If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Black marks on published papers don’t change citation rates, new study finds
- Researcher claims his case report was stolen by someone else at his hospital
- Are AI chatbots infiltrating online survey data? Not yet, says new study
- NEJM retracts case study for AI-manipulated imagery
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):
- A top cancer researcher in Spain kept raising funds based on a PNAS paper he knew was being retracted.
- “A study claimed that ChatGPT improved learning. Now it has been retracted.”
- “Opening Pandora’s box:” Publication offers found for 1,700 papers in IEEE conference proceedings.
- “Exclusive: Here’s the Covid-19 vaccine paper the CDC censored.”
- “Why Has There Been So Little Progress on Alzheimer’s Disease?”
- What Gets Funded, What Gets Lost: Will funding irretrievably shift the foundational research that science relies on?
- “South Africa withdraws AI policy due to fake AI-generated sources.”
- “When I next hire scientists, I will rely less on publication output.”
- “Whistleblower alleges Finnish startup’s vaunted solid-state battery isn’t what it claims.”
- “The Editorial that Defends a Ghostwritten Paper by Citing Additional Ghostwritten Papers.”
- “AI Wrote A Harvard Physicist’s Most Recent Paper. No One Knows What It Means for Science.”
- Informal research ties ‘more important’ than co-authorship.” From a study of 130,000 political science articles.
- “Exclusive: Former Australian National University vice-chancellor accused of ‘serious misconduct.’”
- “Do LLMs know Which Published Articles have been Retracted?” A recent study found a similar answer.
- “AI Policies Fail to Reduce Undisclosed AI Use,” a study of 5,000 journals and 5 million papers found.
- “Growing use of guest editors turns some journals into a ‘playground of bad science.'” Follows BMJ Group’s retraction of a special issue.
- Groundbreaking cardiologist Eugene Braunwald — mentor to John Darsee, who faked experimental data in dozens of studies — has died at 96.
- Dorothy Bishop on a fireside chat last week with the NIH director: “a view from across the pond.”
- “Quality Over Quantity: Why Scholarly Publishing Needs Stronger Front-End Gatekeeping to Build Trust and Long-Term Value.”
- “You Put my name, I Put your name: exploring unethical practices in academic publishing using the authorship misappropriation Diamond framework.”
- “The Triumph of Ego Depletion: The Real Story Behind One of Social Psychology’s Most Replicated Findings.”
- “We Call It Peer Review. Sometimes It Is Just Popularity.”
- “Could agentic AI topple grant-funding systems?”
- “Nipping Fraud in the Bud? Challenges for Detecting and Managing Issues of Research Integrity Before Publication.”
- “Detecting Fraud-Associated Characteristics in the Medical AI Literature: A Multi-Signal NLP Framework Reveals Distinct PaperMill Subtypes.”
- “Ukraine’s universities are in survival mode – but corruption still thrives.”
- “Don’t let your students use AI as a ghostwriter.”
- “‘Loss of faith’ in gold open access as funders withdraw support.”
- “Closure of China’s influential journal ranking leaves academics reeling — what will take its place?”
- “Rise in publications sparks fear of ‘perfect storm’ for research integrity.”
- “Academics demand apology for scientist investigated for China ties but never charged.”
- “Artificial intelligence in the retraction spotlight: trends, causes and consequences of withdrawn AI literature through a systematic bibliometric review.”
- “The phenomenon of ‘value extraction’ in Open Access.”
- “Why is publishing so expensive?”
- “Arguing that notions such as ‘100% human authored’ are untenable, Gary Hall, together with COPODE, proposes an alternative: a campaign for creative work that is ‘100% inhuman made’.”
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