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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Springer Nature retracted 2,923 papers last year
- When a sleuth gets hired by a publisher: A Q&A with Nick Wise
- Wiley journal retracts 26 papers for ‘compromised peer review.’
- Paper on conversion therapy retracted, authors planning to republish
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 55,000 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):
- “The Discipline of Last Resort: Retraction isn’t designed as punishment, but it serves that role by default. And that’s OK.”
- The universities with the most retractions, and retractions data for “cleaning up science,” both featuring RW.
- “‘Patent mills’ sell scientists inventorship of bizarre medical devices.”
- Researchers propose “Democratisation of Academic Publishing” and the “Scholarly Wallet” to incentivize peer reviewers.
- “Will medical publishers fight Trump’s war on ‘woke’?”
- “Should Psychologists Be Paid to Conduct Peer Reviews?”
- “Can AI Solve the Peer Review Crisis” in economics?
- A longtime Stanford affiliate calls “for leadership to strengthen academic integrity” there. (He is also a major donor to Retraction Watch.)
- Researchers “manage to purchase 50 citations” for a fake author.
- A book on forensic metascience by scientist-sleuth James Heathers.
- “Academic Publication is Utterly Broken.” And open access has become an “Academic Integrity Challenge for Health Professionals.”
- Researchers find “papers with titles including tripartite phrases receive significantly more citations.”
- “Does authorship mean anything when academic papers are simply citable tokens?”
- Author of retracted paper blames plagiarism on his “lack of experience writing academic articles.”
- “Our published work in a government journal curiously disappeared.”
- Researchers suggest “more scholars make an active decision to review only for platinum open access journals and preprints.”
- “Publishers need to provide guidelines on use of AI in research, says Wiley.”
- “Big shifts in research collaboration benefit from a ‘top-down’ approach, event told.”
- “Animal rights group ‘outraged’ by rat strangulation study.”
- “Over 500 COVID studies retracted for ‘unreliable’ information,” featuring RW’s list.
- “Banned terms in scholarly publications and restrictions on researchers’ activities,” a new statement from COPE.
- Author of a study on same-sex parents reflects on the controversy following its publication.
- “Stealth Corrections in Scientific Literature.” A link to our coverage of the preprint.
- “Conflicts of interest in climate change science.”
- “Strengthening research integrity in Italy: a landmark commitment in Rome.”
- A “first trial of ‘distributed peer review’”: Applicants for a funding opportunity will also be enlisted as peer reviewers.
- “Is research misconduct becoming unstoppable?”
- “ChatGPT to help peer review scientific studies” in the UK.
- “Retractions Increase 10-Fold in 20 Years – and Now AI is Involved”: from a panel with our Ivan Oransky.
- GenAI “usage guidelines for scholarly publishing” in medical journals.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].