Weekend reads: ‘Unicorn poo’ and other fraudulent COVID-19 treatments; disgraced researchers and drug company payouts; a fictional account of real fraud

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Two retractions of an Oxford lab’s papers from a major heart journal
• An excerpt from Brian Deer’s new book about Andrew Wakefield
• The retraction of a bizarre paper about a black hole in the center of the Earth
• A court battle for a duo with a history of legal threats against researchers who use a tool one of them developed

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 33.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Unicorn Poo and Blessed Waters: COVID-19 Quackery and FDA Warning Letters.”
• “Disgraced researchers can still reap drug industry payouts,” Science reports.
• “The Mills Have Ayes: A Fictional Account of Real Fraud.” 
• In the social sciences, “The rush to research COVID-19 risks compromising research integrity and impact.”
• “Information about the vetting process for a specific publication or general publishing venue remains difficult to find, daunting to compare at scale, and impossible for anyone (with the possible exception of a journal’s editorial board) to fully assess.”
• “The carnage of substandard research during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
• “Without peer review, we are nothing but well-paid bloggers.”
• What motivates peer reviewers? asks a new paper.
• “Some 50 internet users, most of them academics, were robbed of a total of one million liras ($127,500) in a fraud pretending to be a scientific journal online…”
• A surgeon fired from the Karolinska after a scandal is charged with aggravated assault.
• “For academic publishing to be trans-inclusive, authors must be allowed to retroactively change their names,” argues Lilian Hunt.
• “Attention science: some people have only one name,” and that creates problems for authors.
• “It seems that while the Covid-19 pandemic is advancing around the world, leaving thousands of deaths every day, there is also another pandemic that until now has remained in the dark: that of fraudulent studies.”
• “The Surgisphere Scandal: What Went Wrong?”
• A longtime investigator at the US Office of Research Integrity retires.
• “Data manipulation – the corruption of scientific practices.”
• India’s “University Grants Commission (UGC) will release a new guidance document, titled Good Academic Research Practices, on Tuesday. The document will provide the general framework for enhancing research integrity by focussing on potential threats and good practices.”
• For a Texas cardiologist who wrongly blamed Black Lives Matters protesters for beating up his daughter’s boyfriend, this wasn’t the first time he tweeted accusations without evidence.

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