Weekend reads: ‘Strife at eLife’; fraudulent science at Monsanto; cats and chatbots writing papers

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• After a sleuth reveals a paper with authorships advertised for sale, it’s retracted
• Here’s one article that won’t be making any top 50 papers list
• Gov’t committee in Pakistan lets plagiarizing vice-chancellor off the hook
• When it takes two university-federal agency letters – and five years – for a journal to retract a paper
• When journals don’t meet their ethical guidelines, will anyone hold them accountable?

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300.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):

• “On 9 March, 29 eLife editors — including the journal’s former editor-in-chief, Randy Schekman — wrote …asking that Eisen be replaced ‘immediately’.”
• “‘Ashamed to Put My Name to It’: Monsanto, Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories, and the Use of Fraudulent Science, 1969–1985.”
• “Thanks to generative AI, catching fraud science is going to be this much harder.”
• “[P]eer review has been widely considered to be a form of quality assurance, yet today, it is the subject of considerable debate, given its (also widely recognized) shortcomings.”
• “From Cats to Chatbots: How Non-Humans Are Authoring Scientific Papers.”
• “Retractions relevant to COVID-19: does the retraction rate jump during the pandemic?”
• “Science journalism put to the test of ‘all covid’ news and the scientific method.”
• “Complaint related to research misconduct, animal abuse filed against the University of North Dakota.”
• “The multiple uses of peer review: an interview with Marcel LaFlamme.”
• “Most notably, the committee’s report calls for researchers to scrap the term ‘race’ itself in most studies…”
• “Our analysis confirms that when bibliometric indicators are integrated into systems of incentives, they are capable of affecting rapidly and visibly the citation behavior of entire countries.”
• “Responsible Conduct of Research – Preparedness for Times of Crisis.”
• “’How did this get published in PNAS?’” My response: ‘well, PNAS is not a good journal.'”
• “Brain imaging do-over offers clues to field’s replication problem.” (Spectrum, on this study.)
• “U.S. government agencies may have been double billed for projects in Wuhan, China, records indicate; probe launched.”
• “Peer review perpetuates barriers for historically excluded groups.”
• “Is our current review process, which is generally the same for most journals, outdated?”
• “Overcoming the ‘ostrich effect.'”
• A 2009 study of homosexuality and child abuse earns an expression of concern but “should be retracted.”
• “Why research integrity matters and how it can be improved.”
• “When multiple generations of academics have internalised the imperative to ‘publish or perish’, how will they respond to a technology which promises to automate significant elements of this process?”
• “Quality questions as publisher’s growth challenges big players: Analysis shows Swiss publisher MDPI set up almost 56,000 special issues with a closing date in 2023.”
• “ACM’s pivotal role in the field of computing leads some to argue that ACM bears a responsibility to be more forthcoming about its findings of violations of its policies.”
• East Lansing High School “Principal Resigned Following Discovery of ‘Fraudulent Degree,’ Superintendent Says.”
• “Peer reviewers from Low- and Middle-Income Countries for open access journals in oncology can improve the equity in cancer research and clinical trials.”
• “The Right to Retract and the Danger of Retractions.”

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].