Never let it be said that journals are not deliberative when it comes to correcting the record. Of course, “deliberative” also means “slow.” Take a 2018 article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases (JID) by a group of authors in India.
Move over, Reviewer 2: The legal reviewer wants your job. Last month, I was relieved when the journal Research Ethics published my article, “The Use of Confidentiality and Anonymity Protections as a Cover for Fraudulent Fieldwork Data.” One unexpected hurdle had almost thwarted publication. The problem wasn’t with the proverbial hard-to-please peer reviewer called Reviewer … Continue reading The peer reviewers and editor wanted to publish my paper. The legal team rejected it.
Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance. The week at Retraction Watch featured: ‘Regrettably it took too long to investigate and retract this … Continue reading Weekend reads: Gibberish papers persist; the academic who faked Cherokee heritage; ‘organised fraud hits scientific journals’
Eric Lam, a highly-published cancer specialist, has been fired from his post at Imperial College London following a university investigation that found misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned. Lam’s work has been the subject of scrutiny on PubPeer for some three years, dating back to a 2018 post pointing out suspicious images in a 2003 paper … Continue reading Imperial College London researcher fired for research misconduct
The periodic table is, as a recent book notes, a guide to nature’s building blocks. But the building blocks of said book appear to have been passages from Wikipedia. The book, The Periodic Table: Nature’s Building Blocks: An Introduction to the Naturally Occurring Elements, Their Origins and Their Uses, was published by Elsevier last year. … Continue reading Elsevier retracts entire book that plagiarized heavily from Wikipedia
It keeps happening. There was the case of Talent Development and Excellence, which cloned an existing journal and managed to index hundreds of articles in Scopus, one of the world’s leading databases for scholarly literature. The Transylvanian Review did the same thing, and so did Test Engineering and Management. These journals — which can make … Continue reading How hijacked journals keep fooling one of the world’s leading databases
Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance. The week at Retraction Watch featured: Paper linking frequency of Google search terms to violence against … Continue reading Weekend reads: Legal threats, lawsuits, a professor loses emeritus status, and ‘the 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill’
Retraction Watch readers may recall the names Jun Iwamoto and Yoshihiro Sato, who now sit in positions 3 and 4 of our leaderboard of retractions, Sato with more than 100. Readers may also recall the names Andrew Grey, Alison Avenell and Mark Bolland, whose sleuthing was responsible for those retractions. In a recent paper in … Continue reading ‘The notices are utterly unhelpful’: A look at how journals have handled allegations about hundreds of papers
Retractions, expressions of concern, and corrections often arise from reader critiques sent by readers, whether those readers are others in the field, sleuths, or other interested parties. In many of those cases, journals seek the input of authors’ employers, often universities. In a recent paper in Research Integrity and Peer Review, longtime scientific publishing consultant … Continue reading How can universities and journals work together better on misconduct allegations?
Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance. The week at Retraction Watch featured: Drug company withdraws court motion requesting retraction of papers critical … Continue reading Weekend reads: Government interference in research; ‘mega’ reviewers; tobacco funding draws scrutiny