weekend reads – Page 7 – Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: More allegations at Harvard; plagiarism euphemisms; citation cartels in math

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Journal takes 3 years to pull papers by researcher who committed misconduct
Journal retracts 80 papers ID’d as paper mill products following sleuth’s report, Undark-Retraction Watch investigation
Paper about clergy sexual abuses in South Korean churches retracted over ‘citation irregularities’
Book retraction surfaces long-standing feud between South African academics

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to nearly 400. There are more than 46,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains well over 200 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? Or The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?

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

Weekend reads: ‘Unethical studies on China minority groups;’ an editorial board signs off; the sleuth who uncovered Dana Farber paper problems

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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: Paper mills bribe editors; Dana-Farber researchers to retract paper; ‘The Next Battle in Higher Ed’

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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: The future of a federal US watchdog; a publisher plans massive layoffs; the plagiarism arms race

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Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to over 375. There are more than 46,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains well over 200 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? Or The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?

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

Weekend reads: Claudine Gay and what comes after; China cracking down again; ‘retracted papers and collateral damage’

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 to over 375. There are nearly 46,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains well over 200 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? Or The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?

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

Weekend reads: Misconduct by national institute director in Japan; ‘a safe space for paper mills’; authors remove COVID-19 vaccine manuscript

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 to over 375. There are more than 45,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains well over 200 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? Or The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?

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

The year at Retraction Watch, 2023: Whew!

Did 2023 feel like a year in which you couldn’t keep up, whether that was your to-do list, the news, or email?

We know the feeling.

Earlier this month, Nature reported that journals retracted more than 10,000 papers this year – so many, in fact, that we have not been able to enter them all into The Retraction Watch Database yet, because each one has to be reviewed by hand. It’s not unusual for us to have to keep working into the following year to catch up, but the volume this year will mean that will all take longer.

The value of that database – 45,000 retractions strong and counting – was the basis for our biggest development this year: Its acquisition by Crossref, in a deal that makes the data fully available for free, and provides us sustainable funding for the database side of our operations. We’re still pinching ourselves about that agreement, and we can’t wait to see just how many scholars, software developers, and others dream up new uses for the data.

The top ten stories at Retraction Watch in 2023

Each year since 2013, we put together a roundup of the 10 most-read stories we published on the blog over the past 12 months.

This list doesn’t have some of what you might think are the biggest stories of the year—Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation and retractions, allegations of fraud against Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino, and the unraveling of the claimed discovery of a room-temperature superconductor. Or more recently, allegations of plagiarism, with associated corrections, by Harvard president Claudine Gay.

When other outlets are paying a lot of attention to a retraction-related story, we think it’s a better use of our limited resources to focus on stories they’re missing. This year, that included a prominent nanoscientist who retracted a paper after PhD students found an error, the delisting of 19 Hindawi journals from a leading index, and a Yale history professor whose first book misrepresents primary sources, according to other scholars. (And if you want to help us cover even more stories in 2024, it’s not too late to make an end-of-year tax-deductible contribution!)

The following list reflects the stories that grabbed our readers’ attention the most in 2023: