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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Publisher slaps 60 papers in chemistry journal with expressions of concern
- Professor, former dean earns nearly 100 expressions of concern for citation manipulation
- Nature earns ire over lack of code availability for Google DeepMind protein folding paper
- Norway university committee recommends probe into the country’s most productive researcher
- Lack of permits, ‘selective’ data halt research at Swedish prosthetics research center
- How the Karolinska protected Paolo Macchiarini — and whistleblowers paid the price
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400.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):
- Spain’s “Ministry of Science requests an investigation into the new rector of the University of Salamanca, accused of “inflating his resume with cheating for years.” (Our earlier coverage from 2022.)
- “Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures: Wiley to shutter 19 more journals, some tainted by fraud.”
- “New chemistry journal folds after outcry over editor appointments.”
- “Federal officials suspend funding to EcoHealth Alliance, nonprofit entangled in COVID-19 origin debate.”
- “A wave of retractions is shaking physics.”
- “Star USC scientist faces scrutiny — retracted papers and a paused drug trial.”
- “Infected blood scandal: Experimented on and exploited – the Treloar’s School pupils who ‘lost everything.'”
- “Misspellings or ‘miscellings’—Non-verifiable and unknown cell lines in cancer research publications.” A guest post on the paper when it was a preprint.
- “The monetisation of citation data has led to the creation of rival publishing platforms and citation infrastructures.”
- “Integrity of the Scholarly Record (ISR): what do research institutions think?”
- “Legal threats, online trolls and low pay: the world of scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik.”
- “In a ‘publish or perish’ culture, some scientists may resort to questionable research practices or even fraud.”
- “Overall, just under one fifth of fully open access journals appear to be sponsored [aka diamond]. But their proportion and number have been decreasing.”
- An author of a retracted paper in Vietnam has resigned from council positions.
- “Nature staff hold unprecedented vote on industrial action.”
- Didier Raoult loses in court, ordered to pay 2,000 euros.
- “How, and why, to list preprints on your cv as a faculty job applicant.”
- “Guidance needed for using artificial intelligence to screen journal submissions for misconduct.”
- A study “found that Japanese medical researchers have actually tended to prioritise the journal IF and other quantitative indicators based on English-language publications in their research evaluation.”
- “Why English? Exploring Chinese early career returnee academics’ motivations for writing and publishing in English.”
- China’s Double First-Class University Initiative “generates enormous institutional tensions and strains.”
- “Retractions of papers by authors…[at institutions in Europe]…are increasing and are primarily due to research misconduct.”
- “Two sides of the same coin: a taxonomy of academic integrity and impropriety using intellectual virtues and vices.”
- “Without changes, thousands of academic papers could be sent to chatbots as reviewers without the knowledge of the authors, Cynthia Rudin warns.”
- “Researchers split on merits and pitfalls of AI in peer review, IOP Publishing survey finds.”
- “Stop ‘scienocide’ by injecting more passion into scientific ventures.”
- “Researchers get used to uncritical media coverage and then, all of a sudden, someone questions their…methods, or someone finds out their numbers don’t add up, they’re on Retraction Watch, and all of a sudden they’re screaming about terrorism…“
- “Journalists should report on lax oversight of research data, says data sleuth.”
- “I’m worried I’ve been contacted by a predatory publisher — how do I find out?”
- “The authors…are very grateful to the patients and mice for their contributions and sacrifices to this study.”
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].