Weekend reads: Academic fraud factories; zombie science; ‘Silicon Valley’s new obsession’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Authors admit to stealing parts of a paper from a thesis on an unrelated subject
• Should residents and fellows be encouraged to publish systematic reviews and meta-analyses?
• How an ivermectin study that didn’t mention COVID-19 fell under scrutiny
• ‘My egregious delay’: Science journal takes more than three years to retract paper after university investigation
• Courage and correction: how editors handle – and mishandle – errors in their journals
• Two abstracts about unapproved heart technology retracted

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 207. 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):

• “Academic fraud factories are booming, warns plagiarism sleuth.” And: Revealed: The inner workings of one such paper mill.
• “The Attack of Zombie Science: They look like scientific papers. But they’re distorting and killing science.”
• “We have a rule that nobody at Arcadia can publish in a journal.” A look at “Silicon Valley’s New Obsession.”
• “Why was a study about autism cited by a paper on plant beauty?”
• “A Visionary Without a Country.”
• “Prosecutors drop China Initiative case against MIT’s Gang Chen.”
• University of Kansas “diversity leader admits plagiarizing his campuswide message regarding MLK Day, says he was in a hurry.”
• “Locke’s team waited for a peer-review of their own experiment, the results of which were published Thursday in the American Journal of Transplantation.”
• “What can be done to improve research integrity?” And our written evidence for an inquiry by the UK’s House of Commons Science & Technology Committee.
• “Living Science: Authorship then and now.”
• “18 papers co-authored by ICMR ex-researcher flagged for ‘image manipulation’, 2nd case this month.”
• “British newspaper retracted advert for vaccine ‘crimes.’“
• “Should journals introduce new requirements for researchers reporting elemental analysis data?”
• “Medical discoveries have been shared at an unprecedented pace during the COVID-19 pandemic, but so have fraudulent studies, which has led to worries about scientific integrity.”
• “Covid-19: a provisional assessment of retractions of scientific articles” from France.
• Another ivermectin-COVID-19 retraction of a paper with a massive Altmetric score — undated until we asked Springer Nature about it.
• A correction of a correction. It’s not the first.
• “Which should concern me more — being asked to peer review papers about which I have no expertise, or seeing lousy papers on which I have expertise published?”
• “Are We Standing on Unreliable Shoulders? The Effect of Retracted Papers Citations on Previous and Subsequent Published Papers.”
• A “plea to publish less.”
• The upside of a retraction? Earning citations for your salami-sliced and duplicated papers that led to it.
• “Scientific journals must be alert to potential manipulation in citations and referencing.”
• An editor who paid attention to scientific integrity steps down after 20 years.
• “Leading Queensland cancer researcher Mark Smyth fabricated scientific data, review finds.”
• “How Physicians Became Scientists: The introduction of formal peer review to journals aided medical doctors in their quest to bring more scientific rigor to their field.”
• “An Appeal Court in the Lagos Judicial Division has dismissed a case of plagiarism” filed by a university against two of its lecturers.
• “Inside The New York Times’ crossword correction on coal.”

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