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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Dental school dean up to five retractions for cancer research papers
- Can you explain what these 1,500 papers are doing in this journal?
- Exclusive: Hindawi and Wiley to retract over 500 papers linked to peer review rings
- When emails asking to withdraw manuscripts started repeating themselves, an editor got suspicious
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 264. There are nearly 36,000 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):
- Romania to “introduce effective amnesty on doctoral plagiarism and loosen rules on candidates’ relatives from serving on hiring and promotion committees.”
- Romania’s education minister resigns following accusations of plagiarism.
- “Erroneous Erratum to Accounting Fraud Article.”
- “How Nature contributed to science’s discriminatory legacy.”
- “Case Study in Research Integrity: You Can Disagree, Without Being Disagreeable.”
- “Institutional policies on plagiarism management: A comparison of universities in mainland China and Hong Kong.”
- “Perceived publication pressure and research misconduct: should we be too bothered with a causal relationship?”
- “Why she teaches her students about scientific failure.”
- “It is our understanding that this author does not exist.” Here’s background on a retraction that may be one of many.
- “Boston Scientific Workers Allegedly Called Out Misuse of Its Device and Were Ignored.”
- “‘Something is seriously wrong’: Room-temperature superconductivity study retracted.”
- “What is the best way to ensure that scientific criticism is heard and understood?”
- “Is the Lancet complicit in research fraud?”
- “This rapid response is being attributed in a misleading way on social media.”
- “What is the sensitivity and specificity of the peer review process?”
- “Biden’s Rule-Breaking Integrity Official.”
- “Transparency, completeness, and consistency of reporting of COVID-19 clinical trials were insufficient both in preprints and peer-reviewed publications.”
- “‘Honorary authors’ of scientific papers abound—but they probably shouldn’t.”
- How Quanta handled the retraction of a high-profile paper on room temperature superconductivity.
- “Quality Output Checklist and Content Assessment (QuOCCA): a new tool for assessing research quality and reproducibility.”
- “Memory Games, Part II: “’The Editors-in-Chief Have Retracted This Article.” More on the Cassava imbroglio, courtesy a public records request.
- “The Leader would like to retract all quotes from Peterson from the story.”
- Our Ivan Oransky had a paper accepted to Science. Or maybe he didn’t.
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That “You Can Disagree, Without Being Disagreeable” article is a lot spicier than the headline suggests. If it wasn’t a government blog it would probably be framed a lot differently.
The article referred to in the “This rapid response is being attributed in a misleading way on social media” link is about acute hepatitis of unknown cause in children.
The response, published in April 2022, may not have been peer reviewed, but the suggestion that this hepatitis was caused by adeno-associated virus type 2 appears to have correctly anticipated the cause of these hepatitis outbreaks. At least in the UK.
See the following summary:
https://www.statnews.com/2022/07/25/new-studies-offer-theory-on-cause-of-unusual-hepatitis-cases-in-kids/
The letter by letter plagiarism in Romania is an old-scholars’ and non-experts’ business. If you want good stuff, take a look at this: https://www.bjbabe.ro/ (be confident, is not a porn site!).
If it wasn’t sad, it would be very funny: spectacular increase in the number of citations of members of boards (editorial advisory board, local (???) editorial board, international editorial board!!!!) from one year to another, titles very far from the field of biotechnology and a plethora of anomalous citations (it seems to be the only reason to be of this science-parodical journal).
Another interesting thing is that the journal is not published under the auspices of any university or research entity, nor any organization. Or maybe Captain Jack Sparrow took up biotechnology on an invisible ship in the Black Sea?
Har Harrr. We communist romanians be looking for plunder an yee master degrees and doctorates be it sunny boy. Harrr.