If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Diabetes association VP resigns over response to editorial boycott after protest at annual meeting
- A year after plagiarism allegations and author’s retraction request, Elsevier is still investigating.
- Misconduct cases remain unresolved for years in South Korea, data show
- Do PubPeer comments make a difference? A study tried to find out
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):
- “China Fires Researchers After Child Dies in Gene-Editing Trial,” a case we were first to report.
- “Critics question baffling genetic data from prolific infectious diseases group.”
- “Retractions of old papers are on the rise: when should bad science be culled?”
- “Does preprinting reduce the value of peer review?”
- Researcher asks what the separation between publisher and journal “means for the governance of science.” Featuring our Mass Resignations List.
- “If AI brings down the journal system, then university rankings are likely to follow.”
- Data Colada on Francesca Gino: “If there are five fraudulent papers, then there are more than five.”
- “Elsevier acquires Clear Skies to strengthen research integrity screening.”
- “AI beats scientists at finding errors in clinical research papers,” preprint finds.
- “Galway university ‘fake news’ expert claims fake doctorate.”
- Cancer researcher who once threatened to sue Retraction Watch loses another paper for image issues.
- “‘AI slop’ papers published under prominent academics’ names.”
- Springer Nature journal retracts paper on trans youth after researchers used minors’ data without consent.
- “Submissions to preprint server keep rising despite author cap.”
- “The Problem of Wrongly Identified and Nonverifiable Nucleotide Sequences and Cell Lines in Research Papers, or How to Study Things That May Not Exist.”
- “Tracking down scientific fraud“: A podcast in French.
- “Canada’s new open‑access policy expands access to research, but leaves publishing fees unchecked.”
- “The glut of disciplinary overviews is understandable but if they come faster than new data, the returns rapidly diminish.”
- “AI ‘slop’ is a social judgement,” say researchers.
- “Self-Correction in Science, Preregistration as Cheap Talk, and a Critical Analysis of the Case for Preregistration”: A response to “When is science ‘self-correcting’?”
- “The ‘unpoliceability’ of AI journal policies.”
- “The New Importance of the Scientific Seminar.”
- “The scientific fraud behind the IEEE’s prestige.”
- Editor-in-chief of ophthalmology journal says he is “more interested in dealing with issues in a current submission than probing into a paper from 23 years ago.”
- George Church “quits role at AI startup Radical, claims ‘sleazy’ behavior stole credit from partner.”
- “Science runs on invisible labour—and thank-yous aren’t enough.”
- “Author or just ‘acknowledged’? How women are not gaining full credit for research.”
- “Anthropic’s Biology Work Spotlights Researchers’ Need for Advanced AI Access.”
- “Ignore the Writing: A Proposal for Peer Review in the Age of AI.”
- “Preprint platform offers to pay researchers to review papers, but questions remain.”
- Cloning researcher Woo-Suk Hwang “Loses South Korean Nationality, Acquires UAE Citizenship.”
- “How much does it cost to produce one research paper?”
- American Journal of Political Science caps submissions to three per author annually.
- “Down the Rabbit Hole of LLM Peer Review.”
- “Peer Reviewer Apologizes for Lobbing AI Accusation at Author Who Is Just Terrible Writer”: A satire.
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].