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 The week at Retraction Watch featured: Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to well over 350. There are more than 43,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains well over … Continue reading Weekend reads: The strain on publishing; Gino defends herself; the rise of fake peer review retractions
Last week, an environmental journal published a paper on the use of renewable energy in cleaning up contaminated land. To read it, you would have to pay 40 euros. But you still wouldn’t know for sure who wrote it. Ostensibly authored by researchers in China, “Revitalizing our earth: unleashing the power of green energy in … Continue reading Signs of undeclared ChatGPT use in papers mounting
A paper that found smoking rates in the United States fell faster than expected as more people started using e-cigarettes has been retracted over the objections of its authors, who have filed a complaint with the journal’s publisher. As we reported in July, BMC Public Health informed the authors of “Population-level counterfactual trend modelling to … Continue reading Authors file complaint with publisher as journal retracts vaping paper
We are pleased to present an excerpt from Trust in Medical Research, a freely available new book by Warwick P. Anderson, emeritus professor of physiology and biomedical sciences at Monash University in Victoria, Australia. It has always been difficult for me to admit that we have a genuine and substantial problem of fraud and rubbish … Continue reading To guard against fraud, medical research should be a profession: A book excerpt
It’s Nobel Prize week, and the work behind mRNA COVID-19 vaccines has just earned the physiology or medicine prize. But this is Retraction Watch, so that’s not what this post is about. A Nobel prize-winning researcher whose publications have come under scrutiny has retracted his 10th paper for issues with the data and images. Gregg … Continue reading Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction
In case you didn’t get the memo, the presidents of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) want you to stop talking about sex already. Or at least they want anthropologists to stop.
Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? The week at Retraction Watch featured: We also added The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List. Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to well over 350. There are more than 43,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. … Continue reading Weekend reads: ‘The band of debunkers’; a superconductor retraction request; ‘the banality of bad-faith science’
In 2023 alone, editors of eight journals on topics ranging from mathematics to biogeography all quit at once because of disputes with their publishing companies. Mass resignations of editors from scholarly journals aren’t new – the Open Access Directory has a list of some such actions going back to 1989. But the frequency appears to … Continue reading The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List
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 well over 350. There are now nearly 43,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains 200 titles. … Continue reading Weekend reads: Who should pay for sleuthing?; the Gino retraction requests; university ‘halts projects over fraud investigation’
Surveys show spreadsheets are the most widely used analytical tool in academic research. But they are prone to errors. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Public Health England lost 16,000 test results after using an old Excel file format to handle data. Whether this mix-up hampered local infection control is anybody’s guess, but it … Continue reading Guest post: Genomics has a spreadsheet problem