The week at Retraction Watch featured a call to make peer reviews public, lots of news about Cornell food researcher Brian Wansink, and a request by the U.S. NIH that the researchers it funds don’t publish in bad journals. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
The U.S. National Institutes of Health has noticed something: More of the research it’s funding is ending up in questionable journals. Recently, the agency issued a statement highlighting some qualities of these journals — aggressively soliciting submissions, failing to provide clear information about pricing — and urging researchers to avoid them. The NIH’s goal: to … Continue reading NIH to researchers: Don’t publish in bad journals, please
Researchers have retracted a 2017 paper exploring a novel approach to treat kidney injury, because three images were “constructed inappropriately.” That’s about as much as we know: The retraction notice provides few details about the nature of the issue, only that the authors—most of whom work at Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine in Hershey—could … Continue reading Where’s the data? Authors can’t support figures in 2017 kidney paper
After more than 30 years working with scholarly journals, Irene Hames has some thoughts on how to improve peer review. She even wrote a book about it. As the first recipient of the Publons Sentinel Award, Hames spoke to us about the most pressing issues she believes are facing the peer review system — and … Continue reading Make reviews public, says peer review expert
A former postdoc at Emory and Georgetown Universities falsified data in manuscripts and a grant application to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Mahandranauth Chetram committed misconduct while at Georgetown, the ORI said in a finding released today
The week at Retraction Watch featured the temporary removal of the director of the U.S. HHS’ Office of Research Integrity, a mass resignation of an journal’s editorial board, and a court injunction against OMICS. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
A US government agency has won an initial court ruling against OMICS, which the government says will help stop the academic publisher’s deceptive business practices. Today, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it won a preliminary injunction in September in its lawsuit against Srinubabu Gedela, CEO of OMICS Group and other companies. The lawsuit, … Continue reading US court issues injunction against OMICS to stop “deceptive practices”
Title: Assessment of coronary heart diseases in diabetics in al-Madinah al-Munawarah What Caught Our Notice: We’ve seen researchers dinged for adding authors to papers who didn’t participate in the research, but it’s rare to have a notice say co-author signatures were forged. In a recent retraction, the first two authors said the signatures on the the … Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Wait…we wrote WHAT paper?
The publisher Frontiers has retracted four papers in three of its journals after discovering they had been accepted with fake peer reviews. The problem of fake reviews has been on the research community’s radar since at least 2014, and several major publishers—including Springer, SAGE and BioMed Central—have retracted hundreds of papers accepted via fake peer … Continue reading Publisher issues first retractions for fake peer review, starts new checking policy
The week at Retraction Watch featured a the story of how a nonexistent paper earned 400 ciations, a lawsuit filed against a journal for publishing criticism, and the retraction and replacement of a paper by a group of anti-vaccine advocates. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: