Weekend reads: ‘What’s wrong with peer review?’; ‘how to catch a scientific fraud’; superconductor research falls apart

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• ‘A travesty’: A researcher found guilty of misconduct by federal U.S. government responds
• Exclusive: Editor caught plagiarizing resigns as more concerns emerge
• Exclusive: Whistleblower fired after raising concerns about journal articles on LinkedIn
• ‘Super Size Me’: What happened when marketing researchers ordered a double retraction?

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to over 375. There are more than 44,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains well over 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? Or The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

• “What’s Wrong With Peer Review?”
• “How to catch a scientific fraud.”
• “Nature retracts controversial superconductivity paper by embattled physicist.” It is Ranga Dias’ third retraction.
• “How a scientific ‘breakthrough’ fell apart amid allegations of plagiarism and fakery.”
• “Don’t overlook race and ethnicity: new guidelines urge change for psychology research.”
• “Sector leaders quizzed in Elsevier survey back shift to more holistic methods of evaluating scholarship.”
• “Burden of proof: combating inaccurate citation in biomedical literature.”
• “Considering average JIF values, its growth is proportional to the number of publications in the area and to its JIF value, leading to an inhomogeneous boost that preferentially benefits those journals with high JIF.”
• “Professor Graeber claims the institution fabricated misconduct allegations against him after he lodged a public interest disclosure (PID) in 2021 criticising management.”
• “Withdrawn medicines report ‘not suppressed.'”
• “Performance evaluation considering academic misconduct of China’s higher education institutions.”
• “Statistical analysis of research integrity construction in 466 Chinese universities with medical programs.”
• “Plagiarism is prevalent in COVID-19 publications.”
• “Results show that over the last four decades, abstracts have contained an increasing amount of valence-loaded scientific jargon, as previously observed in earlier studies.”
• “Our results show that Chinese PhD student significant pressures to publish in order to obtain their degree, with papers indexed in the Science Citation Index often a mandatory requirement for students to obtain their degree.”
• “We propose a new indicator for academic medical research: the “Free lunches” index (fl-index), computed from the sum of gifts from the industry.”
• “How big is science’s fake-paper problem?”
• “An analysis of functional relationships between systemic conditions and unethical behavior in German academia.
• “Impact or Perish, Gaming the Metrics and Goodhart’s Law.”
• “Scientists Are Scrutinizing Their Work With Francesca Gino. Here’s What They’ve Found So Far.”
• “Making wider use of available resources, such as the Retraction Watch database, and improving and standardizing the retraction notices may help add another important dimension to research appraisals.”
• “The relationship between scientific publishing retractions and democracy.”
• Teikyo University has found plagiarism by one of its professors.
• “‘ChatGPT detector’ catches AI-generated papers with unprecedented accuracy,” using “features of writing style to distinguish between human and AI authors.”
• “Isro chief Somanath withdraws publication of autobiography after controversy.”
• “Plagiarized Indiana archaeologist recognized after 90 years.”
• “A good mathematician was accused of selling many scientific research papers” and loses a key post.
• “Correction is courageous,” says Science editor-in-chief Holden Thorp.
• “Cross-HLA targeting of intracellular oncoproteins with peptide-centric CARs:” Another retraction from Nature.

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