Weekend reads: Puberty blockers paper remains ‘unpublished because of politics;’ ‘What Drugmakers Did Not Tell Volunteers in Alzheimer’s Trials;’ ‘Ginger Rogers science’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Reflecting on research misconduct: What’s next for the watcher community?
• Young employee’s death puts workplace culture in spotlight at publisher MDPI
• Cambridge researcher pulls Cell paper five years after Nature, Science retractions
• eLife latest in string of major journals put on hold from Web of Science

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400.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

• “U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says.”
• “What Drugmakers Did Not Tell Volunteers in Alzheimer’s Trials.”
• “Progressives should worry more about their favorite scientific findings…and pay more attention to Ginger Rogers science,” says Paul Bloom.
• “After extracting 130 million hours from researchers every year to do peer reviewing for us, if we can’t ensure some basic gate-keeping, aren’t we overstating the importance of the peer-review process?”
• “Exposing predatory journals: anonymous sleuthing account goes public.”
• “Penn State bans scientist from doing research after investigation found ‘unreliable data.'” A link to our coverage. 
• “Yvonne Perrie: ‘Good research culture is about being able to learn and fail without judgment.’”
• “From bench to bedside: determining what drives academic citations in clinical trials.”
• “The future of research dissemination: Innovation in publishing formats.”
• “Plan S urged to keep going, expand and boost reforms.”
• “Why learned society publishers are struggling and what we can do about it.”
• “’Communicating at the Speed of Science’: Can preprints make science more accessible?“
• “Fraud in Medical Publications.”
• “WSU controversy exposes need to vet leaders’ academic writing.”
• “Microbiologist not guilty of violating integrity code after dismissal.”
• Researchers say “retractions are both efficiently and transparently publicised in the Ear Nose and Throat Literature.”
• Researchers “explore general picture of research practices, publications, global collaboration, themes and trends concerning scientific integrity.”
• “Meta-research should be seen as part of research, not separate from it,” says Stanford METRICS’ John Ioannidis.
• University and state “Pay $2.1 Million to End Whistleblower Suit Alleging Improper Practices, Possible Fraud at Cancer Research Lab.”
• “What to Do When You Don’t Trust Your Data Anymore: A plenary by a central character in the Jonathan Pruitt saga. 
• Researcher proposes the “R-Index: A Metric for Assessing Researcher Contributions to Peer Review.”
• 1 in 3 researchers say “peers force them to carry out tests with animals if their work is to be published,” a study finds.
• “What is going on at the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research?”
• “Oxford researcher wins lawsuit over peanut allergy research plagiarism.”
• “Academic integrity—a brief history, a proposed definition, guidelines, and violations.”
• “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone: the changing landscape of UK learned society publishing.”
• Researchers find “distinct patterns of doctoral publication disparities by gender and race/ethnicity, offering insights into a key metric of bioscience student success.”
• “Journals with high rates of suspicious papers flagged by science-integrity start-up.”
• Indonesian organization “calls for crackdown on plagiarism, degree sales at universities.”
• “Paper mills: the ‘cartel-like’ companies behind fraudulent scientific journals.”
• “Google Scholar is not broken (yet), but there are alternatives.”
• “Leveraging Transformative Agreements for Research Integrity.”
• “Open letter from fraud sleuths raises concerns over research integrity at Scientific Reports.”
• “Cite me! Perspectives on coercive citation in reviewing.”
• “Shareholder activist law firms managed to screw $3.7 million out of Wiley for the loss in stock price after the Hindawi acquisition”: part 3 of a blog post by James Heathers.
• “Six-month battle sees Telegraph forced to correct an inaccurate article about the impact of climate change on rail delays.”

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