Weekend reads: Cash for error detection; problems with MDPI papers; retractions in abortion science

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Paper claiming ‘extensive’ harms of COVID-19 vaccines to be retracted
• How (not) to deal with missing data: An economist’s take on a controversial study
• Exclusive: Elsevier to retract paper by economist who failed to disclose data tinkering
• Science ‘Majorana’ particle paper earns another editor’s note as expert committee finds no misconduct
• Medical society takes millions from company that sued it for defamation – and lost

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 47,000 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):

• “Wanted: Scientific Errors. Cash Reward.”
• MDPI says “A total of 84 papers spanning 23 journals are potentially affected by templated reports and citation misconduct.”
• “Retracted studies the latest in a decadeslong abortion-science fight.”
• “Our findings reveal both national and disciplinary gaps in attention to reproducibility and replicability, aggravated by incentive misalignment and resource constraints.”
• “‘Exact replica’: Fort Hare prof at heart of plagiarism and predatory journal scandal.”
• “Competition among publishers and scientific journals for market dominance resulted in an increase in both the number of journals and the cost of publishing and accessing scientific papers.”
• “Duke’s 3-year fraud investigation into Dan Ariely has ended, and the star professor still has a job. Does he want it?”
• “Honorary authorship is highly prevalent in health sciences: systematic review and meta-analysis of surveys.”
• “At The Lancet, we are discussing how we can best strengthen trustworthiness screening of the research submitted to us.”
• Top “oncologist disputes junior scientist’s claims in lawsuit over research credit.”
• “Claudine Gay’s downfall is no victory for research integrity.”
• “Why Scientists Should Care About Society Publishing.”
• “Could AI Disrupt Peer Review?”
• “Amid high profits and falling wages, peer reviewers must be paid.”
• “Large Language Models for Scientific Publishing: Please, Do Not Make Them a Foe.”
• “Publication ethics in biomedical journals are receiving increasing attention.”
• “‘I should do what?’ Addressing research misconduct through values alignment.”
• A publisher silently removes an author who was alarmed to see her name on a paper.
• “Ambiguity in Ethical Standards: Global Versus Local Science in Explaining Academic Plagiarism.”
• “[T]his study suggests that the primary reason for the lower citation rates at the author level is women publishing fewer articles over their careers.”
• “Mistakes, fakes and a giant rat penis: why are so many science papers being retracted?” Our Ivan Oransky appears on the Guardian’s science podcast.
• “The wrong word for the job? The ethics of collecting data on ‘race’ in academic publishing.”
• “The Use of Artificial Intelligence in Writing Scientific Review Articles.”
• “‘Ethics is not a checkbox exercise.’ Bioinformatician Yves Moreau reacts to mass retraction of papers from China.”
• “Salami slicing and other kinds of… misconduct: A faux pas for the author, a disaster for science.”

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