If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Critics of birdsong study fight to be named in Nature’s retraction
- Elsevier retracts study tying sudden infant death syndrome to vaccinations
- A researcher’s unusually high h-index gives a window into an expansive citation network
- Under new framework, Vietnam researchers face bans and funding cuts for violating integrity rules
- In what EIC calls an ‘honest mistake,’ journal approves paper without peer reviewing it
Also the deadline for our Ctrl-Z Award is this Sunday! This $2,500 award recognizes scientists who discover substantial errors in their published work and take meaningful steps to correct the scientific record. More details and nomination form here.
In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 65,000 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):
- “White House seeks to tighten political oversight of grantmaking, restrict foreign collaborations and remove federal funding for open-access fees.”
- “Sleuths say Thermo Fisher doctored data to sell antibodies.” To date, 127 images for 119 products have been flagged.
- “Will string of science scandals ruin century-old journal Nature’s reputation in China?”
- Science replaces, issues correction for a cover image after discovering it was partially AI-generated.
- “Academia Is Enshittifying. AI Made It Faster.”
- “The UK Biobank breach shows the need for data management training.”
- “Genentech offered countless academics and other researchers up to $125,000 in grants to generate papers about several topics that read like key talking points for a trip to Capitol Hill,” STAT reports.
- “Lawmakers propose banning all U.S.-Chinese research collaborations.”
- “Faculty shuffle”: Researchers look at “potential institutional ‘gaming’ behaviors among Italian universities.”
- “This medical procedure can be extremely painful. Part of the problem is bad research,” including a paper that was retracted last month.
- “They Got the Best NIH Scores of Their Careers. A Year Later, They Still Don’t Have Funding.”
- “To Trust or Not to Trust: Authors’ Response to AI-based Reviews.”
- “U.S. agencies aren’t ready for the rising cost of making research papers free, report warns.”
- “Fake academic journals are publishing AI-generated papers under real professors’ names.” More on impersonation.
- “Molecular cancer articles sharing features with retracted papers from paper mills display citation patterns that suggest systematic inflation.”
- “Can peer review in academia survive faculty overload?”
- “Scottish Funding Council integrity policy urges strict university misconduct reporting.”
- “India’s quiet redrawing of research integrity’s accountability chain.”
- “Without guidelines academic authorship defaults to power politics.”
- “We don’t need more reviews; we need to reuse the ones we have.”
- “Preventing and correcting spread of misinformation about near-Earth objects, impacts, airbursts, and planetary defense: Case studies.”
- “The Pandemic of ‘Predatory’ Rankings: Why Academic Integrity Fails the Stress Test.”
- Dutch universities “must act now to regulate AI-use in science.”
- Fraud in Scientific Research and its Implications for Healthcare Professional Educators.”
- Ecologist asks to what extent “we should expect ecological field studies to replicate.”
- A video interview with a university integrity expert on the future of the UK Research Excellence Framework.
- Journal editor-in-chief and coauthor “argue that the evaluative aspects of peer review—particularly judgments of significance, originality, and impact—must remain human-driven.”
- “The bottom line is that human beings must be responsible for the quality and integrity of their research, especially when relying on tools, such as GenAI,” say researchers.
- “Graduate Students Find Content of Responsible Conduct of Research Coursework Useful.”
- “Withdrawal of UGC Care List of Journals in India: A Step Towards Reform or A Risk to Research Integrity.”
- “Why AI can’t be trusted to write scientific reviews.”
- “India needs an autonomous Research Integrity Office.”
- AI math startup’s proofs created by algorithms “land in peer-reviewed journals.”
- “40 Years of Changes In Scientific Publishing: From Conflict of Interest to Generative AI.”
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