Weekend reads: ‘The fall of a prolific science journal’; Clinical trials by ‘super-retractors’; ‘How to Study Things That May Not Exist’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Iraqi journal suspected of coercion, two others dropped from major citation databases
• Authors retract Nature paper projecting high costs of climate change
• The case of the fake references in an ethics journal
• Number of ‘unsafe’ publications by psychologist Hans Eysenck could be ‘high and far reaching‘
• Glyphosate safety article retracted eight years after Monsanto ghostwriting revealed in court
• Nature paper retracted after one investigation finds data errors, another finds no misconduct

Did you know that Retraction Watch and the Retraction Watch Database are  projects of The Center of Scientific Integrity?  Others include the Medical Evidence Project, the Hijacked Journal Checker, and the Sleuths in Residence Program. Help support this work.   

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

• “The fall of a prolific science journal exposes the billion-dollar profits of scientific publishing.”
• “A small number of influential authors … account for a significant proportion of retracted clinical trials,” researchers find.
• “The Problem of Wrongly Identified and Nonverifiable Nucleotide Sequences and Cell Lines in Research Papers,” and why they’re “canaries in a coal mine.”
• Professor “cleared of data fabrication allegations after investigation.” A link to our coverage of the “statistically improbable data” tied to the researcher. 
• “New NIH Policies Make It Easier to End Grants, Ignore Peer Review.”
• “Holding science to account: A qualitative study of practices and challenges of watchdog science journalism,” coauthored by our Ivan Oransky. 
• Can X discourse be used to predict which papers will be retracted? Researchers investigate. 
• “Reviewers are better equipped to detect fraud than editors,” researchers say in response to study of coordinated fraud. See our earlier coverage.
• “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence – and that affects what scientific journals choose to publish.”
• “There is a danger in not being critical about the efforts that go under sleuthing,” psychologist Ioana Alina Cristea says. “The boundaries of what they are doing are very porous.” 
• “Riding the Autism Bicycle to Retraction Town.”
• “Court sets aside” university researcher’s “plagiarism case against colleague.”
• An advent calendar by Anna Abalkina, the creator of our Hijacked Journal Checker, that gives you a chance to spot issues in academic publishing.
• “Disquiet over ‘PhDs by publication’ diminishes doctorate’s prestige.”
• MDPI makes three “stealth corrections” of the peer review record after professor flags the papers as “being affected by a review mill.”
• “Gender disparities in publishing: how networks, occupational self-efficacy and the university shape the gender publication gap among professors in Germany.”
• The Royal Society journal Philosophical Transactions uses cover art that is AI generated, says researcher. 
• “Diabetes ‘Trade Journals’: A Rather Heterogeneous Affair.”
• “AI use widespread in research offices, global survey finds.”
• “Elsevier shutdown looms Down Under as open access talks collapse.”
• “The CNRS is breaking free from the Web of Science.”
• UK funding body “opens up grant proposal data to explore using AI to smooth peer review.”
• “The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine.”
• Researchers propose the “BEYOND Guidelines for Preventing and Addressing Research Misconduct.”
• “Publish or perish: making sense of India’s research fraud epidemic.”
• “Research Integrity in an Era of AI and Massive Amounts of Data“: Authors expand on previous papers “and offer more details on solutions.”
• How the authors of recent World Health Organization guidelines on infertility treatment used the Retraction Watch Database to check for potentially falsified data. 
• “Low success rate in early career grants” in Australia “deeply disappointing.”
• “Universities told they must lead fight against scientific ‘paper mills’” in Poland. 
• Chinese ministry “kicks off a campaign to crack down on misconduct in academic papers.”
• “WHO said what? Non-robust standards in citing WHO and EPA drinking water guidelines.”
• “How I contributed to rejecting one of my favorite papers of all time.”

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