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, university investigations launched into gene-editing death following Science-Retraction Watch reporting
- Journal investigating apparent data mismatch in climate study
- Exclusive: News outlet killed story on plagiarism allegations after Cambridge prof hired law firm
- Kaggle removes problematic stroke dataset for copyright infringement
- Just over 400 U.S. patents contain citations to retracted scientific papers
- Retraction Watch story exposing research factory fuels investigations, preprint withdrawals, termination
- Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges
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):
- “The ADA must take accountability for a self-made mess”: Our cofounders “once praised the American Diabetes Association’s courage. How things have changed,” they write.
- “Psychedelic Therapy Paper Linked to Sexual Abuse Faces Possible Retraction” after journal flagged concerns.
- “AI is an accelerant, not the kindling. The kindling is publish or perish.”
- Researchers find the highest concentration — nearly 88% — of paper mill article retractions came from researchers in China.
- Analysis finds “string of paper retractions linked directly to sitting vice chancellors and directors” at eight of India’s top 100 universities.
- “Systems fail people: dry labbing as a distinct category of scientific fraud.”
- “Academic integrity has become a pedagogy of suspicion: Much of what we classify as misconduct consists not of ethical failings but of unevenly distributed opportunities to acquire skills.”
- “Paper mills in evidence synthesis: reported involvement among retracted systematic reviews and meta-analyses.”
- Chemistry journal retracts a paper by Russian Academy of Sciences official who had two retractions last year.
- Founder of Research Professional News announces plans to launch new publication after Clarivate announced its plans to close the news site.
- “From publication to retraction: A systematic analysis of retraction dynamics in multiple sclerosis and related demyelinating diseases.”
- MIT Press director: “When it comes to the open sharing of knowledge, I think we are in a much better place.”
- “It is not science journalism’s job to improve trust in science.”
- “Predatory Journals: Do They Publish Undergraduate and AI-Generated Papers?”
- “When affiliation errors become a research security problem.”
- “What AI’s usurping of the peer-reviewed publications means for medicine and pharmaceutical industry.”
- “Detecting Hallucinated and Suspicious Citations: What Current Tools Can and Cannot Do.”
- “When stars hold power: The impact of returnee deans on academic publications in Chinese universities.”
- “Criminal cases booked against 249 guest lecturers who submitted fake PhD certificates” in India.
- “Spin bias in scientific publishing: upholding integrity in research reporting.”
- “Journal brand alone increasingly feels insufficient, and trust now has to be made legible to machines as well as people.”
- Anna Abalkina, creator of the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, receives the Rosalind Franklin Prize from the Free University of Berlin for scientific integrity.
- “Africa’s open-access journals ‘run on hidden labour.’”
- “China has banned an unproven Alzheimer’s operation and detained its inventor, but international clinical trials of dcLVA are still going ahead.”
- Researchers find articles first published as preprints had a roughly 70-day shorter time to first citation than those without.
- Court upholds ex-professor’s jail term “for forcing students to write paper for daughter’s admission.”
- “AI’s top startups are barely publishing their research: More than half of AI ‘unicorns’ have never published a paper or preprint,” say researchers.
- “The broken world of publishing scientific papers: Peer review is dead! Long live peer-review!”
- The latest entry in a compendium of “papers that should never have been published“: A paper by Thomas Count Dracula.
- “John Bell and the most obscure journal in physics”: why did a researcher publish “one of the most significant results in quantum mechanics” in a “little-known, short-lived journal”?
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Re:“Academic integrity has become a pedagogy of suspicion: Much of what we classify as misconduct consists not of ethical failings but of unevenly distributed opportunities to acquire skills.”
So THE spikes a report about failures of academic integrity, then publishes this apologia for being lenient about academic integrity. And this from a “associate professor and director of student success” at a UK Law department. Making sure students know what academic integrity is has been a basic part of first semester teaching at universities for a very long time. Doesn’t seem like that department is setting their students up for success if they can’t get that basic part right. Although I guess some of the might qualify to be professors at Cambridge, I supposed that’s something.