Weekend reads: A lawsuit over a cell line; criminal charges for a science agency; nonsense in prestigious journals

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Leading marine ecologist, now White House official, violated prominent journal’s policies in handling now-retracted paper
• How one US organization hopes to make retractions more visible
• Here’s what happened when a publisher looked more closely at a paper milled paper
• Retraction of review of broccoli’s health benefits is 22nd for deceased author, 5th for one of his postdocs
• Author defends paper claiming COVID-19 vaccines kill five times more people over 65 than they save
• Elsevier corrects a retraction notice following questions from Retraction Watch

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 162. And there are now more than 30,000 retractions in our database.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

• “Henrietta Lacks Estate Sues Thermo Fisher Over HeLa Cell Line.”
• “Science agency on trial following deadly White Island volcano eruption.”
• “The best science writers learn that…peer-reviewed publications are not gospel and even prestigious journals are polluted by nonsense…”
• “Top U.S. science funder says it is swamped by investigations of foreign influence on grantees.”
• “Covid-19 Panel of Scientists Investigating Origins of Virus Is Disbanded.” The panel was affiliated with The Lancet.
• “A one hour introduction to bias detection.”
• “These analyses suggest that gender disparity is closely related to the first-mover and cumulative advantage that men have in physics, and is not an intentional act of discrimination towards women.”
• “Head of Wellcome-funded Malawi health project investigated for bullying.”
• “Everybody realised that preprints are like a moving train, you’ve got to get onboard or you’ll be left behind.” Four years of preprints in chemistry.
• “Sci-Hub: Journals Must Stop Exploiting Research for Profits.”
• “[P]rizewinning topics produce 40% more papers and 33% more citations, retain 55% more scientists, and gain 37 and 47% more new entrants and star scientists, respectively, in the first five-to-ten years after the prize.”
• “On a day to celebrate the Nobel in medicine, a stain still mars the institute that awards it.”
• Who retracts more often: Men or women?
• “After valley fever rips through Arizona breeding colony, questions are raised about monkey research.”
• How many published papers contain plagiarism? A new meta-analysis says nearly one in five.
• “The academic social networking site ResearchGate has removed about 200,000 files from among the research papers it publicly shares, prompted by a spate of new copyright complaints from Elsevier and the American Chemical Society (ACS).”
• “About 60 percent of IEEE conferences, magazines, and journals have no practices in place to ensure reproducibility of the research they publish.”
• “NIH ignored my report of sexual misconduct by Axel Grothey—and danced around questions from Congress.”
• “For the ‘good of the lab’: Insights from three focus groups concerning the ethics of managing a laboratory or research group.”
• “Scientific misconduct represents the most common reason for retraction in cardiothoracic and vascular anesthesia.”
• “Systematic review and meta-analyses of studies analysing instructions to authors from 1987 to 2017.”
• “After years of failed experiments, I made a mid-Ph.D. pivot. Here’s what I learned.”
• A hand surgeon in South Korea is up to 13 retractions. Here’s the latest, and our coverage of the first seven from last year.
• The president of West Liberty University faces plagiarism charges.
• “Unfortunately, there is little agreement on how and when to retract a study, as well as unwanted stigma attached to retractions even when the error was an honest mistake.”
• “Iranian-born scientist sues University of Alabama at Birmingham, alleges discrimination.”
• “EU institutions have made major improvements in reporting trial results, report finds.”
• A retraction of a story about 9/11.

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