Free Republic

More than 300 COVID-19-related articles have been retracted — long after they’d done their damage — due to a lack of scientific truthfulness and ethical guidelines, according to Retraction Watch, a website that monitors retractions of science-related articles.A total of 330 COVID-related papers have been retracted thus far.According to Gunnveig Grødeland, a senior researcher at the Institute of Immunology at the University of Oslo, many researchers took ethical shortcuts when writing their essays.“It will, of course, be withdrawn when it is found that ethical guidelines have been breached,” Grødeland quipped to Khrono, an academic news publication.Grødeland states that there were...

But new tools show promise in tackling growing symptom of academia’s “publish or perish” culture When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010—and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers’ group report. “It is just...

A major publisher of scholarly medical and science articles has retracted 43 papers because of “fabricated” peer reviews amid signs of a broader fake peer review racket affecting many more publications. The publisher is BioMed Central, based in the United Kingdom, which puts out 277 peer-reviewed journals. A partial list of the retracted articles suggests most of them were written by scholars at universities in China, including China Medical University, Sichuan University, Shandong University and Jiaotong University Medical School. But Jigisha Patel, associate editorial director for research integrity at BioMed Central, said it’s not “a China problem. We get a...

Evidence is accumulating that quality control is a serious issue in academic publishing, which is the key to career advancement for scientists and other scholars. In an age when appeals to "peer reviewed" "settled science" have become standard operating procedure in efforts to impose radical increases in government control over our lives, corruption in the mechanisms for reviewing  scientific publications has very real consequences for all of us. Nature magazine tells us: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers. Richard Van Noorden writes: The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after...