Weekend reads: When scholars sue; why university rankings reward bad science; AI making its way into publishing

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Lawyers can foreclose on cancer researcher’s house for unpaid defamation suit bills, says judge
• Who are you, Dragan Rodriguez? Fifteen studies have the same fake author, sleuth finds

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 350. There are now 42,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in Edifix, 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):

• “When Scholars Sue Their Accusers: Francesca Gino is the latest. Such litigation rarely succeeds.”
• “How bibliometrics and school rankings reward unreliable science.”
• “Use of AI Is Seeping Into Academic Journals—and It’s Proving Difficult to Detect.”
• “What are LLMs bad at? Reference lists.”
• Using AI in peer review.”
• “Since living syntheses are especially susceptible to retractions, it is important to be notified of these through automated database alerts and regularly checking Retraction Watch.”
• “Guillaume Cabanac, the Sisyphus of the depollution of science.” A profile of a sleuth in Le Monde.
• “How Much Fraud Exists in Scientific Research & Publication.” Our Ivan Oransky on the radio in Colorado.
• “When investigators are given a pig in a poke: the case of the hijacked journals.”
• “Superconductor Scientist Faces Investigation as a Paper Is Retracted.”
• “Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s fall from grace could have happened to anyone.”
• “University of Sydney gambling research centre bankrolled by casinos is ‘troubling’, experts say.”
• “But who is responsible for upholding research integrity, mitigating misinformation, and increasing trust in science beyond individual researchers?”
• “These changes address the concerns about the paper’s integrity and therefore Science Advances has removed the Editorial Expression of Concern.”
• “A fake journal, algorithmic plagiarism and tricking Google Scholar: A case of a fake journal that passed Google Scholars’ bots and algorithm checking to become indexed.”
• “How can we make science more rigorous?”
• “The Corporate Capture of Open-Access Publishing.”
• “Journals need ‘diversity factor’ to improve representation.”
• “Systematic examination of post- and pre-citation of Indian-authored retracted papers.”
• “Science for sale? Why academic marketization is a problem and what sustainability research can do about it.”
• “The rise of a mega-journal in public health publishing.” And an update on how MDPI’s IJERPH has shrunk since being delisted.
• “Metascience Since 2012: A Personal History.”
• “Hong Kong graft-buster investigates Chinese University medical research centre over misconduct, misuse of funds.”
• “Predatory journals entrap unsuspecting scientists.” What universities can do.
• “Ray Blanchard’s Research is Bad. Maybe Retraction Bad?”
• “Every author as first author: We propose a new standard for writing author names on papers and in bibliographies, which places every author as a first author — superimposed.”

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].