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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Exclusive: ‘Highly problematic’ policy has Saudi university pressuring faculty to cite its research
- Meet the researcher aiming to halt use of ‘fundamentally flawed’ database linking IQ and nationality
- After realizing a fungus contaminated their experiments, researchers retract and redo study
Did you know that Retraction Watch and the Retraction Watch Database are projects of The Center of Scientific Integrity? Others include the Medical Evidence Project, the Hijacked Journal Checker, and the Sleuths in Residence Program. Help support this work.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “An MIT Student Awed Top Economists With His AI Study—Then It All Fell Apart.”
- “Highly cited Egyptian scientists with high h-index scores are increasingly taking part-time positions at Russian universities.”
- “The dangers of using bibliometrics with polluted data.”
- “Chief scientist at China’s top naval research institute detained over ‘faked’ credentials.”
- Study finds “Serial image manipulation in neuroscience articles.” A link to our coverage.
- “Do acts to correct the scientific record need to move out of the shadows?”
- “Editorial bias, nepotism, and the ‘club culture’ in Indian medical journals.”
- Researchers find the “majority” of retractions in biomedical research “are linked to serious violations” like plagiarism and fraud.
- “Research integrity is undoubtedly in crisis”: A response to The Lancet’s editor-in-chief claiming integrity “a challenge not a crisis.”
- 2025 Einstein Foundation Award recipients include a psychologist, a reproducibility effort in Brazil, and a project on how mistakes in the lab affect results.
- On the ScienceGuardians, a “shadowy group trying to discredit scientific integrity detectives,” including Elisabeth Bik, Guillaume Cabanac, and others, online.
- Study suggests “generative AI could make scientific publishing fairer, and more competitive.”
- “Sociology of science: What does it take for erroneous or fraudulent claims to take hold?”: A blog post from Andrew Gelman.
- The “editor’s real work is not gatekeeping. It is partnership. And our most important partnership is with our authors,” writes Harlan Krumholz, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
- New NIH policy “drops ‘paylines’ based on peer-review scores and requires geography and other factors to guide approvals” for grants.
- The BMJ puts expression of concern on paper claiming association between missing first screening appointment and death from breast cancer.
- Researchers say their AI system can “deliver rigorous and constructive feedback on scientific manuscripts in minutes.”
- “Is the China Cycle coming for scholarly publishing?”
- “Massive Amounts of Data: More Publications, Better Science?”
- “A ten-year drive to credit authors for their work — and why there’s still more to do.”
- “Could We Cope Without COPE?”
- “Why the Current Model of Academic Publishing Is Ethically Flawed—and What We Can Do to Change It.”
- Oxford University Press acquiring Karger: “The last large acquisition before big tech brings big change?”
- “Will AI Write the Next ‘Chapter’ in Literature Reviews?” When researchers asked LLMs to generate literature reviews of mental health research, “nearly two-thirds of citations [were] fabricated or inaccurate.”
- “Should scientific papers be written more like blog posts?”
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