Weekend reads: Academania; redaction bias; a Harvard star falls; top retractions of 2021

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• ‘Why did this take over five years?’ Reflecting on two new retractions
• Harvard journal retracts paper on Black advocacy in elections
• AHA journal tones down abstract linking COVID-19 vaccines to risk of heart problems
• Court tosses $50 billion suit by ‘prince of panspermia’ against Springer Nature
• Researchers ‘devastated’ after finding manipulated data in study of pediatric brain tumors
• Two expressions of concern arrive for papers linked to beleaguered biotech Cassava
• Revealed: The inner workings of a paper mill
• Elsevier subjects entire special issue of journal on COVID-19 to an expression of concern

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 204. There are now more than 32,000 retractions in our database — which now powers retraction alerts in EndNote, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

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

• “Are you suffering from academania?”
• “The new normal? Redaction bias in biomedical science.”
• “A portion of his salary was deposited in a Chinese bank account and the remainder — an amount he estimated as between $50,000 and $100,000 — was paid in $100 bills, which he carried home in his luggage.”
• The top retractions of 2021, from Star Trek to ivermectin. Our annual tradition for The Scientist.
• “We have to work together to detect and root out fraud or people who are trying to game the system,” says the executive vice president of Wiley.
• “Journals adopt AI to spot duplicated images in manuscripts.”
• “Our results suggest that, although deciding which papers to cite is an individual choice, the cumulative effects of these choices needlessly harm a subset of scholars.”
• “2021 In Review: The Culture of Academic Publishing.”
• “Guest authorship as research misconduct: definitions and possible solutions.”
• “Will innumeracy cause this study to be retracted? Don’t count on it…”
• “A survey of retractions in the cardiovascular literature.”
• Researchers have retracted a study linking low vitamin A levels to sleep problems in autism for “fundamental errors.”
• “The CDC’s Flawed Case for Wearing Masks in School.”
• “Questionable Research Practices and Misconduct Among Norwegian Researchers.”
• “BMJ Slams ‘Incompetent’ Facebook Fact-Checking of Vaccine Article.” And the fact-checker responds.
• “‘A moral issue to correct’: the long tail of Elena Ceaușescu’s fraudulent scientific work.”

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