Weekend reads: Journal retracts ADHD intervention papers; ‘Science and the crisis of trust’; letters to editors surge

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Former Australian science agency ecology researcher loses two papers
• Dozens of board members resign from big-data journal after mass staff firings
• Review mill in Italy targeting ob-gyn journals, researchers allege
• Exclusive: A misconduct ruling, a flawed investigation, and an attempted payoff
• Sleuths flag ‘complete mismatch’ in data of BMJ stem cell study
• Journal retracts ‘bizarre’ placebo effect paper

Did you know that Retraction Watch and the Retraction Watch Database are  projects of The Center of Scientific Integrity?  Others include the Medical Evidence Project, the Hijacked Journal Checker, and the Sleuths in Residence Program. Help support this work.   

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

• “Journal retracts two papers evaluating ADHD interventions.”
• “When science is perceived as aligned with political agendas, or when episodes of scientific misconduct receive high-profile media coverage, the legitimacy of science can be damaged, even if such cases are rare.”
• “Letters to scientific journals surge as ‘prolific debutante’ authors likely use AI.” Meet one author who published over 500 letters to editors in a year. 
• arXiv will “no longer accept computer science review articles and position papers” after getting “spammed” with AI papers.
• “The relentless rise of China’s medical science.”
• “What Research Scandals? Welcome to the Bioethics Memory Hole.”
• University president “files defamation suit over plagiarism allegations.”
• Ex-university “soccer coach’s doctorate revoked for research misconduct.”
• Researcher “repulsed by the prevalence of scientific misconduct” says “science itself could be a form of dissent.”
• “Temporal shifts in retraction reasons”: study finds a “shift is observed from classical misconduct, e.g. ‘Falsification’ … to procedural concerns like ‘Fake Peer Review.'”
• Researchers find “only a small proportion (5.7%) of submitting authors disclosed AI use” in biomedical journals.
• “Professor Loses Appeal Over Firing for Racial IQ Gap Article.”
• “Oxford University Press announces agreement to acquire Karger.”
• “Large language models in peer review: challenges and opportunities.”
• “Concerns Escalate With the Fundamental Integrity of Scientific Peer-Reviewed Literature.”
• “How politicians soured on Europe’s biggest primate research center.”
• “Post-publication peer review: remedy or risk for publishing?”
• Ghost writing “threatens the integrity of scientific research: When a paper is ghostwritten by a corporation with a clear interest in promoting or exonerating a profitable product, the paper may have been inappropriately influenced by that interest.”
• Indian council clears former director of the Animal Resources Development Department of misconduct charges.
• Researchers look at strategies to limit endogamy in editorial boards of university journals. 
• Meta and TikTok are obstructing researchers’ access to data, European Commission rules.
• “Could research security measures reshape open science?”
• “UK university halted human rights research after pressure from China.”
• An author of a study on “Fake publications in biomedical science” is among those proposing a “call to action for all stakeholders…to unite in reforming the structure of the current science publishing culture.”
• Data science platform’s “Scientific Image Forgery Detection” competition: “Who can develop the best model to detect copy/move forgeries in biomedical images?” asks Elisabeth Bik.
• “Facing claims of animal abuse, a major breeder of research dogs will close its pipeline.”
• “The Administration Dismantled CDC’s Peer Review System. Staff Scrambled to Save It.” 
• “Manuscript Submissions Are Up! That’s Good, Right?”
• “Citation proximus: The role of social and semantic ties on citations.”

Upcoming talks

• “What to do next?” with our Ivan Oransky (November 18, International Research Integrity Conference, Sydney)
• “Retractions: On the Rise, But Not Enough” with our Ivan Oransky (November 19, Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-research and Open Science 2025 Conference, University of Sydney)

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• weekend-reads