If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Preprint server removes study attributing increased infant mortality to vaccines
- A medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction
- Controversial comet theory struck by two new retractions
- Publisher demands $500 from impersonated author to retract paper
- Librarian finds ‘preposterous number’ of fake references in paper from Springer Nature journal
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 to nearly 650, 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):
- “Hey ChatGPT, write me a fictional paper: these LLMs are willing to commit academic fraud.”
- Researchers propose concept of “peer replication”: “A new tier of science built on reproducibility.”
- Researchers propose a “spam filter against research fraud.”
- “Lack of reviewers threatens robustness of neuroscience literature.”
- University president “revives old plagiarism case after federal investigators clear professor.”
- Dorothy Bishop looks into “contrasting views” of sleuths and research integrity experts.
- “Ars Technica Fires Reporter After AI Controversy Involving Fabricated Quotes.”
- “How China’s universities joined the global elite,” but still tally thousands of retractions annually.
- “Is authors’ treatment by publishers getting worse?”
- “Faster science, penalties in evaluation, and concerns on quality and impact: Researchers’ use and perceptions of preprints.”
- “Why China’s anti-corruption drive in academia is vital to its science and tech ambitions.”
- “Why Retractions Matter“: A conversation with our Ivan Oransky.
- “Fear of stigma blamed as 0.1 per cent of papers declare AI use.”
- “Will AI Help or Hinder Scientific Publishing?”
- “Favorable research environment is a key determinant of research integrity according to a ten-country survey across Central and Eastern Europe.”
- “No paper is perfect: What happens when AI peer review cuts us no slack?”
- “Human versus artificial intelligence”: Researchers find “relying on human judgment alone is insufficient for identifying AI-assisted academic text.”
- “When peer review drags on: the harm to early career researchers.”
- “For sale: scientific reputation”: Publishers seek means to detect paper mills and “risk holding up the conveyor belt of science.”
- “Cheating in science“: A podcast episode in Dutch.
- “Account for AI in the environmental footprint of scientific publishing.”
- “Beyond authorship: Analyzing disciplinary differences of contribution statements using the CRediT taxonomy.”
- “Australian councils launch national research integrity review.”
- How Pokémon shaped science, including helping to expose “dodgy practices in academic publishing.”
Upcoming Talks
- “Scholarly Metrics in the Age of AI,” featuring our Ivan Oransky (March 16, Denver)
- “Restoring Trust in Science: Storytelling, AI, and Integrity in Scholarly Publishing,” featuring our Ivan Oransky (March 26, virtual)
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