If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Journal tags ‘impossible’ case report with short erratum
- Guest post: The CDC hepatitis B study is unethical and must never be published
- Court challenge could chill reporting of research fraud, say whistleblower attorneys
- As journal’s retraction count nears 170, it enhances vetting
In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 63,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up over 640, and our mass resignations list has 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “Controversial Danish vaccine research group faces new allegations” about 10 previous trials, Science reports. The group, recently awarded CDC funding to study the hepatitis B vaccine, called for the retraction of a previous critique. Read a guest post on the ethics of the trial.
- The Lancet “refuses to retract” paper by researcher who falsified data.
- The retraction of the 2010 ‘arsenic life’ paper tells a story “of the transformation of the methods used to correct science.”
- “Journal impact factors still exert ‘undue influence’ on hiring and grant approval panels, a survey finds.
- “AI is not a peer, so it can’t do peer review.”
- “A framework for assessing the trustworthiness of scientific research findings.”
- Sleuth Elisabeth Bik reviews materials science papers with “UnEDXpected Peaks.”
- “Don’t Trust the Rankings That Put China’s Universities on Top.”
- “Number of UK universities opting out of Elsevier deal hits nine.”
- “Publishing less won’t save the research system“: A response to the argument of “slow science.”
- ”Opinion: Scientists Could Help Reveal Fraud — and Get Paid For It.”
- “US judiciary scraps climate chapter from scientific evidence manual,” citing bias against fossil fuel companies.
- “Is there a crisis of confidence in scientific articles?”
- “‘Don’t hate the players, hate the game’: qualitative insights from education researchers on questionable and open research practices.”
- “What the Literature is Filling Up With” under the “onslaught of chatbots.”
- “Open-source AI tool beats giant LLMs in literature reviews — and gets citations right.”
- A correction to a PNAS letter, “Confronting the inevitable: Harnessing technology to contain systemic scientific fraud,” adds acknowledgement for undisclosed use of (AI) technology.
- “Fraud in the past relied on bespoke fakery, but today’s fraudsters can exploit the online scientific world to quickly create realistic looking papers on an industrial scale.”
- “Characteristics, Citation Analysis, and Altmetrics Impact of Retracted Papers in Dentistry (2001-2024).”
- “On the determinants of journal rejection rates: evidence from the Journal of Financial Economics.”
- “OpenClaw AI chatbots are running amok — these scientists are listening in.”
- Sleuth points out “complete replacement” of authors between revisions on a now-retracted paper.
- “Lexington drug company executives indicted in alleged wire fraud scheme tied to failed cancer drug.”
- “AI ‘Copy-Paste’ Lands PhD Students in Trouble, UGC Rejects Dozens of Research Papers.” Another university “plans 10% cap on AI use in PhD thesis.”
- “An evaluation system for scientific journals”: Researchers propose “clearinghouses for journal evaluation and certification, that establish accreditation and reputation criteria based on transparent, standardized benchmarks.”
- “University journal publishers – global, messy and underestimated.”
- “Cabells’ Predatory Reports database passes 20,000-journal milestone.”
- “In the fight to safeguard academic credibility, authentication infrastructure is a vital line of defence.”
- “Frontiers warns over paid approaches to editors.” A link to our 2024 coverage in Science of firms bribing editors.
- Researchers find growth of “mysterious citations” in computing conferences from 2021 to 2025.
- “Conversational bibliometrics needs a recipe, not just ingredients.”
- “Who are Darcy & Roy?” A look into a possibly “predatory” publisher.
Upcoming Talks
- “Restoring Trust in Science: Storytelling, AI, and Integrity in Scholarly Publishing” featuring our Ivan Oransky (March 26, virtual)
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