The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Journal to retract two articles more than six months after VA said they had fake images
- Exclusive: Editor resigns after he says publisher blocked criticism of decision to retract paper on gender dysphoria
- Faked data prompts retraction of Nature journal study claiming creation of a new form of carbon
- ‘The PubPeer conundrum:’ One view of how universities can grapple with a ‘waterfall of data integrity concerns’
- Swiss medical association accused of forcing publishing subsidiary into insolvency
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400.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):
- “How many types of falsehoods might sully applications for research funds and the studies they support?” A plethora of misdeeds by U.S. NSF grantees.
- “The most notable outcome of the Hindawi fiasco, however, may prove to be not its impact on Wiley, but on MDPI and Frontiers.”
- “Now you see it, now you don’t: the strange world of disappearing Special Issues at MDPI.”
- “The withdrawal of a study estimating the number of victims of hydroxychloroquine, wrongly used against Covid-19, at 17,000, is causing serious concern among scientists.”
- “The survey revealed a significant lack of awareness among authors, with 78.7% unaware that they had cited retracted articles.”
- A look at “bibliometric coloniality.“
- “Peer Review Demystified: What, Why, and How.” Reflections after 100 reviews.
- “Springer Nature could launch IPO as soon as next week, sources say.”
- “Developing Surveys on Questionable Research Practices: Four Challenging Design Problems.”
- “In search of a theory associating honest citation with a higher/deeper level of understanding than (dishonest) plagiarism.”
- “Generative AI-assisted Peer Review in Medical Publications: Opportunities Or Trap.”
- “Getting Your Scholarly Papers Published: A Guide on How to Avoid the Top Ten Most Common Causes of Paper Rejection.”
- Uncovering a “pretendian” scholar — and what comes afterward.
- “Why research integrity matters to all of us.”
- Anna Abalkina, author of a new study and producer of the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, says more research is needed “to understand hijacked journals and their consequences for the scientific community.”
- How to figure out whether studies are underpowered — no programming required.
- “Good science, poor science,” a podcast episode with our Ivan Oransky.
- “The Far-Reaching Ripple Effects of a Discredited Cancer Study.” A link to our earlier coverage.
- “Researchers, who are under pressure to publish frequently, don’t think they have the time for it,” but here is “an ethical way forward for Indigenous microbiome research.”
- “Academic bullying is hidden in plain sight.”
- “The rise and rise of predatory journals and the risks to clinical practice, health and careers:” A declaration by journal editors.
- Faked data prompts retraction of Nature journal study claiming creation of a new form of carbon.
- “Anyone can start a papermill!” Nick Wise sleuths out a shady operation.
- “Drinking from the Firehose? Write More and Publish Less.”
- “How can I publish open access when I can’t afford the fees?”
- “From bench to bot: Does AI really make you a more efficient writer?”
- Many ChatGPT generated papers cover “applied, often controversial topics susceptible to disinformation,” sample finds.
- “AI Editing: Are We There Yet?”
- “The truth is that the research assessment reform movement needs scientometricians and scientometricians need research assessment reforms.”
- “6 main figs and 5 supplementary figs.”
- Dana-Farber CEO who was an author of now-retracted papers is stepping down.
- “AI tool achieves 94% accuracy in telling apart fake from real research papers.”
- “What Science and Nature are good for: causing paper cuts.”
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The title has an amusing typo on hydroxychloroquine
Fixed, thanks.
Belated comment, but it’s genuinely impressive that academic work to uncover “pretendian” fraud has led to new policies throughout Canada which will prevent fraud on a systemic, nationwide level.
I couldn’t read the second half of the article about scientists’ concerns on the retraction of the HCQ paper due to the paywall, so I don’t know if it addressed this, but multiple pubpeer comments as well as this preprint https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.18.24301464v1.full-text have pointed out that their estimate of 17k deaths is based on generalizing data based on a high dose (=>4800 mg/5 days) which the editors mention in their retraction statement: “2. The assumption that all patients that entered the clinic were being treated the same pharmacologically was incorrect.” In combination with issues with the Belgian dataset and the poor statistical significance of even the high dose excess mortality rate, I don’t think that issuing a correction would make sense in this case because most of the effects disappear with a more robust analysis.