Weekend reads: Scientific fraud at scale; upheaval inside US human protections office; vaccines-autism paper retracted

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Springer Nature retracts book with fake citations. Help us find more cases like this
• Fighting coordinated publication fraud is like ‘emptying an overflowing bathtub with a spoon,’ study coauthor says. More coverage from the New York Times, Science, Nature and the Economist.
• ‘Biologically implausible distributions’ and self-plagiarism result in 10 retractions for ob-gyn
• Dean accused of plagiarism in Bulgaria not guilty, ministry report says

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 60,000 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?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

• “Contested paper on vaccines, autism in rats retracted by journal.”
• Director of Office for Human Research Protections details her work to “fix” OHRP before being put on leave and, eventually, getting a termination letter.
• Danish scientist responds to HHS secretary’s call to retract aluminum vaccine study.
• “Abstracts Related to Dietary Guidelines Pulled From Meeting, Raising Concerns.”
• Senate appropriations committee endorses increase to NIH budget, and takes on APCs, indirect costs, replication experiments, and more.
• “NIH details options for limiting its payments for open-access publishing fees.” 
• “More transparency is required for article processing charges,” says Graham Kendall.
• “India’s research retraction surge sparks call for reform.”
• “Does ResearchGate have a growing credibility problem?”
• Academic research association “guarantees quick publication without peer-reviewing, sells authorship.”
• “Has NSF defied a court order by suspending 300 UCLA grants?”
• Publications with promotional words in their abstracts — “unprecedented,” “devastating,” “incredible,” etc. — “receive more citations and public attention,” say researchers.
• Can peer reviewers spot ChatGPT-generated manuscripts?
• “Science becomes trustworthy by constantly questioning itself.”
• “University of Iowa professor improperly spent $295K, auditor says. He denies wrongdoing.”
• The “current approach towards the alleged reproducibility crisis … does not adhere to the standards that would normally [be] applied to the scientific method,” say U.K. professors. 
• Linguistic analysis reveals “retracted works show distinct phrase patterns and higher word repetition.”
• “Six Months Later: What Their Response on ME/CFS Tells Us About the Cochrane Collaboration.” Our January coverage of the issue.
• eLife staff ask why indexers are “unable to see that peer review can be more than a thumbs up or a thumbs down?”
• “Commercialization of scientific misconduct and the challenge of paper mills in research.” Coauthored by Anna Abalkina, creator of our Hijacked Journal Checker.
• “One-fifth of computer science papers may include AI content,” study finds. 
• “Comparing AI-generated and human peer reviews: A study on 11 articles.”
• “Evaluating the potential risks of employing large language models in peer review.”
• Opinion: Metascience “will be essential for navigating an uncertain future.”
• “The psychological burden of statistical significance: editorial reflections from 2015 to 2025.”
• NIH director “denies banned word list” after staffers said grants turned down for “language deemed to be at odds with the administration’s priorities.” 
• “What’s the line between retracting something because it’s wrong and retracting something because it’s wrong?” The Studies Show takes on retractions.

Upcoming Talk

• “Future Proof Your Research With Rigor” featuring our Ivan Oransky (Sept. 8, Philadelphia)

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