Yesterday,we posted on the retraction of a 2004 Nature paper on innate immunity whose findings had been questioned by two groups. A few hours after we posted that item, we heard back from the senior author of one of the papers doubting that data, Tom DeCoursey. DeCoursey makes a number of important points, so we … Continue reading More on Ahluwalia et al Nature retraction, from Tom DeCoursey
Last week, we noted a Nature editorial in which the journal came clean about its higher-than-average number of retractions this year — four. What we missed was the fact that the fourth retraction of the year also appeared in last week’s issue. The retraction, of a paper called “The large-conductance Ca2+-activated K+ channel is essential … Continue reading Previously questioned Nature paper on innate immunity retracted
This week’s Nature includes a refreshing and soul-searching editorial about retractions. Excerpt (we added links and corrected a misspelling and wrong country in the editorial after a reader noted the errors below): This year, Nature has published four retractions, an unusually large number. In 2009 we published one. Throughout the past decade, we have averaged … Continue reading Nature comes clean about retractions and why they’re on the rise
Amy Wagers, an up and coming stem cell researcher at Harvard who made a name for herself as a postdoc early by questioning the work of others, has retracted a January 2010 paper she co-authored in Nature. According to the retraction: Three of the authors (J.L.S., F.S.K. and A.J.W.) wish to retract this Article after … Continue reading Highly cited Harvard stem cell scientist retracts Nature paper
Mario Biagioli, a distinguished professor of law and communication at the University of California, Los Angeles — and a pioneering thinker about how academic reward systems incentivize misconduct — passed away in May after a long illness. He was 69. Among other intellectual interests, Biagioli wrote frequently about the (presumably) unintended consequences of using metrics … Continue reading Remembering Mario Biagioli, who articulated how scholarly metrics lead to fraud
In its second batch of misconduct findings this year, the organization responsible for allocating basic research funding in China has called out 25 researchers for paper mill activity and plagiarism. The National Natural Science Foundation of China, or NSFC, gives more than 20,000 grants annually in disciplines ranging from agriculture to cancer research. The NSFC … Continue reading Chinese funding agency penalizes 25 researchers for misconduct
Editor’s note: This guest post by Csaba Szabo is a response to a June 3 post by Mike Rossner on replication studies. We sent a draft to Rossner in advance; find his response below. The recent guest post on Retraction Watch by Mike Rossner takes a peculiar view of reproducibility. Rossner sets the stage talking … Continue reading Guest post: In defense of direct replication studies (if they even need defending)
Twenty journals lost their impact factors in this year’s Journal Citation Reports, released today, for excessive self-citation and citation stacking. Nearly half of the journals on the list are from well-known publishers MDPI, Sage, Springer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley. Clarivate releases the annual Journal Citation Reports each June. For the first time, the company … Continue reading Citation issues cost these 20 journals their impact factors this year
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 60,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately … Continue reading Weekend reads: Journals are MAGA’s ‘latest target’; a psychedelic retraction; professor sues rival over plagiarism accusations
Brown University physician-scientist Wafik El-Deiry has been a longtime critic of the post-publication forum PubPeer, where 75 of his papers have been flagged. For example, in an April post on X, formerly Twitter, he stated, “It is not good that PubPeer has been weaponized and has become tyrannical.” In July 2024, he referred to the … Continue reading Apparent NCI director candidate wants ‘open, respectful’ post-publication peer review while promoting anonymous site that calls sleuths a ‘mob’