Weekend reads: Why was a paper’s acceptance rescinded?; kinder peer review; plagiarism in a plagiarism atonement essay

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Journal retracts C-section paper with ‘impossible’ data
• ‘A terrifying experience’: A team of researchers does the right thing when they find an error
• Another ivermectin-COVID-19 paper is retracted
• A college that doesn’t exist. An email address that goes dark. Who wrote this paper?
• ‘Conclusions related to vaccine safety are not validated’: COVID-19 spike protein paper retracted

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 226. There are more than 33,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, 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):

• An anthropologist says her paper’s “acceptance was reversed prior to publication because the article included content that criticized trans ideology.”
• “Can Peer Review Be Kinder?”
• “Plagiarism Today Plagiarized in a Plagiarism Atonement Essay.” By Jumi Bello.
• “A university has extended a gag order on a thesis by a convicted murderer who is believed to be the first Australian to obtain a doctorate behind bars.”
• “NIH gains new power to police sexual harassment.”
• “China’s biggest academic database faces anti-monopoly probe.”
• China sanctions the ten groups of authors of 19 papers.
• Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth uses our database and blog to ensure retracted work is not cited in reviews.
• “Assessment criteria for research misconduct: Taiwanese researchers’ perceptions.”
• How to work with researchers who critique the way you describe your methods.
• “Ranking of journals by journal impact factors is not exact and may provoke misleading conclusions.”
• “Our analysis discloses that questionable publishers overstate their citation impact by attributing publisher-level self-citations, which make it hard to detect by conventional journal metrics.”
• “Should we publish every correlation during the COVID-19 pandemic?”
• A look at “journals that were repeatedly suppressed from Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports.”
• “Germany weighs whether culling excess lab animals is a crime.”
• “US math professor found guilty in latest China Initiative trial: Mingqing Xiao convicted on tax charges, but found not guilty of grant fraud.”
• “Nobody likes negative feedback but rejection is not all bad. Here is how to see rejection of your article by a peer-reviewed journal as an opportunity.”
• “When Medical ‘Myths’ Outlast the Evidence.”
• “[W]e found that between 1989 and 2019 the number of figures increased 1.5-fold, the number of figure panels increased 3.6-fold, and the number of display items increased 5.6-fold.”
• “And the credit goes to … – Ghost and honorary authorship among social scientists.”
• “Duke Senior’s Commencement Speech Appears to Plagiarize 2014 Address by Harvard Student.”
• The U.S. FDA retracts a warning letter about a product called Shred Her Max following a mixup.
• “Interview with Ivan Oransky on the perils of scientific publishing.”
• “Improving peer review on many fronts.”
• “Why does open access make publishing more complicated?”

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