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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- $1.5 million program targets changes to academic incentives
- Editors of criminology journal resign amid concern about review times
- ‘Cosmic magnet’ study retracted after cleaning agent wipes away results
- Deputy minister in Iraq losing papers with signs of paper mill involvement
- Soil scientist previously named in citation scandal appointed to editor role at Elsevier journal
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500.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):
- “Tracking Shutdown Impact and Changes at PubMed.”
- EU’s research commissioner “appears to cite discredited study in AI speech.”
- “KPMG corrects its own phantom reference” attributing a book chapter to our founders after our coverage prompted an Australian senator’s inquiry last year. Another instance of false citations this week: “Deloitte to refund government, admits using AI” in report with three “nonexistent academic references.”
- University president accused of plagiarising doctoral dissertation “by former professor,” submits to assessment.
- “As paper mills and fraud proliferate, experts warn the retraction rate should reach 2% of published literature—ten times current levels”: A piece on a talk by our Ivan Oransky.
- “NIH decision looms about caps on scholarly-journal publishing fees.”
- “Newly unsealed warrant shows search of fired IU professor’s homes part of federal funding fraud investigation.”
- Times Higher Education says when calculating their university rankings, paper and citation counts don’t include retractions.
- “After months in limbo, four NIH institute directors fired.”
- “The system is not designed for replications”: managing director of Münster Center for Open Science “on the importance and acceptance of replication studies in science.”
- “Scientific publishing without gatekeeping: an empirical investigation of eLife’s new peer review process.”
- “Paper Chase: A Global Industry Fuels Scientific Fraud in the U.S.”
- “All academics should be scientific sleuths, says scholar” Lonni Besançon.
- Plant geneticist in Iran gets another retraction for image duplication five years after our coverage of his work.
- A study of journals that retracted paper mill articles found more than half were health and medicine-focused.
- “Reproducibility Failure in Biomedical Research: Problems and Solutions.”
- “Scholarly Communication Is a Research Problem. This Means You.”
- “AI in peer review: where to draw the line?”
- A journal looks at 21 years of its own data to quantify reviewer declines.
- “The typical sample size of a correlation coefficient has dropped something like 25% over the last 40 years,” says ecologist.
- “A Network Analysis of Retracted Citations by Iranian Computer Scientists.”
- “On and off-the-record correction practices: A survey-based study of how chemistry researchers react to errors.”
- “Journals and publishers crack down on research from open health data sets.” A link to our coverage.
- “Banning Sci-Hub highlights India’s unequal access to knowledge.”
- MIT Technology Review takes down article on an AI platform for churches because its characterization of it was “based largely on a now discontinued product,” they write.
- “Frequency of statistical mistakes and associated article characteristics” in dermatology journals.
- “Why wait 6 months for reviewer 2 when you can get roasted by an #AI in seconds?” A metascientist’s thought exercise. Meanwhile, an AI society announces it’s incorporating LLMs into its review process.
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