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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
Here's what was happening elsewhere:
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"Michigan State University Museum Director Mark Auslander is suing MSU and three people he claims retaliated against him after he revealed decades of financial mismanagement." The story begins here.
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"A stem cell company co-founded by the leading geneticist Professor Sir Martin Evans conducted unlawful medical trials in Greece."
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"Now, Pruitt acknowledges in a new interview that a lawyer he hired has sent several journal editors and co-authors letters cautioning them about airing this matter on social media and admonishing them to follow retraction guidelines set up by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)." A researcher whose work is being questioned by colleagues - and some of which has been retracted - lawyers up.
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A paper on treating coronavirus with traditional Chinese medicine "promised much more than it delivered."
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A Harvard professor sues the school, "citing a dispute concerning his employment contract" - aka a tenure denial.
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"Wow, that was rough. My dad just found out that my lab has run out of research funding," Dr Saunders wrote.
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"Luckily," says biotech founder Sarah Richardson of prestige publishing, "I don't give a crap about that."
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"A former West Virginia University professor admitted to a fraud charge..." Lewis was employed by the People's Republic of China's "Global Experts 1000 Talents Plan."
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"Scientists Say Another Panic-Fueling Vaping Study Needs to Be Retracted: A paper that claimed vapes are a gateway to cigarettes relied on faulty methodology, experts say."
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"Hundreds of scientists who post their peer-review activity on the website Publons say they've reviewed papers for journals termed 'predatory', an analysis has found."
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"Equating citations with impact thus underestimates the impact of highly cited papers. Real citation practices thus reveal that citations are biased measures of quality and impact," argues a new preprint.
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"The best research is done not when we pretend that we are perfectly objective, but when we acknowledge that we are not."
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Why are hundreds of papers retracted every year? Our Ivan Oransky talks to BYU Radio.
PNAS lifted the embargo early on Friday of last week on a paper because the corresponding author's institute posted a press release days before the embargo was scheduled to lift.
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What is "white hat bias?" David Allison explains.
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"[Q]uality of reporting in preprints in the life sciences is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles, albeit slightly lower on average, supporting the idea that preprints should be considered valid scientific contributions."
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"But for more normal journals, how poisonous is suggesting reviewers?"
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"For three years, part of DARPA has funded two teams for each project: one for research and one for reproducibility. The investment is paying off."
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"[T]he overall quality and originality of published academic research can be improved by introducing randomness into the peer review process," argue two researchers.
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"Imagine your excitement when you receive your first email inviting you to present your esteemed article in Rome. Is this invitation a dream come true or predatory?"
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"Enforced, structured reporting and processes to assess relevance are required to make conflict of interest disclosures fit for purpose."
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"Editor's note: Retraction and apology for racist op-ed illustration choice."
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