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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Exercise science grad student at Australian university dismissed after he admitted faking data, says supervisor
- ‘Striking’: Journal editor suspects paper mills behind rash of withdrawn manuscripts
- Publisher retracting 68 articles suspected of being paper mill products
- Why one biologist says it’s not too late to retract the “arsenic life” paper
- The mill and the loss: Journal up to 39 retractions from paper mill articles
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 76.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- A high-profile scientist in China with five retractions has been “cleared of fraud and plagiarism charges involving more than 60 papers.”
- “What my retraction taught me.” A reflection on a case we covered.
- A scientist who has lost two libel suits has now been sued twice for unpaid legal bills of more than $1.5 million.
- “[W]orkload has become so enormous that the academic community is no longer able to supply the reviewing resources…”
- “A big chunk of Trump’s 1776 report appears lifted from an author’s prior work.”
- A public college in New York agrees to repay more than $98,000 in National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration grants “to resolve a federal investigation concerning alleged fabricated research results.”
- “As image analysts at two major imaging facilities, we are regularly asked to replicate the typically vague methods in published papers and find this task ranges from straight‐forward, over pleasantly challenging, to impossible.”
- “‘Textbook case’ of disability discrimination in grant applications.”
- “[T]he likelihood for a scholar to author an [article processing charge open access] article increases with male gender, employment at a prestigious institution…association with a STEM discipline, greater federal research funding, and more advanced career stage…”
- Cell Research celebrates its 30th anniversary.
- “The pandemic has brought new public attention to non-peer-reviewed research, especially in medical fields.”
- “Now, there are a lot of academics who care dearly about good patient care, and I love them, but I don’t love the ones who aren’t really focused on better patient care – the ‘publish or perish crowd’ and the ‘impact factor crowd’.”
- “With the increasing appreciation for trials with real-world applicability, editors might wish to favour trials with both pragmatic intentions and pragmatic designs, and guide their reviewers and authors to avoid over-reach in making real-world recommendations from trials that are mostly explanatory in design.”
- “But if we could muster the desire and discipline to better combat bias in research, at least we could take comfort in the fact that what we are calling science is in fact actual science, as free of bias as we can possibly make it.”
- Critics of a colleagues’ paper were called “baboons” as a funder’s chairman tried to silence them, according to a report.
- “[H]e now sees press conferences as ‘a spectacle that science doesn’t need…”
- “We found that Australian [humanities and social sciences] academics face increasing pressure to publish journal articles rather than books, to publish books with prestigious international publishers, and to secure external funding for their research.”
- “In two experiments, we found that source trustworthiness but not source expertise indeed influences retraction effectiveness, with retractions from low-trustworthiness sources entirely ineffective.”
- “In the author’s opinion, an overall error rate of 40% across the three years for RQES is simply too high.” How accurate are references?
- An MIT professor was charged with “failing to disclose contracts, appointments and awards” he received from China.
- “Daily Telegraph rebuked over Toby Young’s Covid column.”
- “Publishing improprieties – a new awakening needed.”
- “USU scholar accused of ‘self-plagiarism’, forfeits appointment as rector.”
- “I know many analyses and reports are downright dodgy – but that doesn’t mean they all are..”
- “An expert’s opinion: An interview with Adam Marcus on scientific publishing in times of COVID-19.”
- Ritsumeikan University finds evidence of plagiarism by one of its professors.
- “Academic misconduct: ‘Students are buying degrees that they aren’t earning.'”
- When attention isn’t always positive: The 3 retracted papers with 2020’s highest Altmetrics.
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JEAA are reminding Croce there are indeed consequences for ones actions in the real world (even if, in the esteem-based academic parallel universe, OSU was unwilling to offer this lesson after years of, alleged, investigations). Hope JEAA prevail in being made whole.
The high profile scientist issue in the China is a joke. As long the CCP is there, there might be no honest scientific work being done there.
Re Cao:
As I noted on Twitter, “In other words, if a scientist is well connected in China, data falsification is fine. 20 years of data fakery = 1 year funding ban.
I think *any* research out of China should be looked on with great skepticism until they take research publications more seriously.”
The Cao case certainly seems problematic. However, my impression is that, over the years, there have been way too many instances in the US in which cases of misconduct of ‘well-connected’, senior researchers, especially who bring lots of grant dollars to an institution, often result in little to no real consequences to these offenders (at least at the institutional level), relative to investigations of ‘less productive’ and/or untenured individuals, which are more likely to result in more serious consequences. If there is some real basis for the above observation, and other considerations aside (e.g., more paper mills originate from China), might a call to some skepticism of *any* research coming out of the US be similarly justifiable?