If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- University of Melbourne opens formal investigation into education researcher John Hattie
- Most editors at math journal resign over multiple reviews, ‘cloak-and-dagger’ removal of EIC
- Technology journal pulls papers for unauthorized author changes, fictitious emails
In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 63,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to 650, and our mass resignations list has more than 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “I tried to buy a scientific paper“: See a sting unfold on video, while experts and sleuths unpack the paper mill problem.
- “Creating a responsible authorship culture in science: Anchoring authorship practices in principles of transparency, credit, and accountability.”
- Former cancer researcher pleads guilty of attempting to take federally funded research to China. And “Research security policy needs clear guidelines.”
- Researchers who submit papers with hallucinated references “should be sanctioned. Desk reject and one-year ban,” says AI ethics consultant.
- Researchers using UK BioBank inadvertently leaked confidential health records online.
- eLife editors reflect three years after implementing “radical new approach to the publication process.”
- “The Academic Publishing System’s Most Pointless Bottleneck.”
- “IIT Bombay investigates plagiarism allegations against professor.”
- “Reckoning with my ‘ghost years’: why a low publication rate doesn’t always reflect failure.”
- “How AI use in scholarly publishing threatens research integrity, lessens trust, and invites misinformation.”
- AI tool flags plagiarism in 95% of Ph.D. theses submitted this year at India university.
- “Ninety-seven ignored: A personal reflection on the hidden struggles of an academic editor.”
- “Can aspects of predatory publishing be applied to some mainstream and grey journals?”
- “The ethical risks of open-access agreements being used for authorship leverage.”
- “Hallucinated citations produced by generative artificial intelligence may constitute research misconduct when citations function as data in scholarly papers,” say researchers.
- The editor-in-chief on ACS Energy Letters on how AI “may reshape a human-centered model of authorship, peer review, and readership in ways that warrant careful scrutiny.”
- “Research Culture and Integrity in Japan: A Qualitative Study.”
- “Research integrity is locked into an arms race with agentic AI slop.”
- “The Influence of Principlism on the Field of Research Integrity.”
- “AI can help with research, but humans must remain accountable,” say university executives.
- “How to Get There From Here? Barriers and Enablers on the Road Towards Reproducibility in Research.”
- “Against Moral Panic and Citation Fiction”: Researcher criticizes article in support of Enhanced Games, while another says the peer review process at the journal “seems to have broken down.”
- arXiv “declares independence from Cornell.” (Disclosure: Our Ivan Oransky manages the Simons Foundation’s support of the arXiv.)
- “Peer review at the service of society.”
- “Litigating multimillion-dollar scientific fraud cases“: A conversation with attorney Eugenie Reich.
- “The Camel’s Camel”: Elisabeth Bik on a tortured phrase in paper on camel microbiota.
Upcoming talks
- “An Intro to the Retraction Watch Research Accountability Reporting Fellowship” in partnership with The Open Notebook (March 26, virtual)
- “Restoring Trust in Science: Storytelling, AI, and Integrity in Scholarly Publishing,” featuring our Ivan Oransky (March 26, virtual)
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