If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Computing journal retracts 13 papers, including four from past EIC
- Bioengineered retracts 119 more papers as investigation continues
- A year later, Springer Nature journal hasn’t updated article with fake reference to our cofounder
- U.S. university asks journal to remove professor’s name from paper with coauthor in China
In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 68,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is approaching 800, 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):
- “Prof. Francesca Gino’s Contract and Discrimination Claims Against Harvard Business School Dismissed.”
- “Modern Scientific Sleuths: A Brief (and Incomplete) History” by our cofounders.
- “In China, a flood of controversial clinical trials slows” following patient deaths, including one we were first to report.
- An impersonated researcher is impersonated again.
- “AI article review ‘better than humans at their best,’” say researchers. Journal editor gives “uncomfortable” guess in response: “pre-submission AI review becomes normal, then expected, then required.”
- “Cell Press probe clears editor but Chinese biologist keeps up pressure.”
- The BBC’s “Unexpected Elements” podcast on Retraction Watch and the Ctrl Z Award.
- “The Currency of the Journal Article Is Collapsing.”
- “The journal article is too static for the world it now serves,” says a professor.
- “What editorial mutinies reveal about the architecture of academic prestige.”
- “Research integrity needs clear routes for sharing concerns.” A panel said libraries could help.
- “An analysis of 20 years of retracted articles in psychiatry.”
- “Who wrote that paper? AI use spurs debate over scientific authorship.”
- “Holding Science to a Gold Standard Will Hold It Back: A metascientist pushes back against the unified and idealized vision of science embodied in NSF’s new Office of Metascience.”
- “AI systems operating within the incentive architecture of scientific publishing face systematic pressure to optimize for publishability rather than truth, producing outputs that may be internally coherent yet empirically untethered.”
- “AI-hallucinated citations should be treated as research misconduct.”
- “In a Long-Awaited Move, FDA Enforces Trial Result Transparency.”
- “Conflict of interest notices do not protect scientific writing from corporate interests.”
- “A case study in conflicts of interest“: Authors of paper on nicotine replacement therapies with ties to manufacturers.
- “AI can fake a plausible paper at the push of a button. Can detection tools and peer review keep up?”
- “Quantifying Undetected Severe Misconduct in Medical Research.”
- “How Transparent Should Institutions be? Balancing Ethical Principles in Research Misconduct Investigations.”
- “How can research platforms deal with the ‘AI slop’ deluge?”
- “A landmark health study was flawed. Did my mother pay the price?”
- “Disclosure and Transparency Standards for AI-Generated Images in Academic Publications.”
- “How researchers debunked ‘race science’: ‘a triumph of scientific self-correction.'”
- Researchers say there are gaps in consensus on AI policies, but agreement “does not establish that a policy is appropriate, effective or proportionate,” reads an accompanying editorial.
- “While familiarity with [AI chatbots] is high among medical journal peer reviewers, their reported use in peer review remains limited,” survey finds.
- “What genomics and big data science can teach us about authorship in the era of generative AI.”
- “Putin’s Sanctioned Daughters Continue to Publish in Western Scientific Journals.”
- “Fossils of dinosaurs, mammals and other glamorous species are over-represented in high-profile titles, suggests a study.”
- “Climate skeptics used AI to review their work. It told them they were biased.”
Upcoming Talk
- “Rethinking Incentives to Publish: Aligning Accountability Across Stakeholders,” a 2026 Council of Science Editors Fall Virtual Symposium session featuring our Ivan Oransky (November 19, virtual)
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].