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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Legal researcher up to 23 retractions for false affiliations, plagiarism
- Unmeet the beetles: “A very disappointing story” as authors yank paper on new insect species
- The top retractions of 2020: Mostly, but not all, COVID-19
- Caught in the act’: Veterinary researcher caught fabricating gene data, resigns from university job
- Journal expresses concern — we think — about papers by Surgisphere founder
- U Maryland virus researcher up to 13 retractions
- ‘I dropped the ball’: Magic bullet falls short of target
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 40.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “A University of Pittsburgh cardiologist who faced backlash over an opinion piece he wrote criticizing affirmative action is suing his employers, the American Heart Association and the company that published and then retracted his article, alleging that he was demoted and defamed because his views were unpopular.”
- “Scholars pledge not to speak at University of Mississippi until it reinstates a colleague who publicly questioned why his chair rejected a grant, allegedly for political reasons.”
- “Full professors see more than other faculty members the positive sides of the publish-or-perish principle and virtually no downsides.”
- A researcher sued the Free University of Berlin after it rescinded his PhD following findings of misconduct, and prompted the university to revoke its decision if the scientist said he would leave his post. The researcher was responsible for the first-ever retraction from Nature Chemistry.
- “Debates among scientists about the evidence are healthy. But if conducted in public the rules change.”
- “As a result, The Times has concluded that the episodes of ‘Caliphate’ that presented Mr. Chaudhry’s claims did not meet our standards for accuracy.” The Times returned the Peabody Award it won for the podcast.
- “Although the rapid translation of medical evidence is beneficial in cases where the intervention is of proven benefit, preprint release of trial findings prior to peer review, creates a risk of inappropriate global translation.”
- Elisabeth Bik raises questions about 45 papers from Tianjin Medical University.
- “We also consider whether hiring patterns of subfields and mathematicians’ interest in subfields reflect subfields of featured review or highly cited articles.”
- “A recent commentary by Radin et al. (2020), as well as an earlier critique (Radin et al., 2019), heavily misrepresented the methodology and statistical interpretation of this experiment that was commissioned by the funder (www.fetzer-franklin-fund.org) to be performed blindly by Radin.”
- “[T]he linguistic evolutionary patterns in scientific discourse have been interrupted by external factors even though this scientific discourse would likely have cumulatively developed into a professional and specialized genre.”
- “Our material shows, among other things, that the public discourse developed in newspapers creates a favorable environment for bibliometrics-centered science policies…”
- Why integrating the discussion of research integrity and fraud is important in the history of science.
- Death threats forced a Lund University researcher fired for misconduct into hiding — and now she’s fighting back.
- “The most common problem was the citation of nonexistent findings (38.4%), followed by an incorrect interpretation of findings (15.4%).” A look at citations of frequently cited papers.
- Doctors systematically suppress conflicts of interest” in Germany, BuzzFeed Germany reports based on an analysis of millions of records.
- “At this point, the crooked professor relies upon crooked friends to cite him and boost his ratings.” Dawn.com reports on “The Academic Ratings Racket.”
- “Retraction notices as a high-stakes academic genre.”
- “How Science Beat the Virus: And what it lost in the process.”
- “Women Are Underrepresented and Receive Differential Outcomes at [American Society For Microbiology] Journals: a Six-Year Retrospective Analysis.”
- “Professor Gast said she was ‘sorry that, at times, I made some senior staff feel unappreciated and left out. I am very sorry that I bullied someone.'”
- “A study that claimed the Indian subcontinent might be the place where the earliest human-to-human novel coronavirus transmission occurred was withdrawn…”
- “How a torrent of COVID science changed research publishing — in seven charts.” Holly Else, in Nature, reports that “it changed how and what scientists study.”
- “In this analysis of 20 prominent [public health journals], detailed disclosure requirements, the inclusion of timeframes, and policy accessibility were found lacking in editorial, compared with author, [financial conflict of interest] policies.”
- Australia’s “Curtin University has referred allegations of failing to thoroughly investigate serious misconduct claims involving some of its professors…”
- “The scientific literature and publishing scientists have been rapidly and massively infected by COVID-19 creating opportunities and challenges. There is evidence for hyper-prolific productivity.”
- “Harvard Data Science Review explores reproducibility and replicability in science.” (press release)
- Retraction Watch is honored to be among NewsGuard’s “Unsung Heroes” who “are models in producing content that is truthful, compelling, credible, and transparent.”
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