If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Scientist who alleged COVID cover-up circulated a faked NIH email, agency says
- BMJ retracts most of a special issue for ‘compromised’ peer review and ‘improbable device use’
- ‘Game-changer’ breast cancer study retracted as Indiana researcher out of his post
- Retraction Watch testifies in Congressional hearing on scientific publishing. Coverage of the hearing in Nature and Inside Higher Ed.
- 45 editors resign from math journal, former EIC calls Elsevier publisher a ‘mini-dictator’
In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 64,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to 650, and our mass resignations list has more than 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):
- “China proposes a new way to measure academic influence in a departure from impact factor.”
- “Six ‘Superretractors’ Responsible for Large Number of Retracted Clinical Trials,” study finds.
- A cancer research pioneer with five retractions a decade ago earns an expression of concern for a Nature paper.
- “Can journals that pay peer reviewers succeed?”
- “China shifts research funding focus away from journal fees.”
- Study of PLOS journals finds articles with open peer review “much less likely” to be retracted.
- Researchers look at retractions in the orthodontic literature.”Where Does Publishing’s A.I. Problem Leave Authors and Readers?”
- “When Authorship Goes Wrong: Why SIGCHI Conferences Freeze Author Lists and What That Means.”
- “Citations of Retracted Ophthalmology Papers Persist, Study Warns.”
- “Academic fraud may be the symptom of a much more systemic problem.”
- Korean education ministry audits Kookmin University over governance and former first lady.
- “Frontiers issues AI guidance spanning full publishing lifecycle.”
- “I’m much less sure about where to submit my papers than I used to be,” writes ecologist.
- “Discoverability matters: Open access models and the translation of science into patents.”
- “Dozens of AI disease-prediction models were trained on dubious data,” finds preprint.
- The U.K. Research Excellence Framework’s “experiment with research culture was always doomed.”
- Researcher points out a university awarded a thesis that cited a retracted study to attribute “anti-cancer properties to a plant.”
- “Citation self-awareness for a fairer academic publishing landscape.”
- “China discontinues prominent journal ranking list.”
- “Authorship, Accountability, and the Erosion of Scientific Publishing.”
- “Adopting a united front against paper mills“: On international stakeholder group United2Act Against Paper Mills.
- “Questionable Research Practices: A Principled Classification and Ranking Based on Survey Data.”
- “Flawed study on the antidepressant Paxil came with a cautionary note — if you knew how to find it.” A judge tossed the lawsuit on the study earlier this month.
- “Mouse neurobehaviorist by day; research integrity watchdog by night.”
Upcoming talk
- National Academies “Workshop on Enhancing Scientific Integrity Progress and Opportunities in the Social and Behavioral Sciences” featuring our Ivan Oransky (April 24, virtual)
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].