Weekend reads: Claudine Gay and what comes after; China cracking down again; ‘retracted papers and collateral damage’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Exclusive: MDPI journal undergoing reevaluation at Scopus, indexing on hold
• ‘We should have followed up’: Lancet journal retracts article on hearing aids and dementia after prodding
• Elsevier’s Scopus to continue indexing MDPI’s Sustainability after reevaluation

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to over 375. There are nearly 46,000 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):

• Harvard president Claudine Gay resigns.
• “A Brief Guide to How Colleges Adjudicate Plagiarism Cases.”
• “The Claudine Gay Omnishambles.”
• “Alleged Research Misconduct Can End College Presidencies. Are Search Committees Looking for It?”
• “The weaponisation of forensic research auditing will not resolve systemic research misconduct.”
• “The Problems Only Start With Plagiarism.”
• “Bill Ackman’s celebrity academic wife Neri Oxman’s dissertation is marred by plagiarism.”
• In China, “Universities look for misconduct in retracted papers.”
• “Academic paper based on Uyghur genetic data retracted over ethical concerns.” Earlier.
• “Interview: Retracted Papers and Collateral Damage.”
• “Ten Years later: Assessments of the integrity of publications from one research group with multiple retractions.”
• “To address these problems, in 2024, the Science family of journals is adopting the use of Proofig, an artificial intelligence (AI)–powered image-analysis tool, to detect altered images across all six of the journals.”
• “US project seeks standard way to communicate research retractions.”
• “Does open identity of peer reviewers positively relate to citations?”
• “What if It Didn’t Happen: Data Management and Avoiding Research Misconduct.”
• Paper on investigative journalism retracted for “evidence that this article was available for sale.”
• “Evading Open Science: The Black Box of Student Data Collection.”
• “A global exploratory comparison of country self-citations.”
• “Name this network: Addressing huge inconsistencies across studies.”
• “Australian academy wants stronger integrity watchdog,” saying recommended changes do not go far enough.
• “Major Medical Journal Reverses Itself On ‘Research Parasites’ As NIH Beefs Up Data Sharing Rules.”
• “Planned but ever published? A retrospective analysis of clinical prediction modelling studies registered on clinicaltrials.gov since 2000.”
• “Reasons of Iranian Researchers’ Articles Retractions: A Systematic Review.”
• “Watchdogs: More academic and scientific papers should be retracted, and more quickly.”

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