Weekend reads: ‘Don’t hate the replicator, hate the game’; Crossref finds 150K incorrect citation links in database; Announcing our Ctrl

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed. The week at Retraction Watch featured: - Stolen economics study retracted following Retraction Watch coverage - Former Mount Sinai postdoc falsified images in grant updates, ORI says - Controversial editorial practices boost plastic surgeon’s publishing empire - Embattled journal brand mistakenly invites out-of-scope researchers to join board Plus: - Announcing our $2,500 award for researchers who discover errors in their work and take steps to correct the scientific record In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 63,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to nearly 650, and our mass resignations list has 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts. Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read): - “Don’t hate the replicator, hate the game“: Economist discusses “internationally crowdsourced surveillance system, designed to keep social scientists honest.” - Crossref identifies 150,000 incorrect citation links in their database, updates matching strategy following preprint on Springer Nature’s possible citation inflation. - “What Zohran Mamdani can teach us about changing the publishing system.” - “The complex ecosystem of hyperprolific authors.” - “Research integrity investigators are starting to organize, but the field, and the people, remain idiosyncratic.” - “I’m an NIH whistleblower. The scientific community cannot afford to avoid politics.” - “Lessons and Insights from a Case Study on Clinical Trial Fraud.” - AI company develops “system to track dataset reuse.” - Scientist “admits errors” in research on polylaminin, to issue correction. - “Following its takeover by Oxford University Press, Karger Publishing is facing mass layoffs.” - “Purdue animal research project reportedly suspended due to misconduct, falsified documents.” - Researchers analyze discrepancies in document types in different databases, including how retractions are categorized. - “Let’s teach neuroscientists how to be thoughtful and fair reviewers.” - “Journal Submissions Riddled With AI-Created Fake Citations.” And “AI is inventing academic articles – and scholars are citing them.” Our recent coverage of a librarian who found a “preposterous” amount in a Springer Nature paper. - “Views on ‘questionable’ research practices ‘vary across disciplines,’” survey finds. - “A day in the life of a Nature Editor,” and the “fate of research papers after submission.” - An interview with Lonni Besançon, “researcher by day, science detective by night.” - “Editors-in-Chief address tough questions facing scientific journals.” - UK government “urged not to allow data mining of academic literature.” - “Forensic Metascience, the GRIM test, and technology for checking papers“: A conversation with James Heathers, the director of the Center for Scientific Integrity’s Medical Evidence Project. - “Nearly half of biomedical scientists worry preprints could spread shoddy research and misinformation,” survey finds. - “UNC-Asheville whistleblower suit alleges improper COVID research, grant use.” - “A story of India’s misplaced investment priorities” in research and development. - “How bioRxiv changed the way biologists share ideas – in numbers.” - Researchers attempt to create a “Directory of Living Literature Reviews.” - “The Perils of Using Generative AI to Perform Research Tasks: Editors’ and Publishers’ Viewpoints.” - “When Impact Signals Become Noisy”: The Research Integrity Research Index “as an Early Warning Framework for University Rankings.” - “Are supplementary materials the new file drawer?” Upcoming Talks - “Scholarly Metrics in the Age of AI,” featuring our Ivan Oransky (March 16, Denver) - “An Intro to the Retraction Watch Research Accountability Reporting Fellowship” in partnership with The Open Notebook (March 26, virtual) - “Restoring Trust in Science: Storytelling, AI, and Integrity in Scholarly Publishing,” featuring our Ivan Oransky (March 26, virtual) Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected]. Karger, past the paywall, is at https://archive.ph/rit9F “Karger adjusted its sales model and today relies heavily on the sale of content-related packages for major customers, such as from the pharmaceutical industry, and for universities.” (“Karger passte sein Vertriebsmodell an und setzt heute stark auf den Verkauf von inhaltlichen Paketen für Grosskunden, etwa aus der Pharma, und für die Universitäten.”) I’d be more interested in what this all says about OUP generally, but that’s not the focus here. I’d read this as suggesting OUP has its own aspirations toward finding a home in the predatory market, a story I had not seen to date. They currently have one entry in the mass resignations list, at #48, and I suppose we can look forward to more in that line over time. (As I still interact with various journals, I maintain a personal interest in avoiding those whose parent companies don’t take themselves seriously – Elsevier, Wiley, etc.)