Weekend reads: Shoddy commentaries flood journals; key hydroxychloroquine paper retracted; a researcher confesses

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• EcoHealth Alliance retracts and replaces paper on potential origin of COVID-19 in bats
• Journal won’t retract paper that involved human organ transplants in China
• Journal that published viral study on black plastic removed from major index
• Researcher linked to paper mill activity mysteriously reappeared on list of journal’s editorial board

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 450. There are more than 50,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

• How “a quick and dirty route to higher impact numbers—are on the rise.” Our investigation with Science.
• “Study retracted years after it set off an infamous COVID-19 treatment scandal.” It’s the second-most cited retracted paper ever.
• “It speaks better of her that she self-identified what happened than if she had pretended it didn’t happen.” A case of misconduct.
• “The Dirty Business of Monkey Laundering,” a documentary about research lab suppliers.
• “Japanese researchers surprised to learn they co-authored papers with North Korean scientists.”
• Retired researcher David Bimler — aka Smut Clyde — “has embarked on a second career: exposing fraudulent research.”
• What might academic publishing look like in 2030? 2035?
• “Will ChatGPT Get Tenure?”
• “Scholars Are Supposed to Say When They Use AI. Do They?”
• “My brain starts to die when I try to read a journal article.”
• “Leading foreign journals may face growing competition for submissions and readership from emerging Chinese titles.”
• “But if social scientists do not work hard to check that their conclusions are true, and do not limit themselves to what can be justified on that basis, they too are in the fake news business.”
• “Academic writing is getting harder to read—the humanities most of all.”
• “That’s why, in a discussion paper published this month, the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) argues that research misconduct investigations should, as far as possible, use neutral language.”
• “The errors are so obvious and significant that editorial boards from JAMC and PNAS should retract both of these papers to prevent the further misuse of a fatally flawed dataset” about losses from hurricane damage, argues Roger Pielke, Jr.
• “Can novelty scores on papers shift the power dynamics in scientific publishing?”
• “U.S. science funding agencies roll out policies on free access to journal articles.”
• “How to share science with the public when your research is secret.”
• “Research Misconduct in the Age” of AI. And the “Double-Edged Sword of AI in Research Misconduct.”
• “The Course Is About Literature. Its Textbook Was Generated by AI.”
• “Do we need a trust credit agency in scholarly publishing?”
• “Exposure of Academic Misconduct and Universities’ Innovation Output” from retractions in China.
• “Concerns over lack of oversight for privately funded research” in Canada. 
• “Sage acquires the scientific and medical publisher Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.”
• eLife announces partial feed to Web of Science, but won’t change publishing model following loss of impact factor. 
• Research centers at university “experimented on people – without permission.” A link to our previous coverage.
• “Ethics of posthumous scholarly authorship in the sciences.”
• “AI-authored abstracts ‘more authentic’ than human-written ones.”
• “In Praise of Peer Review” from a journal editor. 
• Research scholar files complaint against university faculty “for ‘misconduct.'”
• “On the (ab)use of special issues in scholarly journals.”
• “Giant study finds untrustworthy trials pollute gold-standard medical reviews.”
• “Paris declaration to spearhead fight against fake science.”
• “The Untold Mystery of Rogue RA,” a comic strip. 

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• weekend-reads