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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Meet the medical resident who had his wife peer review five of his papers
- University clears scientist of logging industry’s misconduct allegations
- Irony alert: stolen voices, relative rip-off
- After grad student suicide, misconduct findings, university suspends professor
- “Falsifying elements” prompt retraction of three more papers by former “Peorian of the Year”
- Bad blood at a lab leads to retraction after postdoc publishes study without supervisor’s permission
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 89.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “Who is Camille Noûs, the fictitious French researcher with nearly 200 papers?” And is she related to Bruce Le Catt, by any chance?
- “The English teacher, Oxford University Press, and an accusation of heinous plagiarism.”
- PETA is asking Scientific Reports to retract a paper by scientists at the U.S. NIH that “describes experiments in which rhesus macaques were deprived of water, strapped into restraint chairs and shown videos of shapes engaging in human-like behaviors while experimenters measured their eye movements.”
- Claims that publishing during the pandemic was something utterly different are “just nonsense – complete revisionist history,” says one of our co-founders.
- “But while flawed, the current academic publishing system may be more valuable to policy makers and society at large than some proposed alternatives…”
- Police in London, UK, are warning students and universities against using Sci-Hub.
- “‘Add-my-name’ as a parody of research collaboration among Nigerian researchers.”
- “Retracting publications doesn’t stop them from influencing science. ‘Zombie papers’ keep on getting cited, with huge ripple effects.”
- “However, the explosion of preprints is sometimes portrayed as the downfall of formal peer review. It’s the opposite.”
- “Join one research team on their first voyage through the world of preprinting, a trip that logged 20 citations, 5,500 pdf downloads, 168,083 HTML page views, and an Altmetric score of over 3,700—before their manuscript was published in Nature Immunology.”
- “Is preprint the future of science? A thirty year journey of online preprint services.”
- “ASAPbio has developed resources for preprint servers, institutions, scientists, and journalists to promote the responsible reporting of research in the media.”
- “What I learned about scientific misconduct from reading the NSF OIG’s semiannual reports.”
- “How long do institutional investigations into accusations of serious scientific misconduct typically take?”
- “Scientists Should Admit They Bring Personal Values to Their Work.”
- “Reckoning with Whiteness in Scholarly Publishing”: A look at university presses.
- “The results suggest that free content is more attractive to users than paid content.” Perhaps not surprising, but still.
- “Julie Burchill, a columnist for the UK’s Sunday Telegraph, posted a lengthy and fairly humiliating retraction letter after smearing a fellow journalist as a pedophile-worshipping Islamist.”
- “Unfortunately, in addition to the latest unpublished column submission by the individual, four other articles published September 2020 to December 2020 were found to have varying levels of plagiarism.”
- “A British law firm specialising in data breaches which admitted to sending plagiarised claim letters has paid £45,000 damages to a competitor.”
- How could Michael Kinyon turn down the opportunity to publish in the International Online Predatory Journal of All Mathematical Sciences?
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“Julie Burchill, a columnist for the UK’s Sunday Telegraph, posted a lengthy and fairly humiliating retraction letter”
Not really a scientific publication, though — it was an exchange of offensive tweets, with little or no relevance to scientific research. If Retraction Watch is really going to track every tweet on every subject that’s formally retracted or disowned, that’s going to be a major effort, not to mention a major distraction from the task of monitoring retractions in the serious scientific literature.