Weekend reads: ‘The surprising history of abstracts’; is peer review broken?; bee waggle dance data gets the wrong kind of buzz

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• The wolf in Scopus’ clothing: Another hijacked journal has indexed nearly 900 articles
• University president faces allegations of duplication, institution says no misconduct
• Author blames retraction on ‘Chinese censorship’
• ‘Rare’ criminal charges for data manipulation in Cassava case send a ‘powerful message’: lawyers
• Journal retracts letter to the editor about predatory journals for ‘legal concerns’

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400.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

• “The surprising history of abstracts.”
• “Peer review is essential for science. Unfortunately, it’s broken.”
• How one postdoc’s sleuthing while in graduate school “raises questions about bee waggle-dance data.”
• “This is how publishers distort the state of science.” And: ““In high-ranking journals, many things are black and white.”
• “All the Alzheimer’s Research We Didn’t Do.”
• “Research integrity in the era of artificial intelligence: Challenges and responses.”
• “Collusion to produce international scientific articles: Publishers speak up.” And more from Vietnam.
• “DFG reprimands researcher over plagiarism in funding bid.”
• “Recent trends: Retractions of articles in the oncology field.”
• “While conducting a coordinated set of repeat runs of human evaluation experiments in NLP, we discovered flaws in every single experiment we selected for inclusion via a systematic process.”
• “The map can be used to study issues ranging from gender bias to fraudulent research.”
• “Science Europe ‘renews focus’ on research integrity.”
• “Maintaining Data Integrity for Western Blotting Experiments.”
• “Science stands on shaky shoulders with research misconduct.”
• “Australian institutions urged to improve research culture.”
• How internet sleuths “lose trust in” the peer review process that fails “more often than it actually finds the problems.”
• Did you know? Wikipedia uses The Retraction Watch Database and Hijacked Journal Checker for references.
• “Integrity at Stake: Confronting ‘Publish or Perish’ in the Developing World and Emerging Economies.”
• “Two Senior Cassava Employees Subjects in Federal Probes After Former Advisor Indicted for Fraud.”
• “Enablers and Inhibitors of Research Integrity”: A look at research integrity in the UK.
• “Unethical Cancer Study Designs: Why Clinical Trials Aren’t Always Best for Patients.”
• “Didier Raoult loses his defamation case against Marseille hospital director.” Our previous Raoult coverage.
• COPE adds to its inappropriate image manipulation flowchart: Immediate retraction under certain conditions.
• “Research paper retraction stirs copper safety debate.” Our previous coverage.
• “Types of Retracted COVID-19 Articles Published in PubMed-Listed Journals.” Our up-to-date list.
• “Harvard’s Gino Report Reveals How A Dataset Was Altered.”
• “Designer Science – Why big brand journals harm research.”
• “When scientific citations go rogue: Uncovering ‘sneaked references.’” Our previous coverage. 
• “Journals and publishers facing issues from fraudulent sites,” a follow-up blog from Paul Cockburn and Clare Hooper.
• “Africa CDC calls for subsidised charges on scientific publications” to bolster African scientific findings and researchers.
• American Jewish Committee calls for retraction of Lancet article because of “unsubstantiated projected Gaza death toll.”
• “More is not better: the developing crisis of scientific publishing.”
• “Academic publishers must respond to reviewer fatigue.”
• “Article Titles Matter in Download and Citation Metrics”: a look into which titles can “draw the attention of readers.” 
• “The ethical implications of Elon Musk’s unorthodox approach to medical science.”
• “Digdowiseiso’s high publication rate might have continued uninterrupted if not for monitoring by Retraction Watch, a US-based website and database that tracks retractions in scholarly literature.”
• “I suggest that Dr. Bik abandon this approach of hunting for mistakes in our or other people’s work because it leads to unfounded accusations, but I suspect she and/or her assistants will find new arguments and tweet about extensively…”

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