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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Editor won’t investigate data concerns about paper linking anti-prostitution laws to increased rape
- Fired OSU postdoc charged with forgery admitted to faking data, feds say
- Exclusive: Researcher has “ceased employment” at university amid investigation and retraction
- “Truly devastating”: Four journals won’t get new Impact Factors this year because of citation shenanigans
- How can universities and journals better work together on research misconduct?
- Science paper marked with expression of concern after readers pointed out data issue
- BMJ journal retracts e-cigarette paper after authors disclose tobacco industry funding late in the process
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300.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):
- “Charles Darwin University PhD supervisor plagiarises students’ work, uses it in publications under his own name.”
- In a survey of Chinese medical postgraduates, “27.4% of the respondents considered the fabrication of some data or results to be acceptable.”
- “NIH spent $298,000 in 2021 on ethics training for Chinese scientists” for reasons including “publication fraud.”
- “‘I lose sleep at night’: Experts fight to expose science fraud in Australia.” Using our database.
- “Among Us: Fear of Exploitation, Suspiciousness, and Social Identity Predict Knowledge Hiding Among Researchers.”
- “Specialists offer seven tips for effectively sharing your data.”
- “Plain-speaking or rude? Row over ‘disparaging’ psychiatry paper.”
- “A DIY guide to starting your own journal.”
- “Breakthrough recognition for science publishing’s invisible co-reviewers.”
- “Artificial Intelligence–Generated Research in the Literature: Is It Real or Is It Fraud?”
- “Delivering on NIH data sharing requirements: avoiding Open Data in Appearance Only.”
- Psychological Science will retract two papers by Francesca Gino, the Harvard dishonesty research whose work has come under intense scrutiny.
- “The story of a paper being plagiarized and retracted over a year and a half.”
- “NSF Suspends 18 Awards, Receives Repayments Related to Foreign Ties, Research Misconduct.”
- “How Academic Fraudsters Get Away With It.”
- Is post-publication peer review with the intent to uncover potential misconduct “vigilantism or volunteerism?” the authors of a new paper ask.
- “A coda to the Wansink story.”
- “What does it mean to correct the scientific record? A case study of the JACS (2000-2023).”
- “Biology needs one journal, not 4,000, says Nobel prizewinner.”
- “The future of publishing: scientists need a greater say.”
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“Plain speaking” links to Lake Champaign hiking. Appears to be
this: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/global/2023/06/29/british-scholars-fight-over-psychiatry-paper
Fixed, thanks.
Regarding the coda on the Brian Wansink story (the blog post by Nick Brown): the Food and Brand Lab seems to have been part of the public (SUNY) side of Cornell. As a result, a lot of documents could be obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. That should enable anyone to obtain many documents that Cornell would otherwise keep private. I assume that RetractionWatch and others have already thought of this, so I wonder why some of the records of the investigation can’t be FOIAd.
Reading the headline “Biology needs one journal, not 4,000, says Nobel prizewinner.” (the article, unfortunately, is paywalled) in juxtaposition with “A DIY guide to starting your own journal.”, I was thinking that perhaps one of the greatest services those who are at the pinnacle of science — all those Nobel laureates out there — could do to science would be to start high-quality OA online journals for their respective fields. Journals like Collabra that are truly open, have an exemplary review process, and whose bona fides are bolstered by high-caliber names on the editorial boards and on the list of chief and associate editors. Imagine a world without paywalls for scientific publications (well, those that are still paywalled should be relabeled excludications or privatications or revenutications). What a wonderful world that would be!
Then again, we had International Journal of Theoretical Physics, once with Roger Penrose on its editorial board, and Applied Nanoscience, once edited by Fraser Stoddart.
Readers are invited to check the content to see if “exemplary peer-review process” could be an accurate representation of facts in each of the cases. RW database helps, too.
I wouldn’t start my own journal. The free community run OA projects I have seen around the place struggle or close after a few years. It doesn’t matter whether they’re technically competent publishers or doing rigorous peer review. It doesn’t matter that they have no APCs. It’s just that no one publishes there. Without submissions they can’t get on PubMed or an impact factor. Without PubMed, Scopus or a JIF they can’t get submissions. There are back doors to those things for major publishers who also have the marketing teams to make new journals work, but community OA doesn’t have either. So if you’re going to start a journal, make sure you are a Nobel prize winner and have 5 years of solid submissions lined up because then *maybe* you’ll get enough for the 2 years you need to start getting indexed.
That’s exactly why I think that Nobel laureates should throw their weight around. If anyone can get this done, then it’s someone of their caliber.