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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Mathematician withdraws preprint – 24 years after initial submission
- Penn says access to former Twitter employee’s thesis was ‘mistakenly closed off’ following Elon Musk tweets
- PLOS flags nearly 50 papers by controversial French COVID researcher for ethics concerns
- Cancer researcher banned from federal funding for faking data in nearly 400 images in 16 grant applications
- ‘I never asked or expected to be included as an author’: Retired Penn State prof has three retractions for manipulated peer review
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 279. 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):
- “Fringe race researchers looking for credibility have employed the effective strategy of publishing in both junk journals and — if they’re able to — in more respectable ones that are willing to give them room…”
- “Stanford President’s Research Draws Concern From Scientific Journals.”
- “When there are no consequences for misconduct: Parallels between politics and science.”
- “The rise and fall of peer review: Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that’s a great thing.”
- “AI paper mills and image generation require a co-ordinated response from academic publishers.”
- “Editors can’t spot talent. I’ve heard this joke before. It isn’t funny.”
- “[T]he average citation impact of a Scopus-indexed journal is never completely irrelevant to the quality of an article, even though it is never a strong indicator of article quality.”
- “Something odd jumped out at me. The interview quotations are too perfect. They struck me not to be authentic.”
- Why one researcher is “righting the wrongs of my early research and sharing my scientific data with local communities.”
- “Scientific journal investigating UMass hydrogen study after revelations of gas industry influence.”
- “We want to produce this emotional response that, basically, these things that make science give us wrong positive answers can happen to me as a scientist, and here’s how I can avoid that.”
- “How Gender Bias Worsened the Peer-Review Crisis.”
- “The battle against predatory academic journals continues.”
- “Conflict of Interest is increasingly being recognized as a public health concern.”
- A phantom study becomes a ghost paper.
- “Lots of bad science still gets published. Here’s how we can change that.”
- “Put differently, we found only a limited effect of retraction: retraction decreased citation frequency only by about 60%, as compared to non-retracted papers.”
- “Using co-creation methods for research integrity guideline development – How, what, why and when?”
- “Research Trends in Scientific Integrity.”
- “That scholarship often reflects conscious and unconscious biases has long been an open secret in academia.”
- Japan’s Kyushu University cancels a PhD earned by Hui Li in 2015 because an investigation found plagiarism.
- Chicago school “rescinds Ye’s honorary degree.”
- “Axios has removed this article because prior versions fell short of our editorial standards.”
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Angela Saini’s article is nothing but name calling. If you disagree with a scientific conclusion, the correct response is to conduct further research.
Better research has been done, again and again and again. People don’t publish or evangelize racism because of a thorough examination of the data, they start with racism. How many times was Rushton’s work rebutted? He never responded to these, unlike the norms of scholarship.
Consider starting here: https://img3.reoveme.com/m/a3946b0ab2471614.pdf
https://www.proquest.com/openview/3d103838b1dcad41972eb8f7c4f24ccb/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=30756
Saini’s article looked at the sources of funding for eugenicists and “race scientists” and their favored journals. If you disagree with the results of her research, the correct response is to conduct your own research into the sources of funding.
I presume the fringe race science junk journals are OpenPsych –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPsych
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/OpenPsych_pseudojournals
Emil Kirkegaard who set these bogus journals up is also associated with a fake university / diploma mill named GegenUni:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/GegenUni
He recently changed his legal name to William Engman since he is a perjuror in contempt of court who is being sued for unpaid legal costs. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard