Weekend reads: Fringe race science and journals; flags for Stanford president’s papers; rise and fall of peer review

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Mathematician withdraws preprint – 24 years after initial submission
• Penn says access to former Twitter employee’s thesis was ‘mistakenly closed off’ following Elon Musk tweets
• PLOS flags nearly 50 papers by controversial French COVID researcher for ethics concerns
• Cancer researcher banned from federal funding for faking data in nearly 400 images in 16 grant applications
• ‘I never asked or expected to be included as an author’: Retired Penn State prof has three retractions for manipulated peer review

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 279. There are more than 37,000 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):

• “Fringe race researchers looking for credibility have employed the effective strategy of publishing in both junk journals and — if they’re able to — in more respectable ones that are willing to give them room…”
• “Stanford President’s Research Draws Concern From Scientific Journals.”
• “When there are no consequences for misconduct: Parallels between politics and science.”
• “The rise and fall of peer review: Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that’s a great thing.”
• “AI paper mills and image generation require a co-ordinated response from academic publishers.”
• “Editors can’t spot talent. I’ve heard this joke before. It isn’t funny.”
• “[T]he average citation impact of a Scopus-indexed journal is never completely irrelevant to the quality of an article, even though it is never a strong indicator of article quality.”
• “Something odd jumped out at me. The interview quotations are too perfect. They struck me not to be authentic.”
• Why one researcher is “righting the wrongs of my early research and sharing my scientific data with local communities.”
• “Scientific journal investigating UMass hydrogen study after revelations of gas industry influence.”
• “We want to produce this emotional response that, basically, these things that make science give us wrong positive answers can happen to me as a scientist, and here’s how I can avoid that.”
• “How Gender Bias Worsened the Peer-Review Crisis.”
• “The battle against predatory academic journals continues.”
• “Conflict of Interest is increasingly being recognized as a public health concern.”
• A phantom study becomes a ghost paper.
• “Lots of bad science still gets published. Here’s how we can change that.”
• “Put differently, we found only a limited effect of retraction: retraction decreased citation frequency only by about 60%, as compared to non-retracted papers.”
• “Using co-creation methods for research integrity guideline development – How, what, why and when?”
• “Research Trends in Scientific Integrity.”
• “That scholarship often reflects conscious and unconscious biases has long been an open secret in academia.”
• Japan’s Kyushu University cancels a PhD earned by Hui Li in 2015 because an investigation found plagiarism.
• Chicago school “rescinds Ye’s honorary degree.”
• “Axios has removed this article because prior versions fell short of our editorial standards.”

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