Weekend reads: MDMA papers retracted; COVID-19 vaccine paper retracted for the second time; who gets cited more?

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• What’s in a picture? Two decades of image manipulation awareness and action
• Former Maryland dept. chair with $19 million in grants faked data in 13 papers, feds say
• Exclusive: Publisher to retract article for excessively citing one researcher after Retraction Watch inquiry
• Authors retract quantum physics paper from Science after finding mistakes
• A scientist peer-reviewed an article that plagiarized his work. Then he saw it published elsewhere.

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 50,000 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):

• “Three MDMA therapy papers retracted over data integrity concerns.”
• A study claiming to link COVID-19 vaccines to deaths based on autopsy findings has been retracted for a second time. First time. More from the last author here.
• “Junior researchers ‘cited more if PhD supervisor is well known,’” a study finds. 
• Researchers find “‘Surname strategies’ help authors beat citation alphabet bias.”
• “Making Sense of the 2024 Journal Citation Reports,” from a Wolters Kluwer director.
• “Should We Publish Fewer Papers?”
• “My experience as a reviewer for MDPI.”
• “The UK launched a metascience unit. Will other countries follow suit?”
• “Why I’ve removed journal titles from the papers on my CV.”
• “Flood Of ‘Junk’: How AI Is Changing Scientific Publishing.”
• A look into “a thesis riddled with plagiarism” by “the media’s favorite philosopher of science.”
• “How paper mills are undermining scientific publishing“: a video interview.
• “Superconductivity paper spurs dispute as field reels from earlier scandal.” A link to our coverage of one retraction.
• “Nonsense correlations and how to avoid them.”
• “Has your paper been used to train an AI model? Almost certainly.”
• “Peer review will only do its job if referees are named and rated.”
• “Detecting Scientific Fraud Using Argument Mining.”
• 30% of medical postgraduates surveyed “had resorted to plagiarism at some point during their academic pursuits.”
• Researcher steps down from university position after having a second article removed.
• “The Rat Race for Research Funding Delays Scientific Progress.”
• “Trouble and strife deepen at famed U.S. particle physics lab.”

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