Weekend reads: Publish or perish, the card game; revisiting fraud in anesthesiology; the Hindawi mass retraction timeline

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Journal republishes chiropractic paper it had retracted after legal threats
• PNAS corrects article by Kavli prize winner who threatened to sue critic
• Paper claiming to discover new pain syndrome retracted 
• ‘No animosity between us’: Lungless frog finding retracted after 16 years
• ‘Violated’: Engineering professor found her name on four papers she didn’t write

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 50,000 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 — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

• “‘Publish or Perish’ is now a card game — not just an academic’s life.”
• A journal editor wondered if data were “too good to be true.” A BBC Radio segment featuring our Adam Marcus.
• The “under-reported, puzzlingly incomplete, and very slow” Hindawi mass retraction.
• “Should Publishers Invoice Authors for Retraction Costs?”
• “Diversity statements should not be required for federal STEMM grant funding.”
• “We argue against treating reproducibility as an inherently desirable property of scientific results, and in favor of viewing it as a tool to measure distance between an original study and its replications.”
• “A publishing platform that places code front and centre.”
• “Authors are increasingly paying to publish their papers open access. But is it fair or sustainable?”
• “The US physics community is not done working on trust.”
• “Should scientists be paid when AI chatbots use their work?”
• “In short, I believe there is a clear case for devoting a small share (perhaps one tenth of one percent) of the federal government’s research funding to direct replication.”
• A study found “that the loss of faith in scientific research [sparks] research-related misconduct against publishers.”
• How research fraud can lead to “a humanitarian disaster larger than most wars.”
• 40% of journal editors in a survey said “only 31%–50% of the manuscripts accepted for publication are statistically correct.”
• Researchers look at “why scientists find certain publishing practices more attractive than others.”
• A study found that molecular biology retractions “and their citations were more likely to be retracted for the same reason,” and most were “published by the same publisher and even the same journal.”
• First and corresponding authors are “more likely to be liable for scientific misconduct,” a study found.
• A study looks at review mills: “a new category of reviewer misconduct that flies in the face of reviewer ethics and integrity.”
• A secondary author on a removed paper said he had “absolutely no involvement in the processes related to writing, submitting, reviewing, and editing the article.”
• “Oncology Conference Registration Fraud: Be on Alert, Experts Warn.”
• “Policies on Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Among Academic Publishers: A Cross-Sectional Audit.”
• “Retractions as a Bitter Pill Corrective Measure to Eliminate Flawed Science.”
• “Researchers are willing to trade their results for journal prestige: results from a discrete choice experiment.”
• “Nigerian professor used ghostwriters for politician’s academic proposal.”
• “Why do some academic articles receive more citations from policy communities?”
• “What should journals do to prevent the publication of methodologically flawed systematic reviews?”
• “How did the scientific article evolve to the universally-recognizable format it has today?”
• “Never Waste a Good Crisis.” A conversation with Klaas Sijtsma, a dean at Tilburg University during the Diederik Stapel scandal.

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