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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- ‘All the red flags’: Scientific Reports retracts paper sleuths called out in open letter
- Retraction Watch is hiring! Two journalism jobs available
- eLife won’t get an impact factor, says Clarivate
- Engineering publisher pulled 57 papers in a day for peer review ‘irregularities’
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400.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 300 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):
- When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. appeared on Retraction Watch back in 2011.
- “The great AI witch hunt: Reviewers’ perception and (Mis)conception of generative AI in research writing.”
- As “Switzerland establishes center for scientific integrity,” their research is “not immune to the growing phenomenon of withdrawals of scientific articles.”
- Australian “Medical council’s oversight of grant funds ‘inadequate.’”
- “Green Open Access – Free for Authors But at a Cost for Readers.”
- “Can AI review the scientific literature — and figure out what it all means?”
- “Diversity in academic publishing: we still have a lot to do.”
- “Scholarly Publishing World Slow to Embrace Generative AI.”
- “You could say that I am an accidental infrastructure provider.” More about Anita Bandrowski.
- “Public prosecutor files charges in Dresden research affair” after allegations of fraud.
- Withdrawn “Preprint on Alzheimer’s drug deaths ignites dispute among authors” who say data “don’t support the paper’s claims.”
- “Science communication will benefit from research integrity standards.”
- “Embed ethics in research publications, editors say.”
- “When claims about science become edutainment, science loses.”
- University “investigates alleged plagiarism involving history lecturers.”
- University revokes “Professor’s PhD Over Plagiarism Allegations, Sparking Accusations of Bias.”
- “Students file lawsuit against Polish ‘diploma mill’ university,” Collegium Humanum.
- The analogy of “Bad science as genre fiction”: a blog post from Andrew Gelman.
- “How to Use Generative AI Responsibly in Scientific Research” from NAS president.
- “The research literature is an unsafe workplace,” researchers say.
- Should acts of research misconduct be labeled “felonies” and questionable research practices “misdemeanours?”
- “Perceptions of Research Misconduct Among Lecturers and Students in Vietnam.”
- “The end of an era for science article metrics?”
- “Is global scientific production overheating, at risk of no longer being sustainable?”
- “Will Chinese scientists make or break the uprising in academic peer-review publishing?”
- “Two scholarly publishing cultures? Open access drives a divergence in European academic publishing practices.”
- “Scholarly Metadata as Trust Signals: Opportunities for Journal Editors.”
- Swiss funder says banning animal testing would “massively restrict basic biological and environmental research.”
- “Justice delayed is justice denied for early career plagiarism victims,” says university professor.
- “University committee flags plagiarism in selection process” for college principal.
- A key paper in the Eliezer Masliah saga, used to support drug development, has now been retracted.
- “Preprints at a crossroads – Are we compromising openness for credibility?”
- “But what happens when those niche journals cannibalize each other and fight for prominence—when one journal emerges as the de facto flagship journal, and your research community begins to see the others as second string?”
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Having a skeptic lead the health agencies is a win for science. It will demand stronger efficacy and safety testing and decrease debacles like the American people being told that there was a COVID vaccine that stopped transfer.
A skeptic wants to see evidence. A denier ignores evidence when it’s presented. Form your own views, but to me it’s pretty clear which side of this like RFK Jr. falls on.
Believe what people say, not what others tell you they said.
“the American people being told that there was a COVID vaccine that stopped transfer”
Link(s)?
For the first year, the vaccine was very effective at stopping transfer. That ended with the advent of the Omicron variant, in November 2021. So yes, they were told the truth, but in infectious diseases, disease-specific truths may be provisional. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8828449/
Can you provide a reference to support the assertion that “the vaccine was effective at stopping transfer [of the initial variant]”?
You can start here, and then you can search medline, pubmed, and any other database you choose.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2116597
And this was a good summary.
https://obrieniph.ucalgary.ca/sites/default/files/teams/5/Transmissibility%20of%20COVID_Update_V2_27May2021_Submit.pdf
30 percent protection, degrading to zero over the course of 12 weeks, does not met the pre-covid definition of a vaccine, and is not an effective tool for stopping the spread of a virus.
First of all, protection against infection and (especially serious) disease are two different entities. You focus on the protection against infection, and ignore the protection against severe disease.
Second, there is no “pre-covid definition of a vaccine” that includes “stopping the spread of a virus” or “do not get infected”. The inactivated polio vaccine, for example, does not stop infection. It does almost completely stop the virus getting into your central nervous system and cause the disease we most commonly associated with polio: paralysis of muscle groups.
If vaccines had to be defined as preventing infection, the shingles vaccine would be a logical impossibility. I was infected with the virus about 45 years prior to getting the vaccine. But I still got it, due to its documented effectiveness in preventing shingles symptoms. This seems like a perfectly reasonable goal for a vaccine.
“30 percent protection, degrading to zero over the course of 12 weeks, does not met the pre-covid definition of a vaccine”
Care to provide a link to the definition of a vaccine, pre- or post-covid?
Here is the definition from Merriam Webster: “a preparation that is administered (as by injection) to stimulate the body’s immune response against a specific infectious agent or disease”
Wikipedia: “A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease.”
NIH: “Vaccines stimulate the immune system to produce immune responses that protect against infection.” http://www.niaid.nih.gov/research/vaccines
The COVID vaccines fit all of those definitions. None of them state anything about stopping the spread of an infectious agent. By your made-up definition, no vaccine is a vaccine. Even the flu vaccine does not stop transmission.
“protection against infection” is different from “effective at stopping transfer”?
“protection against infection” is different from “effective at stopping transfer”?
Of course it is.
He’s not a skeptic. He’s a denialist. Those who voted for Trump owe the rest of us an apology; we were warned Trump wanted to put RFKJr in charge of HHS.
Where is his skepticism of Andrew Wakefield, the fraud RFK Jr claims was “unfairly treated”?
The author of the TU Dresden article has also published it without a paywall at https://www.jmwiarda.de/2024/11/13/zwischen-macht-politik-und-geltungssucht/