Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations.
- Do men or women retract more often? A new study weighs in.
- Chinese basic research funding agency penalizes 25 researchers for misconduct.
- Remembering Mario Biagioli, who articulated how scholarly metrics lead to fraud.
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500.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?
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “Journal plagued with problematic papers, likely from paper mills, pauses submissions.”
- The Trump administration may be walking back the announcement that it’s cutting contracts with Springer Nature, according to an update from Nature.
- Research papers from 14 institutions contained hidden prompts directing AI tools to give them good reviews.
- “RFK Jr. says medical journals are ‘corrupt.’” Former NEJM editors say they “know he’s wrong.”
- “Mass Leak Showed the Harvard Law Review Assessed Articles for DEI Values. Some Authors Say That’s Not a Problem.”
- “Amid White House claims of a research ‘replication crisis,’ scientists offer solutions” while some call it “overblown.”
- “Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications.” Coverage in Nature & New York Times.
- “Indians are gaming US immigration to get Einstein visas meant for top scientists” using paper mills.
- “In a male-dominated field, my success became misconduct,” says “principal investigator of a multimillion-euro European project.”
- NIH-funded research is now open-access. But could cuts to funding “have a noticeable effect on publication volumes?”
- “Different Methods Of Identifying Preprint Matches Yield Diverging Estimates Of Rates Of Preprinting.”
- What incentives do companies need to publish research?
- “Exclusive: NIH still screens grants in process a judge ruled illegal.”
- “Journal Editors Do Not Need To Worry About Preventing Misinformation From Being Spread”: A debate from the European Association of Science Editors conference.
- “Why it’s important to know who did what in a research paper.”
- “Why too much biomedical research is often undeserving of the public’s trust.”
- Researcher who “published one article every three days” loses 16 papers.
- Researcher “advocates a shift toward ethical, responsible, and transparent use of LLMs in scholarly publication.”
- “Panel with AI experts to review appeal” of university student “penalised for academic misconduct” in Singapore.
- “Are AI Bots Knocking Digital Collections Offline? An Interview with Michael Weinberg.”
- “Attitudes to sanctions for serious research misconduct”: Survey of sleuths and integrity officers.
- “AI, peer review and the human activity of science: When researchers cede their scientific judgement to machines, we lose something important.”
- “Developing a Criteria Framework for Peer Review: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis.”
- “How Peer Review Became Science’s Most Dangerous Illusion.”
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, 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].