Thanks to a generous grant, we’re in the enviable position of being able to add a second staff writer. Which means we’re looking for applicants. The job is not for the faint of heart. It’s definitely fast-paced; our staff writer will be expected to write an average of two posts per day, and feel comfortable … Continue reading Join our team: Retraction Watch is hiring a second staff writer
Cunning science fraudsters may not give many tells in their data, but the text of their papers may be a tipoff to bad behavior. That’s according to a new paper in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology by a pair of linguists at Stanford University who say that the writing style of data cheats … Continue reading Can linguistic patterns identify data cheats?
The authors of a paper on a mechanism for potential cancer therapies are retracting it after realizing they published some proprietary findings “without permission and agreement from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.” According to the retraction note in Journal of the American Chemical Society, the authors included an X-ray crystal structure and data that were … Continue reading Intellectual property issues sink cancer paper in JACS
This week’s Weekend Reads, which appears below, was preempted yesterday by the news that the Office of Research Integrity had issued a finding of misconduct in the long-running case of Anil Potti. The week also featured news about a child psychiatry trial halted for unexplained reasons, and saw the launch of our new weekly column … Continue reading Weekend reads: Elsevier mutiny; babies as co-authors; what to do after rejection
This week at Retraction Watch featured high-profile retractions from Nature and the BMJ. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
The week at Retraction Watch featured a lot of movement on our leaderboard, with a new total for Diederik Stapel, and a new entry. It also featured a lot going on elsewhere, so here’s part I of Weekend Reads (we’ll have more tomorrow morning):
The week at Retraction Watch featured yet another case of fake peer review, and a court sentence for a Danish researcher found to have committed fraud. Here’s what was happening elsewhere (stay tuned for part 2 tomorrow):
A paper on nematode parasites appears to have been infected with a nasty strain of a publishing problem known as fake peer review. By our count, the phenomenon has felled approximately 250 papers in total. The affected review, “The important role of matrix metalloproteinases in nematode parasites,” explores a type of enzyme secreted by the parasite. Published … Continue reading “Rigging of the peer-review process” kills parasite paper
The number of so-called “predatory” open-access journals that allegedly sidestep publishing standards in order to make money off of article processing charges has dramatically expanded in recent years, and three-quarters of authors are based in either Asia or Africa, according to a new analysis from BMC Medicine.* The number of articles published by predatory journals spiked … Continue reading Predatory journals published 400,000 papers in 2014: Report
The week at Retraction Watch featured the appeal of a modern-day retraction, and a look at whether a retraction by a Nobel Prize winner should be retracted 50 years later. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: