It’s become a sort of Retraction Watch Mad Libs: Author writes a paper that is so far, far, out of the mainstream. Maybe it argues that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Or that vaccines cause autism. Truth squads swarm over the paper, taking to blogs and Twitter to wonder, in the exasperated tone of those who have been here before, how on earth it was published in a peer reviewed journal.
Then, in something that approaches — but does not quite qualify as — contrition, the journal in question retracts the paper, mumbling something in a retraction notice about a compromised peer review process, or that ghosts in the machine allowed the paper to be published instead of being rejected.
This week’s parade float entry is a paper in the International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology, a Springer Nature title that is apparently sponsored by The Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where many of its editorial board members work.
Here’s how Jerry Coyne, a researcher at the University of Chicago who keeps an eye on creationists, described the paper, “A brief history of human evolution: challenging Darwin’s claim,” written by Sarah Umer, in a December 18, 2018 post: Continue reading Journal retracts creationist paper “because it was published in error”
Irony machine, start your engine: A pair of engineers have lost a 2017 paper in the 
For the second time in a week, we’ve come across a retraction notice that gave the wrong reason for the retraction.
The authors of a 2018 paper on how noisy distractions disrupt memory are retracting the article after finding a flaw in their study. 
When a researcher submitted a manuscript to a journal about multimedia tools, she was frustrated to wait 13 months for the journal to make a decision — only to have it reject the paper outright. So imagine how she felt when, days after the paper was rejected, she saw the journal had published a plagiarized version of the paper by a group of different authors.
The 