Weekend reads: When Dr. Oz appeared in Retraction Watch in 2014; Didier Raoult in the news again; superconductivity researcher out

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Wiley corrects retraction notices for ‘inaccurate’ description of why articles were pulled
• Cancer specialist faked data in at least ten papers, VA and UCLA find
• ‘Relieved’: BMJ retracts and replaces article on unexpected weight loss as a sign of cancer
• Mega journal Cureus kicks out organizations critics called paper mills

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400.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 Dr. Oz appeared on Retraction Watch in 2014.
• An “explosive report” that a university “buried for two years.” A link to our Raoult coverage.
• “Embattled Superconductivity Scientist Is Out.” A link to our previous coverage.
• “Can peer review accolade awards motivate reviewers?”
• “Third, meta-researchers should always check back with institutions to verify their findings.” Perhaps researchers could adopt the best practices of journalists.
• “Journal Editors Look to Artificial Intelligence to Spot Recycled Images Before Publication.”
• “The peer review system no longer works to guarantee academic rigour – a different approach is needed.”
• “Sackler family’s opioid history leads Israeli university to strip name from science prize.”
• “Driving Change in Ukrainian Scholarly Publishing.”
• “Self-Retraction as Redemption: Forgiveness for Repentant Authors.”
• Congratulations! Elisabeth Bik, PubPeer and PixelQuality win the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research 2024.
• “Preprints vs. Journal Articles: Citation Impact in COVID-19 Research.”
• “Writing assistant, workhorse, or accelerator? How academics are using GenAI.”
• “The roles of special issues in scholarly communication in a changing publishing landscape.”
• “Over two decades of scientific misconduct in India: Retraction reasons and journal quality.”
• “The obsession with citations and other quantitative metrics for evaluating scientific productivity reinforces the trend toward hyper-specialization, which also promotes risk aversion.”
• “America’s fractured trust in science, explained in 3 charts.”
• Over 2,000 researchers excluded from Clarivate’s “Highly Cited Researchers” list in 2024 for questionable practices. How we contributed in 2022.
• “AI-Assisted Genome Studies Are Riddled with Errors.”
• “For those who worry that already six Nobel laureates in medicine or physiology have retracted papers, we can reiterate that science will still be the best thing that can happen to humans,” says Stanford METRICS’ John Ioannidis. 
• “Risky Science and Public Consent,” a podcast with a political scientist and a former law and ethics professor.
• “Misconduct and the future of neurodegenerative disease research,” a podcast episode.
• Associate professor duplicated images in paper, says university.
• “Researchers find that “databases widely disagree on indexing retracted publications they cover, leading to a lack of consistency in what publications are identified as retracted.”
• Study of homeopathic treatments as replacement for antibiotics “by the Bavarian State Parliament fails.”
• “Rethinking Reviewer Fatigue: AI’s place in a broader discussion.”
• “The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger.”
• “Can Google Scholar survive the AI revolution?”
• “A Star President’s Resignation Was a Mystery. Was It All About Rankings?”
• “Springer Nature reports adjusted operating profit margin of 28%” in its first earning call since going public.

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