Weekend reads: ‘Is economics self-correcting?’; ’20 years of ‘terror’ in the laboratory’; a look at self-citations

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Wiley paused Hindawi special issues amid quality problems, lost $9 million in revenue
• Article retracted when authors don’t pay publication fee
• Ob-gyn loses PhD after committee finds he made up research
• Journals dismiss claims that Harvard researcher’s work on race is ‘pseudoscience’

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300. There are more than 39,000 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):

• “Is Economics Self-Correcting? Replications in the American Economic Review.”
• “20 years of ‘terror’ in the laboratory: the ‘abuse of power’ of a Pompeu Fabra professor against his researchers.”
• “Are self-citations a normal feature of knowledge accumulation?”
• “Article Processing Charges are a Heavy Burden for Middle-Income Countries.”
• “A tool for preprint to publication detection shows global inequities in scientific publication.”
• “Is writing a book chapter still a waste of time?”
• “Protecting research integrity: change or the same old ARIC [Australian Research Integrity Committee].”
• “Are female scientists underrepresented in self-retractions for honest error?” asks a new paper.
• “Research misconduct and questionable research practices form a continuum.”
• How “curing” misinformation can do more harm than good.
• “A sad day for science” as a journal publishes “a worthless corrigendum,” says Nina Steinkopf.
• A USC oncologist’s new book is filled with plagiarism, the Los Angeles Times finds. It’s being held from publication.
• “Deception Detection.”
• Jonathan Pruitt earns another retraction, this one from Nature. It joins 14 others.
• “Leading American medical journal continues to omit Black research,” say the authors of a recent analysis.
• “‘MTL knew’: Misconduct allegations independently corroborated in private correspondence to special committee.”
• A former medical school dean has another paper retracted. He’s up to seven.
• “Article retracted when authors don’t pay publication fee.”
• Two new journals seek to fill a neurodiversity gap in the autism literature.
• “I was wrong, says the Harvard professor. And that’s OK.”
• “Overall, 20% of respondents admitted sacrificing the quality of their publications for quantity, and 14% reported that funders interfered in their study design or reporting.”
• “Allegations of Scientific Misconduct Mount as Physicist Makes His Biggest Claim Yet.”
• March 14 event: Our Ivan Oransky on the ethics of reporting on scientific mistakes and misconduct

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