If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- 10 years ago, Elisabeth Bik published a preprint heard around the world
- Major pharmacology journals flag another 15 papers by scientist facing criminal probe
- ‘I asked him to stop’: Father adds daughter’s name to over 100 preprints without her permission
- A response to: Should universities investigate questionable papers students and faculty wrote elsewhere? Read the original guest post
- Another retraction and two investigations for chemist
- Journal goes dark after impersonating Eric Topol and others
- Buying a first author slot can cost you anywhere from $56 to $5,600
In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 64,000 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):
- Private health records of 500,000 volunteers in the UK Biobank project “offered for sale on Chinese website.”
- “Institutional support for ethical AI adoption in higher education amid the rising trend of manuscript retractions.”
- “The British lawyer using US courts to fight research fraud.” Read Eugenie Reich’s recent guest post for Retraction Watch.
- “Investigation Into Rogue Toxicology Lab Wins 2026 McElheny Award.”
- “Digital identity and the systemic vulnerability of peer review: A call for resilience, awareness, and shared governance.”
- “Moving from Identifier to Identity for Researchers.” Our Q&A from last year on STM’s Research Identity Verification Framework.
- “Showcasing research achievements and safeguarding research integrity: How do Chinese universities fare?”
- “Faced with rising processing charges for international journal articles, China is advancing reforms in its scientific research evaluation system.”
- “Paying reviewers can fix system’s ‘structural problem’, editor argues.”
- “‘Sophisticated fraud’: Impersonators target academics and private universities with lure of government grants.”
- “Checking for Statistical Errors in Primary Studies: A Way to Improve Meta-Analytic Evidence?”
- “AI Is a Better Researcher Than You: That claim got a political scientist denounced. Is it true?”
- “Scientist Irritated by Lab Colleague Accused in Poisoning Attempt.”
- “CDC won’t publish report showing covid shots cut likelihood of hospital visits.”
- “Predatory publishing in nutrition and dietetics: Risks, impacts, and collaborative solutions.”
- “Evaluating the credibility of major medical journals today.”
- “AI use suspected in Lund University doctoral thesis.”
- “How Moderation Makes Science: Precautionary Valuation and Boundary-Making in the Early Circulation of Research.”
- Harvard says researcher who published nearly 100 articles in 2 1/2 years has no affiliation with the university; news outlet alleges the “astonishingly prolific” author used AI to generate papers.
- “How hidden contributions power modern research.”
- Researchers on AI disclosure to address anthropology’s “distinctive epistemic and ethical commitments.”
- “No humans allowed: scientific AI agents get their own social network.”
- “What 6,000 researchers think about the future of science.”
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