Weekend reads: Peak retraction?; another mass editorial board resignation; an autism paper retraction

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• A cardiac surgeon’s tortuous efforts – including three lawsuits – to get the scientific record corrected
• Saudi university dean has 20 retractions in two years
• Exclusive: Embattled dean accused of plagiarism in NSF report
• Exclusive: Physician in India who coauthored review with US profs is running a paper mill
• Exclusive: Cardiologist in Pakistan continued publishing after journal shown evidence he was running a paper mill

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400.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):

• Have we reached peak retraction? Our Ivan Oransky speaks to Peter Coy of The New York Times.
• In May 2023, 31 editors of the Sustainable Organisations section of Frontiers in Sustainability resigned.
• “Autism journal retracts speech-recognition paper, pauses special issue.”
• “Indigenous people sue over alleged Canadian secret medical experiment.”
• “Influential abortion-pill studies retracted: the science behind the decision.” More here.
• A Nobel prize winner earns an 11th retraction.
• Molecular Therapy decides to explain why a paper was retracted two years ago after the withdrawal appears on the front page of The New York Times.
• “The highest-profile research is heavily influenced by cultural forces and career incentives that are not necessarily aligned with the dispassionate pursuit of truth.”
• “Power relations would be more equitable if all leading disciplinary journals and books were published in multiple languages, says Simon Marginson.”
• “A new preprint from economist Patrick Vu argues that there’s a tension between correcting for pseudoreplication (i.e. non-independence of observations), and publication bias.”
• “Are scientists routinely using LLMs to write papers?”
• “From Singapore to Athens via Hong Kong: The Itinerary of Research Integrity from Scientific Research to Real-life Applications and Policy Making.”
• “Federal and university research misconduct regulations and policies may need to be revised to provide institutions with clearer guidance on how to deal with misconduct allegations against top officials.”
• “Eureka! How a Stanford study revealed the success of research failures.”
• “As US schools consider a [chocolate milk] ban, an old, sketchy study [by Brian Wansink] holds sway.”
• “Early COVID-19 research is riddled with poor methods and low-quality results − a problem for science the pandemic worsened but didn’t create.”
• “[G]eneticist and former eLife Editor-in-Chief Michael Eisen called on X for a retraction of the Nature paper…”
• “Fraudulent studies are undermining the reliability of systematic reviews – a study of the prevalence of problematic images in preclinical studies of depression.
• “Should we penalise scientific misconduct in rankings scores?”
• “Brisbane surgeon found to have used woman in human trial without written consent.”
• “[D]yslexia study marred by methodological and ethical problems, researchers say.”
• “Authorship and ChatGPT: a Conservative View.”
• “Bounded research ethicality: researchers rate themselves and their field as better than others at following good research practice.”
• “Penn Calls for Withdrawal of ORI’s Misconduct Proposed Reg; Many Commenters Also Critical.”
• “United2Act Against Paper Mills: Fighting Fraud that Corrupts the Scholarly Record.”
• “Institutional Ethics Committees Move Too Slowly, Critics Say.”
• “Charging authors for scientific publishing is fundamentally flawed.”
• “Research integrity and academic medicine: the pressure to publish and research misconduct.”
• Updates in a legal authorship dispute.
• A “sleuth taking on the widespread problem of research misconduct.”

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