A Canadian panel is proposing several changes to its guidelines for responsible conduct of research, including a provision that effectively removes any statute of limitations on investigations into potential misconduct.
The sleuth calls it “ethical editorial malpractice.” The publisher says it was an “administrative error.” After Retraction Watch reached out for comment, the journal removed the text of the email from the correction notice.
We're honored to be testifying next week at the U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight's hearing on "The State of Scientific Publishing: Assessing Trends, Emerging Issues, and Policy Considerations."
The Dutch publisher Wolters Kluwer has scrapped some of its citation and study-registration requirements at a top-ranked surgery journal founded by the U.K. plastic surgeon Riaz Agha, Retraction Watch has learned.
From his initial review, Markus Englund has found 18 datasets containing duplicated values that are possibly serious enough to need correcting — including one from an influential paper on Parkinson’s disease.
Weekend reads: Half of social science ‘doesn’t replicate’; ‘Scientific ghosts: Life after retraction’; multisensory learning paper retracted
A judge has dismissed a legal challenge aimed at forcing Elsevier to retract a long-criticized study that concluded the antidepressant Paxil was safe and effective for teens.
In a story readers might find familiar, a researcher was asked to pay when he demanded a journal retract an article he had never seen but supposedly wrote — and the journal ghosted him when he refused.
The @bmj.com reviewed the issues raised and found “apparent recruitment outside of the inclusion criteria, including those over 65 years old; discrepancy in the number of participants enrolled; and data irregularities, such as unusual patterns in the data.”
A jury will soon decide whether leaders at Duke University accused a researcher of misconduct in retaliation for her reporting sexual harassment at the institution.
When Elle O’Brien opened a publication that had recently cited her, it appeared to be a rewritten version of an arXiv preprint she had co-authored with two colleagues. Yet this did not seem to be a simple case of theft by other academics.
Weekend reads: ‘Illicit AI use’ in hundreds of peer reviews; 49-year-old commentary on talc retracted; co-authorship as a ‘traded commodity’
"Journalists rarely follow up on scientific retractions due to a combination of structural, economic, and professional barriers."
In upholding Fernández’s 15-year debarment, Brakebusch wrote the scientist’s lack of remorse and “understanding of the seriousness of his misconduct” factored into the decision. “He continues to assert that he committed no misconduct in the face of voluminous undisputed facts that prove otherwise.”
The Lancet has retracted a 49-year-old unsigned commentary on the safety of cosmetic talc after two researchers discovered the author was a paid consultant to Johnson & Johnson, at the time a leading producer of talc products. (No, that's not a record for longest time for publication to retraction.)
Hours after we published a story about a physicist with three retractions, a publisher decided to retract an entire volume of conference proceedings after one of the critics pointed out the researcher was responsible for the majority of its contents.
"If authors cannot stand by their own descriptions of their methods or data, retraction should be automatic," says @eugenie-reich.bsky.social.
"That’s why the Center for Scientific Integrity, the nonprofit organization behind Retraction Watch, has launched a new annual award celebrating scientists who discover substantial errors in their published work and take meaningful steps to correct the scientific record."
Weekend reads: How to buy a scientific paper; creating responsible authorship culture; sanction authors for hallucinated references?
The authors also provided fictitious email addresses during the submission process, but changed them after the papers were accepted, according to retraction notices in the February issue of Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments.
Nearly two dozen editors of a mathematics journal have resigned after its publisher removed the top editor and implemented a multiple review system, “running roughshod over the standard practices of the refereeing process in mathematics.”
The University of Melbourne has opened a formal investigation into the prominent Australia-based education researcher John Hattie, backtracking on a decision months ago that concerns about his work didn’t warrant further scrutiny.
Weekend reads: ‘Don’t hate the replicator, hate the game’; Crossref finds 150K incorrect citation links in database; Announcing our Ctrl-Z award
On November 15, the journal sent a sensory biologist an invitation to “apply for a position on our esteemed Editorial Board as an Associate Editor” for its latest addition, the Cureus Journal of Agriculture and Food Science.
A Retraction Watch investigation shows the mandatory citations helped bring IJS’ impact factor close to that of the world’s highest-ranked surgery journal, JAMA Surgery, while also guaranteeing its founder thousands of mentions in the scientific literature.
