Weekend reads: Paying cash to boost rankings; billions lost from reformatting manuscripts; ‘the truth police’

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Paper with authorship posted for sale retracted nearly two years after Retraction Watch report
• Spider researcher Jonathan Pruitt faked data in multiple papers, university finds
• Retractions should not take longer than two months, says UK Parliament committee
• Prominent nanoscientist retracts paper after PhD students flagged error
• Article that assessed MDPI journals as “predatory” retracted and replaced

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300. There are now 40,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains 200 titles. 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):

• “Saudi universities entice top scientists to switch affiliations — sometimes with cash.”
• A new paper estimates “~ 2.5 billion USD could be lost between 2022 and 2030—solely due to reformatting articles after a first editorial desk rejection.” It includes guidelines that the journal’s publisher tells us it “will carefully consider.”
• “Data-savvy, with an eye for detail and willing to rub people up the wrong way – meet the outsiders keeping science honest.”
• “Flawed protocol for levodopa clinical trial brings retractions.”
• “Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common.” A Science report on a new preprint.
• The Retraction Watch Database has reached a big milestone: 40,000 retractions.
• “Is the Essence of a Journal Portable?”
• “Do Diamond journals really make use of money, and to what end?”
• “Comparing the prevalence of statistical reporting inconsistencies in COVID-19 preprints and matched controls: A Registered Report.”
• “How to publish responsible reproducible research.”
• “Global drive for more open, rigorous research is growing.”
• “Researchers embracing ChatGPT are like turkeys voting for Christmas.”
• “Identifying spin bias of nonsignificant findings in biomedical studies.”
• “We find that papers written by researchers who are affiliated with the journals’ host institutions on average receive fewer citation counts than those written by non-affiliated researchers.”
• “A Doctor Published Several Research Papers With Breakneck Speed. ChatGPT Wrote Them All.”
• “Among articles stating that data was available upon request, only 17% shared data upon request.”
• “Support for those affected by scientific misconduct is crucial.”
• “Peer review is broken. Paying referees could help fix it.”
• “An analysis of retracted papers in Computer Science.”
• “Unveiling Scientific Articles from Paper Mills with Provenance Analysis.”
• “[S]even years to act on misconduct complaints.”
• “The data might be provided upon request to the corresponding author.” A take on a data availability statement.

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].