If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Exclusive: A couple’s daughter died after they paid more than $800,000 for a gene-editing therapy — and it wasn’t made public: in collaboration with Science.
- Publisher investigating peer reviewer for alleged bribery scheme
- Exclusive: Medical student in Nepal behind busy research factory
- Journal retracts breast cancer paper 10 years after sleuth flagged issues
- Editors of economics journal resign after association renews Taylor & Francis contract
In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 66,000 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):
- “FDA retracts test result but still links Taylor Farms lettuce to cyclosporiasis.”
- ADA delays publication of opinion piece from editors at its flagship journal following controversy at last month’s conference.
- “Co-author describes how fraudulent Radboud scientist fabricated peer review process,” a move that recently earned him eight retractions.
- “Top Chinese Cancer Doctor Accused of Academic Fraud in ‘Paper Mill’ Scandal,” another researcher flagged by blogger.
- PLOS One issues expression of concern for clinical trial on cold spray after reporter flags “misleading” reporting of data.
- “Trump’s Science Adviser Wants to Overhaul “Increasingly Calcified” U.S. Science Enterprise While Science Funding Lags.”
- Lithuanian prime minister “rejects plagiarism allegations over doctoral dissertation.”
- Pakistan Medical and Dental Council barred from confirming research misconduct allegations without consulting independent expert.
- Thermo Fisher’s antibody data manipulation “has led to a serious breakdown of trust.”
- “AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive,” says Science editor Holden Thorp.
- Preprint authors say “highly cited papers show more significant reductions in citation after retraction and garner more attention to their retractions as they occur.”
- “Australia’s research integrity system is weak and inconsistent. How can we fix it?” A study offers some pathways forward.
- “Centralised agency publishing misconduct data proposed as UK Committee on Research Integrity shuts up shop.”
- “UK ‘should lean into research quality’ on AI, says Elsevier leader.”
- “Project on peer-review platform PubPeer aims to make replication studies more visible.” A cautionary tale from 2016.
- “Methods to assess trustworthiness of data from peer-reviewed, published randomised controlled trials.”
- “The case for researchers publishing less in the age of AI.”
- Stanley Gartler, whose finding that HeLa cells can easily contaminate other cultures led to improved quality control in labs, passed away earlier this month.
- “After being convicted for denouncing plagiarism in a scientific book, a professor is fined by the [Brazilian] Supreme Court for attempting an appeal.”
- Preprint authors find “research assessment is driven more by differences between evaluators than by difference in the evaluated research.”
- “An audit and feedback intervention to reduce inappropriate citation of retracted anaesthetic and pain medicine publications.”
- “Shaky political ‘science’: breakdown of the peer review process.”
- “China’s detention of U.S. seismologist and data-sharing crackdown alarm researchers.”
- “A most-wanted fugitive appears to have been secretly working as a biotech executive.”
- “Smuggling charges against NIH virologists trigger political uproar.”
- Among Science and Nature papers, articles retracted for misconduct show larger citation declines.
- “Drowning in Evidence: The Meta-Analysis Boom and the Rigor It Demands.”
- “Why won’t Tufts reveal its evidence on a discredited scholar?”
- “Does Publishing Negative Data Matter?”
- “In conversation with Dr Harlan M. Krumholz: On preprints, the story behind medRxiv.”
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