Weekend reads: A fraudster is sentenced to prison; how another reinvented himself; RFK Jr.’s retraction, redux

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Plagiarism scandal engulfs high-profile academic in Latvia
• Journalism with impact: The work of Retraction Watch
• Financial advisor failed to disclose he had sued the organization his paper criticized
• In a Tipster’s Note, a View of Science Publishing’s Achilles Heel
• ‘Deplorable’: Imaging journal to retract nearly 80 papers for compromised peer review
• Paper retracted more than eight months after author admitted to plagiarism

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300. There are now 41,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains 200 titles. 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):

• Paolo Macchiarini is sentenced to prison in Sweden for harming patients.
• “How a Scientific Fraud Reinvented Himself.”
• “I edited Kennedy’s error-ridden piece on a vaccine-autism link, which Salon later retracted.” From our archives, our 2011 coverage.
• “When Eye-Grabbing Results Just Don’t Pan Out.” Our Ivan Oransky on Science Friday.
• “Retractions Australia is an online resource dedicated to highlighting data regarding scientific retractions.”
• “A Dishonesty Expert Stands Accused of Fraud. Scholars Who Worked With Her Are Scrambling.”
• “The ethics of disclosing the use of artificial intelligence tools in writing scholarly manuscripts.”
• “‘Transformative’ journals get booted for switching to open access too slowly.”
• “IOP Publishing extends ‘inclusive’ peer-review policy.”
• “Journals’ predilection for data availability statements makes little difference to readers’ chances of getting their hands on the data.”
• “Bird’s-eye view of 21 million papers presents new way to visually analyze trends in science.”
• “Why Are UK Libraries Signing a Springer-Nature Deal They Don’t Seem to Like?”
• “ChatGPT’s ability to churn out mediocre papers should lead us to reappraise how research is carried out, reported and evaluated.”
• “First publisher abandons impractical elemental analysis standard as journals eye next move.”
• “Evolution of retracted publications in the medical sciences: Citations analysis, bibliometrics, and altmetrics trends.”
• “‘Quietly revolutionary’ plan would shake up the way U.K. universities are evaluated.”
• “Inverse publication reporting bias favouring null, negative results.”
• Why the increase in retractions is a good thing: An interview with our Ivan Oransky.
• “Cambridge professor remains in post despite plagiarism.”
• “Scientific fraud is rising, and automated systems won’t stop it. We need research detectives.”
• “To Sanitize the Master’s Corpus: On the Heidegger Hoax.”
• “Retract or be damned: a dangerous moment for science and the public.”
• “The trouble with circRNAs- are researchers going around in circles?”
• “In our sample, Zotero or EndNote would have identified 477 of the 500 retracted articles (95.4%).” Compare that to Google Scholar (34%) or Scopus (45%). Zotero and EndNote both integrate the Retraction Watch Database.

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].