Weekend reads: A plethora of misdeeds; big slowdown at several publishers; hydroxychloroquine paper retraction draws scrutiny

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400.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

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4 thoughts on “Weekend reads: A plethora of misdeeds; big slowdown at several publishers; hydroxychloroquine paper retraction draws scrutiny”

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

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