Weekend reads: Medical residents’ publish or perish problem; Alzheimer’s and predatory journals; brain biopsies set off alarm bells

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• A study of C-section scars – in women who hadn’t undergone the surgery
• Cureus retracts paper for plagiarism following Retraction Watch inquiries 
• Publisher retracts more than a dozen papers at once for likely paper mill activity

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 48,000 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 — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

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

• “It’s the same as paper mills that sell authorship.” Firms offering a fast track to publication target foreign applicants to U.S. medical residency programs.
• “Medical students lose in the research arms race for residency slots.”
• “There’s a dark underbelly in medical publishing which Bredesen has chosen to exploit, publishing in a section of the medical press that might be best described as ‘predatory journals.'” A problem in Alzheimer’s research.
• “Brain biopsies on ‘vulnerable’ patients at Mount Sinai set off alarm bells at FDA, documents show.”
• “Academic Fraud Is a Waste of Taxpayer Dollars: More transparency is needed to hold researchers to account,” says Bloomberg.
• “Gregory Poland, 68, editor in chief of the journal Vaccine, said that a loud whooshing sound in his ears had accompanied every moment since his first shot, but that his entreaties to colleagues at the [CDC] to explore the phenomenon…had led nowhere.”
• “Policing AI use by counting ‘telltale’ words is flawed and damaging.”
• “2022 psilocybin Nature Medicine study remains uncorrected.”
• “Research Quality and Dissemination” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• “Taking this into consideration, inappropriate authorship practices were
  commonly observed by respondents (52.7%)…”
• “Yale professor accuses Columbia prez Shafik of…‘intellectual theft’ in resurfaced 1994 research paper.”
• “Junk science is cited in abortion ban cases. Researchers are fighting the ‘fatally flawed’ work.”
• “So you’ve found research fraud. Now what?”
• “We find that the early release of a publication as a preprint correlates with a significant positive citation advantage of about 20.2% on average.”
• “‘Unheard Of’: Plagiarism Victims Sound Off As UCLA Remains Silent On Academic Scandal.”
• “We need to slow down scientific publishing,” says Elisabeth Bik.
• “Leiden University starts dismissal procedure for professor due to undesirable behavior.”
• “’Research paper mills’: A factory outlet for dubious research.”
• “How reliable is this research? Tool flags papers discussed on PubPeer.”
• “‘Bad actors’ dominate new chemistry journal’s editorial board, critics allege.”
• “Decentralized Peer Review in Open Science: A Mechanism Proposal.”
• “Are Researchers Citing Their Data? A Case Study from The U.S. Geological Survey.”
• “Chinese virologist who was first to share COVID-19 genome sleeps on street after lab shuts.”
• Modibbo Adama University in Nigeria “Sacks Three Professors for Alleged Unethical Conducts.”
• Using the Retraction Watch Database, “we identified an additional 3,572 papers in our map that were not marked as retracted in PubMed but were in fact retracted.”

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, subscribe to our free daily digest or paid weekly update, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or add us to your RSS reader. If you find a retraction that’s not in The Retraction Watch Database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].