Weekend reads: More allegations about Stanford president; a plagiarizing rabbi; costly spreadsheet mistakes

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Paper with authorship posted for sale retracted over a year after Retraction Watch report
• Five years on, convicted transplant surgeon earns expressions of concern from Lancet
• Harvard surgeon has five papers pulled following internal investigation
• Exclusive: Prof stole former student’s identity to edit two journal special issues

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300. 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):

• “Internal review found ‘falsified data’ in Stanford President’s Alzheimer’s research, colleagues allege.” The president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, said The Stanford Daily report was “replete with falsehoods,” but the newspaper stood by its work.
• “German rabbi at center of ongoing scandal plagiarized his dissertation, newspaper finds.”
• “The long and costly history of spreadsheet mistakes.”
• “Investigation spotlights rise of for-profit ethics boards in research.”
• “Who did what: changing how science papers are written to detail author contributions.”
• Why retractions are on the rise: A conversation with our Ivan Oransky.
• “Seeking to circumvent the payment of APCs, a significant number of researchers affiliated with universities in high- and medium-income countries have sought partnerships that must be…negatively impacting the concept of good scientific practices.”
• “Quality peer review is mandatory for scientific journals: ethical constraints, computers, and progress of communication…”
• Open postpublication critique is “rare in psychology and may assist psychological science to correct itself.”
• “Journal declines to retract fish research paper despite fraud finding: Researcher’s university had found fabrication…”
• “Stop the peer-review treadmill. I want to get off: Faced with a deluge of papers, journal editors are struggling to find willing peer reviewers.”
• Japan’s Nagoya University has revoked one former student’s master’s and PhD for falsification and fabrication of data.
• Similarity detection software Turnitin says an AI detector it will make available in April is 97 percent accurate.
• “The gaming of citation and authorship in academic journals: a warning from medicine.”
• A tale of two journals’ decisions to retract and not to retract.
• “An over-reliance on publishing has left scientists prey to unscrupulous practices.”
• “Escaping ‘bibliometric coloniality’, ‘epistemic inequality.’”
• “Retracting my paper was painful. But it helped me grow as a scientist.”

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