Weekend reads: Elsevier journal under fire; a researcher’s PhD is revoked; peer review vs. ‘attention-economy hellscapes’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• US federal research watchdog gets new permanent director
• ‘I was fired up’: Psychiatrist effort prompts retraction of antidepressant treatment paper
• The Whack-a-Mole problem: Hijacked journal still being indexed in Scopus even after discovery
• How fishy email addresses tipped off a sleuth to a paper mill

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 290. There are more than 38,000 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):

• “Elsevier journal under fire for rejecting paper that didn’t cite enough of its old papers.”
• “How an Egyptian doctor won and lost a doctorate from Utrecht.” His retractions.
• “Yes, peer review sucks. But attention-economy hellscapes would be worse.”
• “In scholarly peer-review, discard bath water, keep baby.”
• “Metrics have their merits.”
• “Scientists, don’t let your writing resemble something you pulled out of your bot.”
• “Highly cited genetics studies found to contain sequence errors.”
• Prominent geneticist David Latchman earns another correction.
• Why there should be more retractions. A conversation with our Ivan Oransky.
• “Rosenhan revisited: successful scientific fraud.”
• “Red flags for paper mills need to go beyond the level of individual articles: a case study of Hindawi special issues.”
• “Overall, we find 2.3% of retracted research is policy cited.”
• “Here we describe our view of how amendments could and should work by drawing on the idea of an author-led version control system.”
• “We found that 80.2% of FCOI reports in our sample had a publication in which a conflicted Investigator served as an author, yet less than half (43.6%) of these publications contained disclosure statements acknowledging the known FCOI.“
• “Falsifying Attribution for a Bad Pun.”
• A university “distances itself from a review on [COVID-19 vaccine] adverse effects made by three of its researchers.”
• “Clarivate Adds Preprint Citation Index to the Web of Science.”
• “3.1% of corresponding authors declared having committed scientific fraud in the past 5 years.”
• Susan Zimmerman, a major figure in research integrity, has died.
• “Studies on COVID-19 and 5G radiation not government admission of link.”
• Men’s Health “publishes serious errors in first AI-generated health article.”

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].