Weekend reads: An authorship dispute goes to court; peer review mills; falsely accused of using ChatGPT to write a paper

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Indian paper mill disbands WhatsApp community following investigation
• ‘The sincerest form of flattery’: How a math professor discovered his work had been plagiarized
• Papers used by judge to justify abortion pill suspension retracted
• No data? No problem! Undisclosed tinkering in Excel behind economics paper
• Could ‘write once/read many’ discourage cheating?

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 46,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 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? What about 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):

• “A junior scientist. A prominent oncologist. Now, a clash at MD Anderson over who gets research credit.”
• “Review mills identified as a new form of peer-review fraud.”
• “‘Obviously ChatGPT’ — how reviewers accused me of scientific fraud.”
• “Accusation of data manipulation against Kiel University President Fulda.”
• “U.S. government requested inquiry into Alzheimer’s scientist over misconduct allegations.”
• “Something is off-base with this title: P esteems, statical significance and more slapdash stats.”
• “Famed climate scientist wins million-dollar verdict against right-wing bloggers.”
• In Norway, “Ministerial plagiarism cases spark heated public debate.”
• “Decades of research destroyed after freezer fails at Swedish university.”
• “Ambiguous editor-publisher relationships are a perfect target for paper mills.”
• “If authors must pay, most humanities scholarship will never be open access.”
• “ISR Roundtable 2023: The future of preserving the integrity of the scholarly record together.”
• “In These Nights.” An interview with our Ivan Oransky.
• “Why I left the editorial board of the prestigious scientific journal NeuroImage — and helped start something new.”
• “‘The situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point.”
• On the “citation of retracted papers,” and what to do about it.
• “Publishers’ and journals’ instructions to authors on use of generative artificial intelligence in academic and scientific publishing: bibliometric analysis.”
• “We found a major flaw in a scientific reagent used in thousands of neuroscience experiments — and we’re trying to fix it.”
• Researcher: NYU retaliated against him by looking into misconduct allegations.
• “Too often, an editor’s decisions are attacked as thoughtless output from an underling rather than insightful determinations from a true colleague.
• “Disciplining research misconduct.”
• “An (intellectually?) enriching opportunity for affiliation.”
• “Impact factor mania and publish-or-perish may have contributed to Dana-Farber retractions, experts say.”
• “Surge In Academic Retractions Should Put U.S. Scholars On Notice.”
• “AI could accelerate scientific fraud as well as progress.”
• A “Report on alcohol taxes got lost in COVID shuffle,” says the epidemiologist for the U.S. state of Oregon.
• “Whistleblowers should have possibility of their risks being federally covered.”
• “Structured Peer Review: Pilot results from 23 Elsevier Journals.”
• “The scientific periphery and new flows of knowledge: the case of regional preprint servers.”
• “If journals are to be purged of racist and sexist work, who decides where to draw the line?”
• A BMJ journal retracts a paper and thanks Anna Abalkina.
• “Make Publishing More Efficient And Equitable By Supporting A ‘Publish, Then Review’ Model.”
• “News Outlet Blames Photoshop for Making Australian Lawmaker’s Photo More Revealing.”

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