discrimination and whistleblowing.”
• “Why Peer Review Should Be More Like Meteorology.”
• “A Nobel prizewinner is six times more likely than someone less well known to get a thumbs-up for acceptance…”
• A critic has filed suit against hydroxychloroquine proponent Didier Raoult, alleging defamation.
• “The great convergence – Does increasing standardisation of journal articles limit intellectual creativity?”
• “Manuscripts ‘rejected’ for using rights retention statements.”
• “Why I think ending article-processing charges will save open access.”
• PubPeer turns ten.

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