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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- When PubMed got it right, Elsevier got it wrong, and Retraction Watch helped clear it up
- Springer Nature psycholinguistics journal retracts over a dozen articles for authorship, peer review issues
- Journal corrects nearly 100 papers after authors fail to disclose they are on the editorial board
- Citation issues cost these 20 journals their impact factors this year
- Editors won’t retract talc and cancer article J&J says is false in court
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 60,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 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):
- How should scientists – including Nobel Prize winners – respond to allegations about their work? Practices to avoid or embrace, by our co-founders.
- Nature to start publishing peer review files automatically “to open up ‘black box’ of science.”
- “To ‘publish or perish’, do we need to add ‘AI or die’?”
- “Issues with dozens of papers prompt inquiry into prolific stroke researcher.”
- “The U.S. Government Is Starving Its Own Scientists of Knowledge” by canceling journal subscriptions, says a government-funded entomologist.
- “How AI-generated content and misinformation are corrupting online academic resources, creating a ‘zombie’ internet where errors and fake science perpetuate.”
- “Meta-analyses almost always include bad studies” and we shouldn’t take them “at face value,” says Joe Simmons on Data Colada.
- “Uptick in ‘unprecedented’, ‘exceptional’ and other grandiose terms within scientific papers can be traced to launch of ChatGPT” and make papers “harder to read.”
- “NIH plan to remove ideological influence from science. How does this fit in the junk science being promoted” by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services?
- Researcher investigates journal that falsely attributed a fabricated article to him.
- “NIH cuts quash $323 million for neuroscience research and training.”
- “Uncovering misconduct among the Alzheimer’s ‘amyloid mafia.'” A link to our coverage of controversy surrounding Charles Piller’s book.
- DOJ settles with drug development researcher in case of “grant gone awry.”
- “Beyond the oligopoly”: researchers “challenge the assumption of a globally uniform publishing system” by looking into “publishing landscapes in Latin America and Europe.”
- University “to investigate how AI text was part of book written by senior academic.”
- “The Case for Government-Backed Science Publishing.”
- “How reliable are the rankings” of India’s top institutions?
- Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Science blocks the “only body in the country that has the authority to check and establish plagiarism … on incorrect grounds.”
- “Survey reveals gaps in ethical publishing knowledge among Chinese researchers.”
- “The pressure to quantify research is erasing conceptual depth,” says economic historian.
- How a physicist “blew the whistle on a fellow chemist and colleague.” A link to our previous coverage of the case.
- “Rethinking how to estimate the monetary value of publications”: Study finds “research collaborations have an intrinsically higher value” than solo projects.
- “Institutional accountability for research integrity means going beyond enforcing regulations, teaching required responsible conduct of research courses, and responding to allegations of misconduct.”
- “Patient advocate calls for retraction of mystery brain disease report from U.S. medical journal.”
- “A competition to develop computational approaches to detect ‘novelty’ in published papers will help metascientists to study how out-of-the-box research changes the scientific landscape.”
- “We Need AI Standards for Scholarly Publishing: A NISO Workshop Report.”
- “The paper itself cannot be directly updated because of the amount of time that has elapsed since publication,” says a correction to a Neuron article published in April 2023.
- “Have you received a peer review that appeared to have been written by AI?”
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