If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Journal retracts paper criticizing parental alienation theory after group threatens to sue
- Journal retracts study linking hepatitis vaccine to autism that was included in CDC review
- Editors of semantics journal resign, launch new journal after publisher ‘ultimatum’
In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 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):
- “Moffitt executive resigns leadership role after investigation of her research.”
- “Hijab-switching researcher scandal puts Indonesian academia under scrutiny.”
- “NSF watchdog unit is no longer investigating research misconduct.” A link to our coverage of the departures last year.
- “How an academic’s AI use was exposed by her peers.” A link to our Q&A with the author to discuss contract cheating.
- “¡Me retracto!”: Our cofounders on being the “bloodhounds” of scientific publishing.
- “Wiley acquires Emerald Publishing in £337m deal.”
- “Sticking Points: Research errors that remain in the record”: An interview with our Ivan Oransky.
- “Three more senior Chinese scientists have been disciplined by their universities” after a blogger raised concerns.
- Science issues an expression of concern as “preliminary reanalysis of the statistics indicates a higher false-positive rate of mantle earthquakes than initially understood.”
- “What’s behind China’s historically high counts of corresponding authors?”
- “AI is eating the academic publishing industry alive, but some good might come of it.”
- “Govt Probes Alleged Research Fraud at Major Denmark Science Conference.”
- “Scientific Fraud: How Do We Ensure Sound Medical Literature?”
- “Nature is expanding Registered Reports to all the fields” in which they publish.
- Former university rector “both plagiarized and did not,” finds report.
- “AI can mass-produce finance research papers indistinguishable from human work, reports study.”
- In a study of open access models, gold OA publications “show the highest overall retraction rate with 12.63 retractions per 10,000 items.”
- Mathematicians issue “formal declaration telling AI companies to stop using their work without permission.”
- University research committee “discusses proposal for paper authorship resolution process.”
- “Library Professionals’ Roles in Addressing Article Retractions.”
- “First and last authors more likely to be men in leading science journals,” analysis finds.
- Editors of sociology journal propose a “A Way to Challenge the Groupthink of Scholarly Journals“: A “peer review” article format. Other members of the editorial board of the journal resigned in 2024.
- “Australia’s erosion of peer review.”
- “Will AI ruin the social sciences — or revolutionize them?”
- “Hot take: Stop calling poor search rankings necessary friction for learning.”
- Crossref, which owns the Retraction Watch Database, now has two billion citation links.
- “Elisabeth Bik has built a career exposing problematic papers. Now she is asking analytical scientists to apply the same scrutiny to their own fields.”
- “Trend in Authorship for Studies Presented at [the American Society of Clinical Oncology] Annual Meeting Highlights Concerns.”
- “Are academics making an (em) dash for AI?”
- “Improving acknowledgments sections to better credit research contributors.”
- Researchers find “wrongly identified, non-verifiable and/or questionable reagents were unexpectedly frequent in human circRNA papers in high impact journals.”
- “Scientists produce more novel but less disruptive work as they age,” study finds.
- “The future of science communication is not an article like this”: Nature on why they joined TikTok.
- The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not use fabricated references.
Upcoming talk
- Science Misinformation Symposium: “Why should we care about science misinformation?” featuring our Ivan Oransky (June 10, Sydney)
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