Weekend reads: Major Alzheimer’s paper slated for retraction; research dog breeder pleads guilty; biomedical retractions quadruple

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• ‘A disturbing experience’: Postdoc fights to have work that plagiarized her thesis retracted
• A look at plagiarism at the Pontifical Gregorian University
• Veterinary journal retracts pet food company’s paper about copper in dog food
• MDPI backtracks on claim that a thesis can’t be plagiarized
• Climate paper retracted from Science over miscalculations
• Elsevier journal issues 73 expressions of concern for manipulated peer review

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 49,000 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):

• “Researchers plan to retract landmark Alzheimer’s paper.”
• “Breeder of research dogs pleads guilty to severe mistreatment in historic case.”
• Why “biomedical paper retractions have quadrupled in 20 years.”
• At a major cancer research conference, “Across all detectors, abstracts submitted in 2023 were significantly more likely to contain AI content than those in 2021.”
• “NISO’s Draft Revision of the Journal Article Version (JAV) Recommended Practice Now Open for Public Comment.”
• “Staff at Nature vote to strike in pay dispute.”
• “China’s research clout leads to growth in homegrown science publishing.”
• “Ranking of ‘world’s top scientists’: Too chaotic.”
• “Why AlphaFold 3 Needs to Be Open Source.”
• “Management of fraudulent participants in online research: Practical recommendations from a randomized controlled feasibility trial.”
• “Most researchers view questionable citation practices as negatively affecting their disciplines.”
• “The alarming rise of fake science: Fraudulent papers are flooding scientific journals.”
• “Columbia University disputes plagiarism claim against president.”
• “How to Write a Good Results Section.”
• “NIH-funded clinical trials often miss racial, gender diversity enrollment goals, report finds.”
• “Can open peer review improve uptake of preprints into policies?”
• “Research funded by the tobacco industry is still appearing” in medical journals.
• “Let authors decide on journals to publish in.”
• “‘2,000 Mules’ Retracted, Still Lodged in Grandma’s Brain.”
• “Disputed dark-matter claim to be tested by new lab in South Korea.”
• “Software that detects ‘tortured acronyms’ in research papers could help root out misconduct.”
• “Why Investigative Journalists Should Report on Lax Oversight and Fraud in Research Data.”
• “If you do research and don’t publish it, is it science?”
• “Accelerating scientific progress with preprints.”
• “This picture is fake”: Interview with Elisabeth Bik, “counterfeit hunter.” 
• “Most professors…reported contempt for peers who petition to retract papers on moral grounds.”
• “Will science ever reach an end?” 
• “Stanford University team apologises over claims they copied Chinese project for AI model.”
• “Hilarious correction in MDPI: ‘References number 1 to 118 have been removed in the first paragraph‘.”

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].