The week at Retraction Watch featured the strange story of a reappearing retracted study, and the retraction of a study showing a link between watching violent cartoons and verbal skills. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Recently, a reader contacted us with an interesting scenario: He’d recently heard about an author who asked for a refund of his page charges after he had to retract a paper for an honest error. The scenario raised questions we’d never considered before. On the one hand, page charges often cover work that was completed in … Continue reading Should retractions ever lead to refunds of page charges?
SCOPUS, the publication database maintained by Elsevier, has discontinued nearly 300 journals since 2013, including multiple journals published by OMICS Publishing Group. Although the reasons the widely used database gives for discontinuing journals often vary, in all cases OMICS journals were removed over “Publication Concerns.” Here’s what SCOPUS said recently about how it vets journals:
An earth science journal has asked an editor to resign after it was revealed he had been manipulating citations at multiple journals. Artemi Cerdà had already agreed to step down temporarily from Land Degradation & Development after the publisher, Wiley, was alerted that Cerdà had resigned from other journals for citation manipulation. In a new statement, … Continue reading An editor in chief was caught manipulating citations. Now he’s been asked to resign.
The fallout from an investigation into alleged citation-boosting at several journals that we first reported on two weeks ago has widened, leading to the resignation of the executive editor of one of the journals, and an investigation at a university in The Netherlands. On February 13, the European Geosciences Union (EGU) announced that an editor … Continue reading Citation-boosting episode leads to editors’ resignations, university investigation
Microbiologist Elies Bik is well-known for applying a close eye to studies, and has spent years anonymously submitting reports on plagiarism and image duplication to journal editors. Last year, she published an analysis of work, with troubling results – that 1 in 25 biomedical papers contains inappropriate duplications in images. She’s never stopped reading papers … Continue reading When does animal research become unnecessary and cruel? A paper’s methods give a biologist pause
The week at Retraction Watch featured a retraction of a state senator’s paper, and an editor busted for citation boosting. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Here’s something you don’t see every day: A state senator with an academic publication record, in his former career as a mathematician. Even more unusual: A retraction of one of his 15-year-old papers, after the journal realized most of the results were incorrect. According to the notice, some aspects of the paper by Daniel Biss … Continue reading Journal retracts paper by state senator (and former mathematician)
The week at Retraction Watch featured the launch of the greatest journal ever, and a story about the backlash against widely covered research on why men eat more. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
After a research group submitted two similar papers only days apart to different journals, one journal has retracted the paper — and told the other it should do the same. The papers, by a group of authors based in Romania, describe a new polymer to stop the formation of biofilms. After a reader flagged the … Continue reading Researchers submit two similar papers 8 days apart; one is retracted