Weekend reads: FDA blocked vaccine findings; ‘Frankencitations Ravage the Academic Countryside’; ‘Publish and Perish’

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• ORI announces 15-year debarment against former Rice University scientist
• Court orders historian to repay grant funding for “pattern of plagiarism” in books
• Winning science fair project in Vietnam beset by misconduct allegations as major high school competition looms
• Russian news outlets hailed a cancer breakthrough, but the retraction went unnoticed
• One in 277 PubMed-indexed papers in 2026 shows fabricated references, says analysis.
• Swiss court clears sleuth in defamation case, awards him legal costs

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):

• “F.D.A. Blocked Publication of Research Finding Covid and Shingles Vaccines Were Safe.”
• “Frankencitations Ravage the Academic Countryside.”
• “Publish and Perish: I’m the editor in chief of a scientific journal. There’s a disastrous imbalance happening with the labor around manuscripts.”
• “CDC leader calls for new journal to ‘elevate scientific rigor,'” and “slams vaccine study he pulled from agency’s flagship publication.”
• Professor who awarded himself a fake “Nobel Prize” now banned from working in higher education.
• Georgia prosecutor suspended for filing documents with AI-generated citations.
• “AI Slop Is Flooding Academic Journals. A Top Journal Measured It.”
• “FDA Claims ‘Manipulated’ Data Led to Drug’s Approval, Proposes Withdrawal.”
• National funding agency in India “mandates disclosure of research paper retractions for grant applicants.”
• “Citations of Retracted Publications Should Be Discounted From One’s Bibliometric Indicator,” says researcher. 
• “Number of Scientific Publications from EPA Authors Has Dropped During Trump Administration.”
• Absence of formal accountability structures “has triggered comparisons of scientific sleuthing to vigilantism.”
• “There’s Still Too Much Uncertainty about Conflict of Interest Bias.”
• “Demanding peer review is associated with higher impact in published science,” preprint finds.
• “Meet the academics refusing to use generative AI.”
• “A Little-Known Lawsuit May Weaken University Ethics Boards.” And “How institutional review boards threaten groundbreaking research in higher ed.”
• “AI Conferences Should Embrace Submission Explosion via Autonomous Review Pipelines.”
• After a news team exposed a DUI testing scandal at a forensics lab, “questions grow over who’s holding labs accountable.”
• “Doubts cast over ‘wild’ claim that magnetic control can turn on genes.”
• “Why preprint servers are increasing moderation — and what that means for researchers.”
• “Failure is part and parcel of research, but discussing it sometimes seems to be taboo in science. It doesn’t need to be.”
• “Often, scientists are ‘100% sure’ of something, and anyone questioning that position is treated as an idiot.”
• “Metrics obsession is supplanting academic vision in China.”
• “Responses to the AI grant flood must prioritize fairness as part of excellence.”
• “Convicted former Harvard scientist rebuilds brain computer lab in China.”
• “Freely available GenAI tools are currently not able to detect, exclude, or appropriately flag retracted scientific literature,” finds yet another study. 
• “Publish or Perish? A Content Analysis of Scholarship Criteria in R1 Academic Libraries’ Promotion and Tenure Documentation.”
• “The field factor: Industry publishing contribution and novelty in science.”
• “Major publishers sue Meta for copyright infringement over AI training.”
• “Why are so many scientific articles wrong about the disease I study?”
• “Illicit Use of AI by Philosophers Refereeing for Journals.”
• “Inside the Scientific Community’s Research Integrity Crisis.”
• “Modeling scientific uncertainty in language: Applied linguistic insights from human and artificial intelligence texts.”
• “Researchers already use AI—it’s time to agree on how to use it responsibly,” says the research integrity director at Springer Nature. 
• “First AI tool to detect suspicious peer reviews rolled out by academic publisher.”
• Researchers say an astrophysics paper performed by AI was halted after three rounds of peer review for lack of AI disclosure.
• “How academia fed my unhealthy fixation with accolades.”
• “Nothing ever dies. It merely becomes embarrassing.”

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