If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Springer Nature to start issuing expressions of concern for books
- A prolific evolutionary biologist caught faking data decades ago notches a new retraction
- Major citation index put surgery journals on hold following Retraction Watch investigation
- Increasing workload may have contributed to recent retraction at nursing journal, editor says
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):
- “Medical students are using a popular research tool to pump out misleading studies.” A Science–Retraction Watch collaboration.
- “Retraction questions claim that cancer therapy works better in morning,” a move that “could hand ammo to China hawks.”
- “Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physicists been retracted?” prompted by our list of retractions by Nobel Prize winners.
- “When errors become etched in stone“: Researcher calls for retraction of 80-year-old asbestos study.
- Springer Nature sells Scientific American and Spektrum der Wissenschaft, with layoffs to come. Union members respond: “On multiple occasions the company has sought to quash or tone down political or sensitive stories that were journalistically sound.”
- “Duke researcher claimed she was fired for reporting sexual assault. She lost in court.” Our earlier coverage of the case.
- “Is science self-correcting? Not in this Elsevier journal,” says Elisabeth Bik.
- University “plagiarism allegations spark $1M defamation fight, July hearing set.”
- “In China, some researchers are attending academic conferences that do not exist.” And “How to spot a predatory conference, before it costs more than money.”
- “How Many Submissions May an Author Make? A Harmonic Quota for Submissions under Coauthorship.”
- “Universities excluded from Webometrics amid fake rankings.”
- “What drives academic research misconduct? The viewpoint of researchers.”
- “From hyper-competition to strategic leadership”: A report on the Future of Peer Review project.
- CNRS research director Olivier Leclerc reacts to the decision by university to withdraw Étienne Klein’s doctorate “due to the presence of numerous plagiarized passages,” a move that led to calls for more transparency. And a French channel discusses the case in contrast with one at another university.
- “The data transparency crisis in research: Lessons from systematic reviews and meta-analyses.”
- “The EPA Relied on an Influential Glyphosate Study Even After Learning Monsanto Was a ‘Ghost Writer.’” A link to our coverage.
- “AI promised to democratise academic publishing – the evidence says otherwise.”
- “Subtle but Important Shifts in the 2025 Journal Citation Reports.”
- “Scientific misconduct, questionable research practices, and research climate: empirical approaches to integrity problems.”
- “Anyone can fake a scientific image with AI, tricking even academic journals – and undermining trust in science.”
- “Mathematicians take lead in addressing AI’s impact on research,” say two mathematicians.
- “I Served on Grant Review Panels for 12 Years. Let’s Not Romanticize NIH Peer Review.” And “I Was an NIH Program Official. Here’s What a Peer Reviewer Doesn’t See.”
- “NIH re-ups proposal to cap number of simultaneous grants per researcher.”
- “To Reform Scientific Publishing, Universities Must Be Publishers.”
- A look at the “prevalence of studies by authors with multiple retraction histories in Cochrane reviews.” Cochrane recently implemented a new system for checking for retracted studies.
- “Publication fraud in the era of generative artificial intelligence.”
- “Irreproducible research and a typology of replication efforts.”
- “Why the Stockholm Declaration will never work.”
- “Academic publishing business models: Self-citations and the selectivity–reputation trade-off.”
- “Distributed peer review ‘good but no holy grail’,” officials say.
- “Evaluating and Ranking Anti-Counterfeiting Strategies to Combat Hijacked Journals.”
- “COVID-19-vaccine-induced eye damage?” Elisabeth Bik takes a look.
- WIRED talks to author who included quotes made up by AI — in his book on AI.
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