Category: RW announcements

Announcing the DiRT Award, a new “doing the right thing” prize — and its first recipient

It takes a lot of work to clean up the scientific literature, and some researchers and organizations deserve special recognition. That’s why we’ve established a “doing the right thing” category when we see praise-worthy progress in individual retractions, and have now gone a step further: We’ve created the DiRT Award, a new annual prize to recognize particularly note-worthy behavior.

As our co-founders announce today in STAT, the first recipient of the DiRT Award is the American Diabetes Association (ADA). Regular readers may suspect why — here’ a hint — but to learn more about the award, and why it’s going to the ADA, check out our co-founders’ STAT column out today. Continue reading Announcing the DiRT Award, a new “doing the right thing” prize — and its first recipient

Thank you, Helmsley Charitable Trust: $325,000 grant renewal will help us build a sustainable future

We’re very pleased to announce an 18-month grant renewal for $325,000 from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust to The Center For Scientific Integrity, our parent non-profit organization.

The generous funding from the Helmsley Charitable Trust will allow us to build on the work funded by our original Helmsley grant. Continue reading Thank you, Helmsley Charitable Trust: $325,000 grant renewal will help us build a sustainable future

“Publications of questionable scientific value:” A scientist models a potential prom date

Barry Cottonfield

Eve Armstrong had an important question: How would things have turned out if she had summoned the nerve to ask a certain Barry Cottonfield to her high school’s junior prom in 1997? Continue reading “Publications of questionable scientific value:” A scientist models a potential prom date

Meet the latest addition to our team, Victoria Stern

Please join us in welcoming our newest staff writer, Victoria Stern, to the Retraction Watch team.

Vicky first worked with editor Alison McCook in 2009 at The Scientist. Since then, she has been freelancing for a number of outlets, including Medscape, Scientific American Mind (where she became a contributing editor), General Surgery News, MedPage Today, and Reuters Health.

Funding for Vicky’s position is primarily thanks to Continue reading Meet the latest addition to our team, Victoria Stern

Happy birthday, RW Daily. Have you signed up yet?

A year ago tomorrow, we announced that we were starting The RW Daily, an email that would summarize the previous day’s news and link to other relevant stories elsewhere — a sort of sneak peek at Weekend Reads.

In about six and a half years, we’ve published more than 3,600 posts; that’s a lot of science publishing news. For people who feel overloaded by individual email alerts every time a new post appears, a daily digest is a good option. Here’s today’s, if you want to take a look. If you haven’t already, click here to subscribe. Continue reading Happy birthday, RW Daily. Have you signed up yet?

The Retraction Watch 2016 year in review — and a sneak peek at our database

It’s been another exciting year for us at Retraction Watch. As always, there has been more to cover than we have time for. At the same time, we’ve expanded our efforts in other media, telling bigger stories and offering more analysis. And we’ve made major progress on our database — more on that in a moment.

A sampling of what happened this year: Continue reading The Retraction Watch 2016 year in review — and a sneak peek at our database

We removed a post temporarily. It’s back. Here’s why.

On December 15, we removed a post from view as a result of a law that some have misused to have content removed from the web. Today, we have reinstated that post.

Here’s what the post about, if you’re curious: Continue reading We removed a post temporarily. It’s back. Here’s why.

The top 10 retractions of 2016

It’s that time again, when top-10 lists start appearing — and we’re no exception.

So check out our list of the 10 most noteworthy retractions of the year, posted by our friends at The Scientist.

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We’ve temporarily removed a Retraction Watch post. Here’s why. (Hint: A bad law.)

Longtime Retraction Watch readers may recall that in 2013, we were forced to temporarily remove ten posts following a false — and frankly ridiculous — copyright infringement claim.

Well, it’s happened again.

On Wednesday, our host, Bluehost, forwarded us another false copyright claim — aka a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice — by someone calling himself “Jiya Khan” and claiming to be based in Delhi, India. (Well, specifically, in “Rohini,sector-12,” which would mean that he or she is based at one of  two petrol stations.)

Khan insisted under penalty of perjury that a December 2014 post of ours — which we have now temporarily removed from public view (more on that in a moment) — violated his or her copyright.

What actually happened, in an eerie echo of the 2013 case, is that Continue reading We’ve temporarily removed a Retraction Watch post. Here’s why. (Hint: A bad law.)

Retractions holding steady at more than 650 in FY2016

pubmedDrumroll please.

The tally of retractions in MEDLINE — one of the world’s largest databases of scientific abstracts — for the last fiscal year has just been released, and the number is: 664.

Earlier this year, we scratched our heads over the data from 2015, which showed retractions had risen dramatically, to 684. The figures for this fiscal year — which ended in September — have held relatively steadily at that higher number, only dropping by 3%. (For some sense of scale, there were just shy of 870,000 new abstracts indexed in MEDLINE in FY2016; 664 is a tiny fraction of this figure, and of course not all of the retractions were of papers published in FY2016.)

Of note: In FY2014, there were fewer than 500 retractions — creating an increase of nearly 40% between 2014 and 2015. (Meanwhile, the number of citations indexed by MEDLINE rose only few percentage points over the same time period.) Which means the retraction rate in the last two years is dramatically higher than in 2014.

We have often wondered whether the retraction rate would ever reach a plateau, as the community’s ability to find problems in the literature catches up with the amount of problems present in the literature. But based on two years of data, we can’t say anything definitive about that.

Here’s an illustration of retraction data from recent years:

Continue reading Retractions holding steady at more than 650 in FY2016