Weekend reads: Retraction counts by country; ‘zombie facts;’ false allegations fell president

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 450. 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):

  • Which countries have the highest rates of retractions? Two different answers from two different studies.
  • When a “lie is allowed to fester and. . . inform public thinking”: ‘Zombie facts’ with our Ivan Oransky.
  • How the president of a German university “Fell Due to False Plagiarism Allegations.”
  • “Unaffiliated researcher” sections in journals: “How would we feel about a world where everyone can participate in the formal enterprise of research?”
  • “Researchers have a responsibility to publish,” says an engineering academic. 
  • “Data sleuths’ work is thankless,” argue our Ivan Oransky and Indiana’s David Allison. “They must get credit for retractions.”
  • Springer Nature offers to sell authors “AI Summaries of Their Own Work.”
  • South Korean first lady “plagiarised master’s thesis, university concludes.”
  • A study looks at “[r]eproducibility and replicability of qualitative research.”
  • “Publishers need more help to combat malicious academic networks.”
  • Researchers say “it may be beneficial to consider using non-monetary incentives, such as gamification, to promote OA [open access] publishing.”
  • Springer Nature develops in-house AI tool to “automate some editorial quality checks.’”
  • “Harsh penalties await scientific research fraudsters,” says the Supreme People’s Court of China.
  • Defining “safe zones” for China-US research collaboration amid worsening relations. 
  • Sociologist who explained the rise of right-wing populism in Germany loses professorship for plagiarism. 
  • “Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped?” An updated episode of Freakonomics featuring our Ivan Oransky. 
  • Researchers look at “[p]eer reviewers’ conflicts of interest in biomedical research.”
  • Journal issues several expressions of concern for Colombia center’s animal rights violations. Our 2023 story on the center.
  • Researchers propose methods to analyze “the scientific integrity of the collected work” of authors, featuring the RW Database. 
  • “Retractions caused by honest mistakes are extremely stressful, say researchers.”
  • Researchers “examine India’s status in retraction trends.”
  • “Dying woman and ethical doubts spark probe into cannabis cancer ‘cure.’”
  • “Fake scientific papers made with AI used names of 3 Japan researchers.”
  • “Teens Are Doing AI Research Now. Is That a Good Thing?”
  • “There’s a fine line between trusting scientific literature and relying too much on it.”

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7 thoughts on “Weekend reads: Retraction counts by country; ‘zombie facts;’ false allegations fell president”

  1. Re: “How Do We Democratize Scientific Research?”

    Journals do not require an affiliation for authors to publish.

    The author also inexplicably throws in a bunch of tropes about vaccines having no side effects and genetics having no effect on brain chemistry.

    Was this article linked as a joke?

    Reply

  2. Re: Springer/Nature AI tool:

    “The AI tool is currently being tested and verified on more than 100 open access (OA) journals, including Scientific Reports, which is the largest OA journal in the world, and across more than 100,000 submissions.”

    I hope they are not using Scientific Reports papers to *train* the AI tool and are instead using the tool to find already-published papers in that journal that should be retracted… 🙀

    Reply

      1. Sue Burke does a nice job with intelligent (though nonetheless occasionally stupid) vegetables in the novels Semiosis, Interference, and, I would suppose, Usurpation, though I have not yet read that last one.

        Reply

  4. I noticed that the story about the three Japanese researchers victimized by a predatory publisher https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20250115/p2a/00m/0sc/021000c
    carefully avoids mentioning the ‘publisher’.
    I have reasons to believe that they refer to … Longdom Publisher Ltd. https://www.longdom.org and in particular refer to the ‘journal “Forest Research: Open Access” https://www.longdom.org/forest-research-open-access.html It perfectly corresponds to the facts they did mention:
    -Contact info https://www.longdom.org/contact-us.html corresponds with Barcelona and Brussels
    – https://www.longdom.org/forest-research-open-access/instructionsforauthors.htm
    -The ISSN 2168-9776 mentioned the journal title “Journal of Forest Research” https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/2168-9776 which corresponds to the reputable journal published by Taylor & Francis Ltd.
    -The details concerning APC USD 2200, average of 55 days from submission to publishing and an addition 99 USD for shortening the process, see https://www.longdom.org/forest-research-open-access/instructionsforauthors.html
    -The publisher is mentioned in the updated version of the Beall’s list (the news item talks about “the company’s name is included on a U.S. expert’s list of potential predatory publishers”) see https://beallslist.net/#update
    The publisher is notorious for this type of scientific conduct, see my reply and that of Smut Clyde here https://retractionwatch.com/2023/04/18/a-professor-found-her-name-on-an-article-she-didnt-write-then-it-got-worse/ and here https://retractionwatch.com/2023/04/15/weekend-reads-plagiarism-allegations-swirl-around-superconductor-scientist-the-ice-cream-studies-no-one-wants-to-talk-about-when-fraud-doesnt-pay/#more-126917 (especially the story about Victoria Braithwaite)
    See also https://retractionwatch.com/2023/08/30/unethical-and-misleading-researcher-finds-his-name-on-editorial-boards-of-journals-hes-never-heard-of/
    Sad that ‘we’ are pretty much unable to end this type of misconduct. Increasing awareness and sending out warning messages like this is basically all we can do so it seems…

    Reply

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