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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Misspelled cell lines take on new lives — and why that’s bad for the scientific literature
- Journal blacklists doctor in Pakistan ‘out of an abundance of caution’
- Up to one in seven submissions to hundreds of Wiley journals flagged by new paper mill tool
- Rejected paper pops up elsewhere after one journal suspected manipulation
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 47,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 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? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- An Elsevier paper written by ChatGPT goes viral.
- “Harvard Probe Finds Honesty Researcher Engaged in Scientific Misconduct.” More here.
- “Superconductivity scandal: the inside story of deception in a rising star’s physics lab.”
- “These investigations always take too long, are shrouded in secrecy, and lead to public statements crafted by attorneys and crisis consultants that are evasive and incomplete.” Indeed.
- “Australia’s chief scientist takes on the journal publishers gatekeeping knowledge.”
- “Five years ago, Sara Farshchi completed her PhD in Linguistics at Lund University. Now her research has been published under the names of three Ukrainian researchers.”
- “I sent my data to the original journal, and they didn’t care at all. It was very hard to get it published somewhere where you thought the reader of the original paper would find it.”
- “Citation metrics and strategic mutations of scientific research: narratives and evidence.”
- “Using automated analysis of the bibliography to detect potential research integrity issues.”
- Among 6200 medical residents in China, “53.7% of participants admitted to having committed at least one form of research misconduct.” A preprint we featured in October is published.
- “She said the output-focused KPIs have led to an overemphasis on the production of publications in academic journals.”
- “Figures just out reveal that the US National Science Foundation (NSF) received 54 allegations of research misconduct in the 2022–23 financial year.”
- “Peer Review and Scientific Publishing Are Faltering.”
- Court upholds sanctions against University of Northern Iowa professor.
- “And so when they see contradictory result after contradictory result, I don’t blame the public for losing trust in science, because we have not worked to build our own trustability, because we are not policing fraud enough.”
- “More published research should be debunked and retracted, watchdogs say.”
- Not just science: “Princess Catherine Apologizes, Saying She Edited Image.”
- “Papermills prefer Open Access.”
- “‘Damning’ FDA inspection report undermines positive trial results of possible Alzheimer’s drug.”
- “[T]he scientific community writ large need[s] to redouble their commitment to conduct, communicate, critique, and—when an error is found, or misconduct detected—correct the published record in ways that both merit and earn public confidence.”
- “AI-generated rat genitalia: Swiss publisher of scientific journal under pressure.”
- “Automatically listing senior members of departments as co-authors is highly prevalent in health sciences: meta-analysis of survey research.”
- “I don’t think we should ‘combat’ predatory publishers: An interview with Jeffrey Beall.”
- “If we discourage negative reviews, positive ones will lose meaning.”
- “Integrity Issues Rampant in Alzheimer’s Research, Say Investigators.”
- “Journals must expand access to peer review data.”
- “Plagiarism row brews in Pondicherry University.”
- “How Science Sleuths Track Down Bad Research.”
- “Predatory publishing goes to the dogs.” It’s not the first time.
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Elsevier paper written by LLM.
Also one in Radiology Case Reports: sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1930043324001298
“In summary, the management of bilateral iatrogenic I’m very sorry, but I don’t have access to real-time information or patient-specific data, as I am an AI language model.”
Noted by Carl Bergstrom at Bluesky. The link is
https://bsky.app/profile/carlbergstrom.com/post/3knqlji4zgl2d
but restricted to members, so I haven’t seen the discussion there.
Beall: “Interviewers: Have you noticed or heard of recent effective developments in the fight against predatory journals?
JB: No.”
Seems fair. In the long run, I am hopeful that commercial academic publishing will simply die out. The industry used to require intensive labor, heavy machinery, and thus investment. Now most of the actual work is done either directly by the author or by unpaid volunteers, so the publishers are simply extracting large rents from university budgets, for historical reasons with no real connection to the modern world. Meanwhile it is valuable to record the various symptoms of their decline. The predatory journals (which can be reasonably taken to include many of those owned by the largest and best known commercial publishers) may ultimately have a positive effect in demonstrating the failure of the current system, and the uselessness of the associated metrics for decisions regarding hiring and promotion.
Academics designed their research misconduct apparatus to make finding misconduct as hard as possible. It is easier to prosecute someone for corruption than fake data because the whole enterprise is built by and for dodgy academics who churn out papers with no regard for the truth of their findings. And remember that even if an institution finds misconduct (after a years long fight with the fraudster’s lawyers), the journal is not obliged to reply to their request to retract and may have to engage in another years long legal fight. And if that happens, chances are the dodgy paper will continue to influence the literature and practice as citations remain uncorrected.
It’s a miracle that there is a single person alive who trusts science or scientists because it gets harder to defend every year.
What are you babbling about?