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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- A journal editor said he’d retract a paper for plagiarism. A year later, it hasn’t happened.
- Exclusive: Thousands of papers misidentify microscopes, in possible sign of misconduct
- First-time scientific sleuths prompt nine retractions for neurosurgery group
- Researcher whose work was plagiarized haunted by impostor emails
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400.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):
- “[H]ow to stop bad science propagating” and “the papers that most heavily cite retracted studies,” both featuring the RW Database.
- “Second paper from lab of Nobel Prize winner to be retracted.”
- “Scientific fraud kills people. Should it be illegal?” More from 2015.
- “No more hunting for replication studies: crowdsourced database makes them easy to find.”
- A narrative review for “readers, authors, reviewers and editors about new approaches to publication ethics in the era of AI.”
- An “AI Scientist”…”does everything from reading the literature to writing and reviewing its own papers, but it has a limited range of applicability so far.”
- “AI firms must play fair when they use academic data in training.”
- “Rationalizing risk aversion in science: Why incentives to work hard clash with incentives to take risks.”
- “Is open access disrupting the journal business?” A researcher compares closed-access, open-access, and hybrid journals.
- “Almost half of Springer Nature’s research now open access.”
- “Anti-racism author accused of plagiarising ethnic minority academics.”
- “Another story about ‘flexible’ addresses in scientific papers”: A university director used different academic affiliations “to increase the number of international articles” on his resume.
- “When asked about a frequent co-author of his who was infamous for using the trick of falsifying his position to help schools cheat on university rankings, Professor Nguyen Xuan Hung replied that it was a ‘private matter‘.”
- “Errors and bias in marine conservation and fisheries literature: Their impact on policies and perceptions.”
- “Is There Such a Thing as a Scholarly Publishing Influencer?”
- Researchers find “traditional research models often don’t translate well to African settings, raising concerns about informed consent, community engagement, and benefit-sharing.”
- Researchers find that journal editors in Nepal have “not satisfactory” knowledge of plagiarism practices.
- Study finds “the attention scientific articles receive on Twitter may have more to do with human interaction and inclusion of visual content in the tweets, than the significance of or genuine interest towards the research results.”
- A commentary “offers guidance for social sciences authors, reviewers, and editors to follow” to meet ethical standards.
- “Check Retraction Watch, Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, journal website, PubPeer, social media.” A new paper proposes ways to assess the trustworthiness of clinical trials.
- Researchers find evidence of “widespread involvement” of questionable research practices in Denmark.
- Irfanullah: Clarivate delists journals at a “painfully slow pace” but had “enough resources to assess and accept 673 new journals” over 15 months.
- eLife’s language about assessments is “sometimes ambiguous or counterintuitive,” a study finds.
- “Science policy is increasingly talking about diamond open access. But what’s it all about?”
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].