Ivan Oransky

Happy 14th birthday, Retraction Watch – and what a year it was

In our old diner haunt (now closed), more than a decade ago

We know we say this every year, but the last 12 months have been big ones for Retraction Watch as we celebrate our 14th birthday on August 3. We’ve continued breaking big stories and maintaining The Retraction Watch Database – while also taking big steps toward financial sustainability.

In September, we announced that the Database – which as of today contains more than 50,000 retractions – became completely open with its acquisition by Crossref. The move also allowed us to hire Gordon Sullivan, another staff member who works on the Database, and covers the costs of maintaining the Database 100% for at least five years.

We hope regular readers by now have noticed the site runs faster, with no downtime. That’s thanks to the volunteer efforts of Michael Dayah and Karl Lehenbauer, who over the past year or so have pitched in to help us with back-end platform and software issues. We can’t thank them enough for their ongoing support.

Some other highlights:

Weekend reads: Attending a predatory conference; zombie theories; difficult authors

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 50,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Weekend reads: The world’s most cited cat; ‘Is peer review failing its peer review?’; Oxford prof accused of stealing research

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 49,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Weekend reads: ‘The surprising history of abstracts’; is peer review broken?; bee waggle dance data gets the wrong kind of buzz

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Weekend reads: A ‘star botanist’ has a retraction; the ‘bizarro world of law reviews’; AI and fake papers

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

‘A threat to the integrity of scientific publishing’: How often are retracted papers marked that way?

How well do databases flag retracted articles?

There has been a lot of interest recently in the quality of retraction notices and notifications, including new guidelines from the National Information Standards Organization (NISO; our Ivan Oransky was a member of the committee) and a new study which Ivan and our Alison Abritis joined.

In another new paper, “Identification of Retracted Publications and Completeness of Retraction Notices in Public Health,” a group of researchers set out to study “how clearly and consistently retracted publications in public health are being presented to researchers.”

Spoiler alert: Not very.

We asked corresponding author Caitlin Bakker, of the University of Regina — who also chaired the NISO committee — some questions about the findings and their implications.