If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Publisher investigating two more papers on glyphosate safety over ghostwriting claims
- Economist outs another Indian university’s rankings-boosting scheme when they refuse to pay him
- Journal investigating paper on cognitive impact of generative AI
- Some Wikipedia citations to retracted papers persist for years, study finds
- RFK Jr. has various stances on retractions. Critics say he’s ‘politicizing’ them
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):
- “French physicist and media star loses doctorate after plagiarism investigation” found “copy-pasted material” in two-thirds of his thesis.
- “Neuroscience journal editor resigns over automation concerns.”
- “University removes dean for fabricating data” in continued fallout after blogger flagged several researchers.
- “Discredited scientist was a rising star, until his exposure.” Concerns first emerged in Brussels and Calgary.
- “Retractions in Nursing as a Systems Problem: A Journal Systems Framework Perspective.”
- “The NIH tried to make research more accessible, researchers are paying the price.”
- “Scammers hijacked the identity of a famous Oregon cancer doctor to pitch ivermectin online.”
- University teacher “finds his PhD data in another faculty member’s thesis; plagiarism row exposes blind spot in university library.”
- Professors cited in report on the state of humanities scholarship say it “misrepresents” their work.
- “Do we need harsher sanctions for research misconduct?”: A subject our cofounders recently wrote about.
- “‘As an Associate Editor, do I actually have to read the papers? Or the reviews?’ – A Field Observation on Responsibility Gaps.”
- “Paper Mills and the Fight Against Scientific Fraud.”
- “We talk about peer review as if it were one of the load-bearing pillars of science, as old and as fixed as the scientific revolution itself. It is not.”
- Concerns about the Stanford / Ioannidis top 2% scientist database include “the absence of a retraction-based exclusion threshold, permitting researchers with retraction rates above 34% and retraction-derived citations exceeding 75% of their total to remain listed.”
- “It is an unfortunate reality that metascience and metaresearch are not immune to methodological or reporting issues,” say researchers.
- “A loss in court: I am now officially a whistle-blower in the legal sense of the term,” says Raphaël Lévy.
- “These graphene experts are trying to close the reproducibility gap in 2D materials research.”
- “A Guide to Reanalyzing Data From Psychology Articles,” including how to look out for potential misconduct.
- “Harvard loses first place in Nature Index” to Chinese institution.
- “Paper Mill Subtypes in Medical AI: Multi-Signal NLP Detection Reveals Heterogeneous Fraud Fingerprints.”
- “Identifying Predatory Journals: A Practical Guide for Researchers.”
- “Seven steps for critically analysing research papers.”
- “Compliance ‘more important than education’ on research ethics.”
- “Did AI write this article?” The Economist tracks “how artificial intelligence is changing five fields,” with a cameo by AI slop at arXiv.
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