If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Sage issues dozens of retractions from two journals it acquired
- A New Zealand journal deleted a paper for potential harm to Māori months after publishing it
- Ceramics journal pulls dozens of papers flagged for integrity concerns
- Defamation suit demanding Elsevier retract paper heads closer to trial
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 approaching 700, 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):
- “Third death in China’s popular but opaque trials revealed, this time in CAR-T.” We revealed a case last month. And “Two GOP lawmakers call on FDA to increase scrutiny of Chinese trial data following deaths.”
- Forensic image analysts, including Elisabeth Bik and Kevin Patrick, find “apparent image duplications or anomalies” in papers on Alzheimer’s disease.
- “AI Is Ruining Scholarship: When we outsource literature review to algorithms, we lose entire sectors of knowledge.”
- “Ex-Fauci adviser pleads guilty to plotting to conceal COVID-19 research records during pandemic.”
- Critic who “raised concerns over Jason Arday suspended by Ghent University.”
- “Professor’s Death Leaves Behind Hard Questions for Cambridge on Race and Hiring.”
- “Star” marine ecologist who was found guilty of misconduct by her university in 2022 loses another paper for “statistically implausible variance” in data.
- “Self-Citation Is How Fields Grow.”
- “Acceleration of the arms race between fraudsters and honest researchers.”
- Director of institute in Russia earns another retraction after losing “breakthrough” cancer paper earlier this year.
- The U.S. Office for Research Integrity released guidance on generative AI.
- “Philosophy Journal Publishes Largely AI-Authored Article — On Purpose.”
- “Science Doesn’t Need Better Journals. It Needs Better Incentives.”
- Researchers use game theory to analyze “how institutional incentive structures shape strategic behavior across different domains of scientific practice.”
- “NIH plan to keep peer-review scores for grants secret draws concern.” And “AI Helped Researchers Win NIH Grants. Will Science Suffer?”
- “When Errors Become Consensus: Science’s Self-Correction Can No Longer Keep Up,” a post from Taylor & Francis’ Director of Research Integrity Engagement.
- “Science or fiction? Shadowy ‘paper mills’ let you pay to be a published author – of fraudulent research.”
- “AI is pushing scientific publishing to the brink. Is it time to replace the scientific paper?”
- New York University has removed a journalist from its list of adjuncts following controversy, and publisher suspended sales of his book “after plagiarism review.”
- “Catalysis chemists are joining forces for reproducibility.”
- “For a decade CRediT has quietly reshaped academic authorship – what comes next?”
- “Graduate Students Pre-Register Research Drafts to Prevent Plagiarism” by professors.
- “Can Anthropic’s invisible watermarks curb ‘AI slop’? Researchers remain sceptical.”
- “PI Who Took Credit For Paper Clarifies Fraud Was Student’s Independent Work”: Satire that rings true.
- “Professor develops ‘bullshit index’ for policy research.”
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