A panel of scholars in Finland has downgraded 60 journals in their quality rating system, following months of review and feedback from researchers. The Finnish Publication Forum (JUFO) classifies and rates journals and other scholarly publications to “support the quality assessment of academic research,” according to its website. JUFO considers the level of transparency, the … Continue reading Finland group downgrades 60 journals
I was once required to testify in a court case. My lawyer gave me a few pieces of advice, but he repeated one several times, which may be why I remember it. “Never say never,” he said. Or, conversely, never say always. Declarations of absolutes present opposing attorneys too wide an opening. They need to … Continue reading What a database of more than a thousand dismissive literature reviews can tell us
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 The week at Retraction Watch featured: Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400.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 … Continue reading Weekend reads: A researcher explains how he publishes every three days; scientific bounty hunters; criminalizing scientific misconduct
Two years after a journal told sleuths it wouldn’t retract flawed papers, it changed course and pulled them. Mark Bolland, a researcher at the University of Auckland in New Zealand who is no stranger to unearthing academic wrongdoing, first sent complaints about one of the papers to The International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics (IJGO) … Continue reading Wiley journal retracts two papers it said were fine following criticism years ago
The journal BMJ Public Health is placing an expression of concern on a paper it said “gave rise to widespread misreporting and misunderstanding,” namely, “claims that it implies a direct causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality.” The article, “Excess mortality across countries in the Western World since the COVID-19 pandemic: ‘Our World in Data’ … Continue reading Expression of concern coming for paper some used to link COVID-19 vaccines to deaths
Last July, David Allison and his students identified what they considered to be fatal errors in a paper that had appeared in Elsevier’s Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice. The authors of the article, led by Sergio Di Molfetta, of University of Bari Aldo Moro in Bari, Italy, used a cluster randomized controlled trial, but did … Continue reading Editor and authors refuse to share data of paper containing alleged statistical errors
Retraction Watch readers may recall the work of Michael Dougherty, who has established a reputation as a sleuth focused on plagiarism. We are pleased to present an excerpt of Dougherty’s new book, New Techniques for Proving Plagiarism: Case Studies from the Sacred Disciplines at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Studies in Research Integrity, vol. 2 (Leiden: … Continue reading A look at plagiarism at the Pontifical Gregorian University
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 nearly 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 … Continue reading Weekend reads: Another vaccine-autism retraction; ‘Why We Commit Academic Fraud’; on a psilocybin-depression correction
A former professor and vice provost for research at the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in New York, falsified data in two published papers, according to findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI). Shaker Mousa, who was also chairman and executive vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research Institute at Albany, already … Continue reading Pharmaceutical researcher faked data in two papers, says federal watchdog
Last May, Devrim Çavuşoğlu, an engineer at Turkish software company OBSS, was looking at feedback from a conference reviewer of a paper he and his colleagues had submitted. One comment stood out to him: The reviewer had noticed a resemblance between Çavuşoğlu’s work and another paper accepted to a different conference on computational linguistics. When … Continue reading Caught by a reviewer: A plagiarizing deep learning paper lingers