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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Former lab tech earns federal funding ban years after leaving science
- High school student who volunteered at NASA-sponsored lab gets retraction
- Genomics pioneer earns first retraction for anti-aging gene therapy paper
- Sage journal retracts nearly 50 papers for signs of paper mill activity
- ‘Tin Man Syndrome’ case plagiarized from hoax, sleuths say
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500.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):
- “Medical journal rejects Kennedy’s call for retraction of vaccine study.”
- “Corrected study rekindles debate over Microsoft’s quantum computing research.”
- “Chemistry’s most influential journals” ranked by impact factor, which Derek Lowe calls “Journal Impact Nonsense.”
- “The ‘arsenic life’ paper’s retraction is good – but the process was poisonous.”
- The Boston Globe revisits the Anil Potti case and how Sally Kornbluth, now MIT president, handled it. Kornbluth responds in a letter to faculty.
- “Peer reviewers altered their recommendation based on whether they were cited or wanted to be cited.”
- Journal “Error Prompts Oncologists to Sound Alarm Over Conflict-of-Interest Reporting.”
- Authors of commentary call out committee of journal editors for “overlooked deeper structural issues” of predatory journals.
- “Gender differences in submission behavior exacerbate publication disparities in elite journals,” say researchers.
- “A Reading List on Unscrupulous Scientists: Six stories on the shady side of scholarship.”
- “AI-Assisted Tools for Scientific Review Writing: Opportunities and Cautions.”
- Springer Nature announces “strong results for the first half of 2025,” in which “the number of published articles rose by approximately 10% across the whole portfolio and around 25% in Full Open Access (FOA) journals.”
- “Academic publishing – stuck in a prisoner’s dilemma?”
- NIH is “moving to prohibit scientists from collecting data about gender.”
- A tale of two research groups “who encountered fraudsters in both randomized controlled trials … and observational studies.”
- “The peer-review crisis: how to fix an overloaded system.”
- “Use as Directed? A Comparison of Software Tools Intended to Check Rigor and Transparency of Published Work.”
- “Making misconduct make sense: Justifications of scientific wrongdoing and their consequences.”
- “Nature’s decision to publish positive peer review reports only gives half the picture.”
- Authors exchange letters about how to handle the inclusion of a retracted study in a systematic review.
- Researchers find “slow, incomplete and opaque responses from publishers to integrity concerns are common.”
- “AI-based fake papers are a new threat to academic publishing,” says journal editor.
- “NIH Proposes Five Strategies to Cap Open-Access Publishing Fees,” including forcing journals to pay peer reviewers.
- “Wave of Spanish politicians edit CVs over incorrect claims of degrees and diplomas.”
- “Disparate data retention standards in biomedical research.”
- AI content is tainting preprints: how moderators are fighting back.”
- “Research on retractions: A systematic review and research agenda.”
- “NIH to reject research applications written by AI.”
- “Fraud Hunters: Sniffing Out Bogus Science.”
- “Judge tells NSF to reinstate suspended UCLA grants.”
- “AI can simplify the process enormously and help publishers get ahead of the industry’s upheavals,” says publisher’s head of marketing.
- The “Enshittification of the Creation of Knowledge”: Librarian presents on a publication “scandal.”
Upcoming Talk
- “Future Proof Your Research With Rigor” featuring our Ivan Oransky (Sept. 8, Philadelphia)
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