Weekend reads: A ‘star botanist’ has a retraction; the ‘bizarro world of law reviews’; AI and fake papers

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• ‘We authors paid a heavy price’: Journal retracts all 23 articles in special issue
• Food science journal retracts 10 papers for compromised peer review
• ‘A threat to the integrity of scientific publishing’: How often are retracted papers marked that way?
• Elsevier withdraws plagiarized paper after original author calls journal out on LinkedIn
• How you can help improve the visibility of retractions: Introducing NISO’s Recommended Practice for Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC)

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400.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

• A “star botanist” has a paper retracted two years after his university initially exonerated him. They’ve since changed their minds.
• “The bizarro world of law reviews”: the promise of legal scholarly publishing. And Brian Galle’s earlier piece on it. 
• “AI threatens scientific research with fake papers.”
• The Swiss National Science Foundation “has detected plagiarism in three books and imposed the appropriate sanctions.” If you know which researcher this is, please let us know.
• “Retracted Publications in Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery: What Mistakes Are Being Made?”
• “What To Do When Your Hypothesis Is Wrong? Publish!”
• “[W]e find that the percentage of promotional language in a grant proposal is associated with the grant’s probability of being funded, its estimated innovativeness, and its predicted levels of citation impact.”
• “Retractions in Scientific Literature:” Our Ivan Oransky appears on the Science Frontiers podcast.
• “Correcting the Literature and Reducing Litigation Risk.”
• “The study suggests that research on retracted literature would require querying more than one source…” (The study did not use the Retraction Watch Database for reasons they describe.)
• “No shame, no blame – How to make retractions work.” Our response.
• “(No) Impact Statement.” A look at the potential costs of the 2022 Nelson Memo on open access.
• “Structured peer review: pilot results from 23 Elsevier journals.”
• “Lies about academic projects are now matters of established fact within bespoke partisan realities.”
• “The ‘publish or perish’ principle dominating global academia since over two decades, however, intrinsically contributes to the publication of non-reproducible research outcomes also in chemistry.”
• “The oligopoly of academic publishers persists in exclusive database.”
• “The role of ChatGPT in developing systematic literature searches: an evidence summary.”
• “Institutional affiliation should not be a requirement for doing research.”
• “Coalition S confirms switch away from transformative journals.”
• “Beyond the journal: The future of scientific publishing.”
• “Imposter Participants Are Compromising Qualitative Research.” And earlier.
• Pakistan’s “COMSATS faces retractions over ‘research fraud.'”
• “Keep it a secret”: leaked documents suggest tobacco companies “continue to exploit science for profit.” 
• “Addressing researcher fraud: retrospective, real-time, and preventive strategies.”
• “‘Yes, but how much smaller?’ A simple observation about p-values in academic error detection.”
• “bioRxiv and Citations: Just Another Piece of Flawed Bibliometric Research?”
• “The Recent American Psychologist Article on Antisemitism”: a call for retraction from Roy Eidelson.
• “Should we be wary of the role of scientific publishers in Open Science?”
• “Protecting Participants Is Not the Top Priority in Clinical Research.”
• “A Retracted Stem Cell Study Reveals Science’s Shortcomings.” A link to our coverage.
• “Springer Nature pay dispute ends” after nearly two weeks. 
• “Some leading ecology journals rank surprisingly low in impact factor. What does that say about ecology as a scientific field?”
• “Western scientists more likely to get rejected papers published — and do it faster.”
• “The Misplaced Incentives in Academic Publishing.”
• “Peer reviewers: chill out and don’t let the power go to your head.”
• “The paper mill crisis is a five-alarm fire for science: what can librarians do about it?”
• “Preprints as tools to advance careers.”
• We were an odd choice to be sent this email. Extra points for a Frankenstein quote at the end of it.

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