If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Ethics journal retracts paper by high school student for AI, peer review manipulation
- Former acting director of national lab in India up to nine retractions
- Springer Nature has restored two papers by Max Planck, reversing a 2011 decision to retract the articles
- Judge dismisses Splenda lawsuit, says courts wrong place for research debate
- Exclusive: Sage to retract multiple articles by dismissed rising star for “compromised” peer-review process
- ‘The exploitation still remains’: Stats journal associate editors resign over $3,000 publishing charge
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):
- “Neuropathologist not guilty of research misconduct, says university probe.”
- “When Editors Revolt: Characterizing Journal Declarations of Independence.”
- “University walks back study on Waffle House workers.” More on the study here.
- Two liver transplant studies retracted over organ harvesting concerns. Of 400 such studies flagged in 2019, only dozens have been retracted.
- Biomedical papers that were never posted as preprints retracted at “twice the rate as those that were,” preprint finds.
- Preprint finds 22% of papers in ten biomedical fields cite authors with at least one retracted article.
- “Philosophers call for their journals to require conflict of interest disclosures.”
- Conflicts of interest are a “relatively uncommon” reason for journals to retract or correct papers, especially when COI is the only issue, study finds.
- Assistant professors accused of publication fraud for “allegedly duping” colleague into publishing in fake journals.
- “Publication integrity and industry influences on the editorial process: a case study” of a series of articles from the journal Anesthesiology. The case involved a lawsuit. “How cheap AI is undermining Indonesia’s academic credibility.” And “Paper Mills, AI-Assisted Citation Fabrication, and the Integrity of Indonesia’s Research Evidence Base.”
- “Cloned journals signal the rise of academic cybercrime.”
- “How paper mills go straight (without going clean): a shift to dual-use services.”
- “The APC Trap and the bind of scholarly publishing across four research intensive institutions in the U.S.”
- Analysis highlights “an estimated US$41.9 million in article processing charges (APCs) collected by publishers for research that was later retracted.”
- “Science is being polluted at a rapid pace,” thanks to generative LLMs.
- “Twenty-one years of coexistence: a comparative analysis of disciplinary and regional journal coverage in Web of Science and Scopus.”
- “Reclassification of basic experimental studies in humans — a case for a new publishing consensus.”
- An official at the Russian Academy of Sciences has proposed a unified registry of retractions. We know of one.
- “Metadata Falsificada: The Cover-Up File in Gino v. Harvard.”
- “Behind China’s retractions, a paper-mill economy built on incentives.” And “China trial retractions put data transparency in spotlight.”
- “[E]ven when corrections exist, they can be hard to discover and may disappear when records propagate across platforms.”
- “Broken citation or academic misconduct? How to spot the difference.”
- “‘Humanizer’ tool can erase signs of AI-written text — alarming scientists.”
- “AI tools meant to vet science are surprisingly easy to fool.”
- “Modern nonsense science looks very professional on the outside.”
- “Decapitalizing scientific knowledge and making it accessible to all: solutions exist.” And “What Do Scientists Think About Open Access Publishing?”
- Researchers propose a LLM pipeline for scoring citation quality, which they say could assist with peer review.
- “China cools on overseas publication of scientific research.”
- “The Challenges of Scientific Publishing: An Editor-In-Chief’s Perspective.”
- “Tackle ‘weak’ enforcement of data sharing rules, journals told: ‘Data transparency crisis’ in research stems from failure to police mandates on sharing results, researchers argue.”
- “The planned closure of Research Professional News is a loss for the sector.”
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