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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Paper recommending vitamin D for COVID-19 retracted four years after expression of concern
- What a database of more than a thousand dismissive literature reviews can tell us
- Journal retracts redundant case study of same patient from different authors
- ‘All authors agree’ to retraction of Nature article linking microbial DNA to cancer
- Seventeen journals lose impact factors for suspected citation manipulation
- Authors – including a dean and a sleuth – correcting paper with duplicated image
- Finland group downgrades 60 journals
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400.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):
- “According to media reports, Zhu Jiapeng, a professor at Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, and his team were given 1 million yuan [$138,000] by the university for publishing a paper in Nature.”
- “Embattled Alzheimer’s Researcher Is Charged With Fraud.”
- “Researchers who buy authorships will be expelled from the [Peruvian] National System of Science, Technology and Innovation and fined up to 320 UIT.”
- Have retraction notices improved?
- “NISO Publishes Recommended Practice for the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC).”
- “The case of the Spanish university rector should prompt change to ranking system.”
- “How to Get Published in a Specialized Journal.”
- “Anyone who has no negative or null results to report may well be engaged in academic fraud…”
- “These findings emphasize the growing, yet diverse, role preprint servers play in scholarly communication and their differential impact across academic disciplines.”
- “Chatbots: To Cite Or Not To Cite?” (Part I) (Part II)
- “Oxford research integrity training tackles ‘publish or perish’ culture.”
- “[T]he rankings are intellectually incoherent, as pointed out by my institution. We can’t, as intellectuals, continue to support and promote rankings as they are.”
- “Are Preprints a Threat to the Credibility and Quality of Artificial Intelligence Literature in the ChatGPT Era?”
- “However, although a journal’s impact score strongly predicted citation counts for articles, we found that these counts were depressed when articles in those journals contained a geographic name.”
- “Publishing quantitative research: exploring the peer-review process and manuscript acceptance rates.”
- “Are the confidence scores of reviewers consistent with the review content?”
- “Peer review trends in six fisheries science journals.”
- “A widely cited study commits so many egregious statistical errors that it’s a poster child for junk science.”
- Should the government have “authority over research misconduct proceedings”?
- “Ethical principles and practices for using naturally occurring data.”
- Journals that published “racist ‘research’ articles should retract them,” say researchers. Our earlier coverage.
- “The Unnoticed Issue of Coercive Citation Behavior for Authors.”
- “Building trust in science is a social and technological project.”
- “Scientific journals have a credibility problem. Here’s how to fix it.”
- “NUJ warns of ‘major disruption’ to Nature if strikes continue.”
- “We work for Nature. This is why we’re striking.”
- “Call to boycott publisher after sexual misconduct book scrapped.”
- Two journals are issuing “corrections noting vaping researchers’ undisclosed ties to Juul.”
- A study finds “at least 10% of 2024 abstracts were processed” with large language models.
- “Associate Editors: Please Jump in the Mosh Pit.”
- “What Citations Tell Us.”
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If the currently highly cited IQ studies are ‘racist’, why isn’t anyone publishing rebuttal studies? Why does basic science not work in this case? How hard is it to spend a week proctoring IQ tests in a country and then summarize the results? This debate has been ongoing for 100 years, in all that time nobody had a week to spend in Angola?
My thought on that article was: if control groups don’t represent baselines, every medical study ever published is flawed. The twist of logic they use to argue against a guy, instead of conducting their own studies, is laughable.
Control Groups should represent baselines for what you’re studying. They may not represent a baseline for something completely different, which Lynn has allegedly used them as.
For example: if you’re studying the effects of malnutrition on intelligence you want a malnourished sample and a non-malnourished control. But the control may still not be typical.
Eg. If your malnourished sample are all rural, you’d choose a rural control group. But if there is an intelligence difference between rural and urban populations, your control will not be typical of the country as a whole. So if Lynn takes this sample as representative of the country would be distorting things.
And if, as claimed specifically to have left out the studies that show higher IQ, the outcome becomes inevitable.
What contribution are you actually making to any argument here? It is obvious that you are carrying a torch for your peculiar biases. To single out Angola without understanding the painful colonial past tell a lot about you.
“what if Africa never got colonized?”
>Ethiopia
“What if we freed the slaves and gave them their own country?
>Liberia
“What if Africans all the white people and ran their own country?”
>Haiti
“What if Africans seized all the property from white people?”
>Zimbabwe
Occam’s razor tells us something here that’s already clear as day.
Yes, good point. Angola had a much easier time than nations occupied by more evil empires like the British.
A few caveats about IQ testing:
All IQ tests are not the same; how well do their scores and interpretations correlate with each other?
Which test or even which test version was used in which oountry? What were the testing conditions?
Had that test shown to be valid and reliable for that country’s population?
Be aware of the risks when using an IQ test developed in America on non-Americans.
Understand the methods, difficulties, and risks in generalizing from small samples to large populations.
Not everyone who speaks English speaks the same version of English.
How much experience do test subjects (don’t call them testees) have with multiple choice tests?
Be aware of confounding variables; IQ tests require the ability to read and understand the test questions, and low IQ scores may have more to do with reading skills than one’s IQ. In the US in the early 20th century, IQ tests in English were given to immigrants who did not understand English, and they were classified as “feeble minded.”
Tell us you know nothing about the composition of IQ tests.