Weekend reads: Retractions as censorship; the carbon footprint when science doesn’t self-correct; NEJM vs. the feds

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Suspended UK surgeon earns nine expressions of concern, one withdrawal
• UC Davis research director loses three papers for image manipulation
• Sodom comet paper to be retracted two years after editor’s note acknowledging concerns
• ‘Squared blunder’: Google engineer withdraws preprint after getting called out for using AI

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 58,000 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 Do Scholarly Retractions Become a Form of Censorship?” by our Ivan Oransky.
• “The carbon footprint of science when it fails to self-correct.”
• “New England Journal of Medicine gets swept up in U.S. attorney inquiry into alleged bias.”
• “The Case of the Tanu.pro Paper Mill in Mind, Brain, and Education.”
• Nature issued a correction for a paper about how wrong nutrition studies are after researchers used the wrong units of energy in their equation.
• “Scientific Data Fabrication and AI—Pandora’s Box.”
• A professor goes from “a chronicler of conspiracy theories to a character in one.”
• Researchers propose “the Journal of Robustness Reports, which is dedicated to publishing short reanalyses of empirical findings.”
• Scientists “drafted a declaration on the defence of science.”
• “AI summary ‘trashed author’s work’ and took weeks to be corrected.”
• “Stronger ethical standards can turn the tide on retractions.”
• “Preprints serve the Anti-science agenda,” says the founder of a “scientific journal designed for ethics and ease.”
• “Russian academic fakes his way to Nobel-level citation index.”
• “ScienceGuardians, where disgruntled authors complain about PubPeer.”
• Wiley’s International Wound Journal retracts 95 more papers. A link back to our previous coverage. 
• “Defamation Claims Arising from Research Misconduct Cases: Best Practices for Institutions.”
• “Eight firms that are likely involved in the sale of thousands of UK registered designs to Indian academics for the purpose of academic reputation manipulation.”
• “Dutch universities, scientific institutes team up to protect scientific data in U.S.”
• “The justified limits of transparency in research misconduct reports.”
• “Grant fraud and other academic offences threaten China’s innovation push, state media says.”
• “Retracted trials have a substantial impact on the evidence ecosystem, including evidence synthesis, clinical practice guidelines, and evidence based clinical practice,” researchers find. 
• “Science sleuths flag hundreds of papers that use AI without disclosing it.”
• “[M]ore articles being published overall – irrespective of where they are from – puts ‘the system under pressure'” admits an Elsevier executive.

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