The week at Retraction Watch featured a survey of researchers in China with an alarming result, and asked whether philosophy has a plagiarism problem. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
This summer, Ottawa Citizen reporter Tom Spears was sitting by a lake on vacation when he opened a spam email from a publisher. Amused to see the sender was a journal focused on bioethics, he got an idea. I thought, what if I just throw something outrageous at them? The situation should sound familiar to readers who … Continue reading Surprise! Paper retracted after author tells journal it’s a “pile of dung”
Sometimes, the best way to expose a problem with the publishing process is to put it to a test — perhaps by performing a Sokal-style hoax, or submitting a paper with obvious flaws. In 2014, that’s just what a researcher in Kosovo did. Suspicious that a journal wasn’t doing a thorough job of vetting submissions, she decided to … Continue reading Sting operation forces predatory publisher to pull paper
The week at Retraction Watch featured a retraction from Nature, and a discussion of what it means to be an author on a paper with thousands of them. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
A philosophy journal that focuses on the teachings of philosopher Alain Badiou has apparently fallen victim to yet another Sokal hoax, and has retracted a fake article submitted by authors trying to expose the publication’s weaknesses. The paper, “Ontology, Neutrality and the Strive for (non-)Being-Queer,” attributed to Benedetta Tripodi of the Universitatea Alexandru Ioan Cuza in … Continue reading Philosophy journal spoofed, retracts hoax article
Totalitarianism and Democracy has removed a paper claiming that German Shepherds belonging to guards at the Berlin Wall descended from dogs used at concentration camps, after learning that the paper was a work of satire, The Guardian reports. The paper, and its author, are the creation of the anonymous group “Christiane Schulte and friends.” This isn’t the first hoax we’ve … Continue reading Death camp dog satire retracted when German journal wasn’t in on joke
Romanian officials are taking a stand against a long-standing oddity in the law that entitles prisoners to 30 days off their jail sentence for every piece of academic writing they author. The crackdown is occurring after a surge in jail literature in the last two years— approximately 200 inmates have authored around 400 scientific works … Continue reading Romanian law shortens jail time for prisoners who write books. (They may ax it.)
The world, it seems, cannot get enough of Sokal-type hoaxes. A French journal, Sociétés, has retracted an article allegedly penned by one Jean-Marc Tremblay but actually written by two sociologists, Manuel Quinon and Arnaud Saint-Martin, who spoofed the work of the journal’s editor, Michel Maffesoli. As the Crooked Timber blog explains, the article, “Automobilités postmodernes: … Continue reading So-kalled research: French sociology journal retracts hoax article
A paper on liver failure in infants has been retracted due to a lab error, though the author contends that the paper still holds a valuable message for pediatricians — one that could save lives. To get to that, though, we had to make it through what turns out to be an unnecessarily vague retraction … Continue reading Paper on liver failure in babies withdrawn for lab mix-up
An expression of concern has been issued for the second of three papers on the idea that, if you have three positive emotions for every negative one, you will be more successful in life. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has spent the last decade building a brand around this ratio, … Continue reading “Positivity ratio” research now subject to an expression of concern