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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Paper about “sexual intent” of women wearing red retracted seven years after sleuths raised concerns (this was our 6,000th post)
- Buzzy Lancet long COVID paper under investigation for ‘data errors’
- Psychologists want to retract old papers about conversion therapy. Elsevier says no.
- ‘Just some eccentric guy in Australia’: The story of a non-retraction for plagiarism
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 277. There are more than 37,000 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):
- “Image manipulation in science is suddenly in the news. But these cases are hardly rare.” Our co-founders weigh in on allegations involving the president of Stanford.
- “Stanford president’s research under investigation for scientific misconduct.”
- “Is it time to pay peer reviewers?” Here’s what James Heathers said in 2020.
- “MDPI’s transparency had been welcome. It is now, unfortunately, following the standards set by the other publishing houses.” More on MDPI here.
- Last year, 20% of retractions were from paper mills. A new study.
- “Biased, wrong and counterfeited evidences published during the COVID-19 pandemic, a systematic review of retracted COVID-19 papers.”
- “NIH looks to slim down peer review in bid for equity.”
- “Best practices for considering retractions.”
- Wiley frets about bad publicity. (page 24)
- “Please, when you review a paper, do not simply create a laundry list of more experiments.”
- “”There is no reason for scientists to make an exclusive free assignment of their works to publishers.”
- JAXA “reported fabrication of data on a now-aborted… experiment…supervised by Japanese astronaut and doctor Satoshi Furukawa.”
- “Research fraud at Japan’s space agency a betrayal of public trust.”
- “This study showed the increasing numbers and higher productivity of female authors in academic radiology…”
- Meet the amateur sleuths finding plagiarism in academic work written by Taiwanese politicians.
- A whistleblower’s fall from grace in Spain.
- A new research integrity award. (Vaux is a member of our board of directors.)
- “Can Plants See? In the Wake of a Controversial Study, the Answer’s Still Unclear.”
- “Should a murderer be allowed to publish scientific papers?”
- “After publication, concerns were raised about the nature of the samples used in this study, in particular that the cytokine and antibodies are diluted beyond the point at which any active molecules are expected to be present.”
- “The Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera: A Story of Pirate Publishers, ISSN Hijacking and Fraudulent DOI Assignment.”
- A look at recent research integrity regulations in several Scandinavian countries.
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].