If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Diabetes association turmoil roils journal as group tries to thwart boycott
- CEO of AI company loses paper on cognitive impact of generative AI
- Lawsuit over retraction of abortion pill papers heads toward arbitration decision
- Lancet union declares first-ever strike over staff wages
- Paper mill studies get cited by clinical guidelines, policy docs and more, analysis finds
In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 67,000 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):
- Nobel Prize winner’s 2015 paper slapped with permanent expression of concern. He tops our retractions by Nobel Prize winner list with 15.
- “DOJ Official Queried a Dozen Journals on ‘Partisan’ Views in 2025.”
- “The ‘synthetic validity’ problem in AI-generated science.”
- “Chinese sisters’ 86-page expose accuses PhD supervisor of affair with dad, academic misconduct.”
- “Agriculture Canada acknowledges scientific misconduct involving federal employees,” originally outlined in Blacklock’s Reporter.
- Duke University removes dissertation by the author of a book on intelligent design following its removal for falsely attributing quotes.
- “Nothing but the Truth: Keeping Science in Scientific Research“: A Q&A with our Ivan Oransky.
- “India’s research paradox: Leading in published papers, but low on citations and patents to universities.”
- Science removes article “after determining the author was impersonating the identity of an established science journalist.”
- “The Smithsonian Used Her DNA. And Lost Her Trust.”
- Slovakian university “will investigate the ethical misconduct of two teachers” who have resigned.
- “OpenAI pulls out of Caltech math hackathon after mathematicians issue open letter criticizing AI math ‘slop.'”
- “Three-quarters of researchers unsure what use of AI to disclose,” survey finds.
- “AI in peer review should be a second reader, not a judge.”
- “Fraud sealed the fate of controversial zoologist Paul Kammerer — 100 years on, his ideas deserve revisiting.”
- Singapore Public Service Division “reviewing paper that alleges civil servants disproportionately bought homes near unannounced” train stations.
- “Is science journalism dying? Comparing a ‘science crash’ 40 years ago to today.”
- How a termite behavior theory “challenges assumptions on self-citation and academic misconduct.”
- “Why funders should investigate if AI is making research more conservative.”
- “Buying a scientific study that never actually existed”: German YouTubers “went undercover to contact so-called ‘paper mills.’” The experiment follows others that achieved similar results.
- “Who Needs National Journals? Dissemination Strategies in Canadian Scholarly Communication.”
- “AI agents blew the whistle on their cheating colleagues.”
- “War over robotaxis in NYC heats up after retracted Waymo report and ‘Autokill’ novel.”
- “Isaac Newton’s remarkable year — and the plagiarism accusations that followed.”
Upcoming Talk
- “Why Retractions Are On The Rise, and Why That’s Good News”: A talk by our Ivan Oransky at the “Spilling the ReproducibiliTea” conference (Sept 25, virtual)
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Brown Brothers Media:
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/brown-brothers-media-ai-slop-empire?eicker.news
Re “Duke University removes dissertation by the author of a book on intelligent design following its removal for falsely attributing quotes.”
The framing implies that the dissertation was removed permanently. Instead, as you can read in the contents of the post you cite, Duke’s actual statement was:
“We are in the process of having the dissertation removed from public access while we continue to review.”
Seems to me that the likeliest scenario is that it will be reinstated with a correction, which is what NYU Press has stated will happen with the book, as you previously reported.
Also, he only falsely attributed an individual quote, not “quotes”.