Dear RW readers, we look forward to wrapping up the week with Weekend Reads. If you enjoy it too, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• How to juice your Google Scholar h-index, preprint by preprint
• One of Kazakhstan’s top nuclear physicists also leads his nation in retractions
• COPE’s involvement leads to retraction of paper on homeopathy for lung cancer
• Journal removes funding statement from hormone therapy paper without issuing correction

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):

• “Springer Nature retracts, removes nearly 40 publications that trained neural networks on ‘bonkers’ dataset.”
• “A new preprint server welcomes papers written and reviewed by AI.”
• “Only 2%” of sampled ethics journals “disclosed potential COIs for their editors,” study finds.
• “Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess.’”
• Retracting papers for fraud or ethical flaws “runs against the grain of the library logic,” say researchers: “one does not burn a book for being questionable.”
• “One Retracted Study Doesn’t Cancel Climate Science.” A link to our coverage of the retraction.
• “Should Australia establish an independent body to investigate scientific misconduct?”
• “More A than I: Testing for Large Language Model Plagiarism in Political Science.”
• “The hidden ethics crisis in Australian health research funding”: “how researcher salaries are costed.”
• “Self-reflection enhances large language models towards substantial academic response” in peer review.
• American Economic Association imposes lifelong ban on Harvard’s Lawrence Summers for his associations with Jeffrey Epstein.
• “Academic Publishing Is Not Fit for the Future – If We Don’t Act Now, The Vital Role Research Plays in Society Is at Risk,” says a director of Cambridge University Press.
• “This science sleuth revealed a retraction crisis at Indian universities.”
• “Global Ecosystems of Scholarship: The Chirality of Publishing Quality and the South African National Research Economy.”
• “AI reviewers are here — we are not ready.”
• For submissions to one AI conference, “ChatGPT Wrote One in Five Reviews (Maybe).”
• “Who Owns the Knowledge? Copyright, GenAI, and the Future of Academic Publishing.”
• “China’s scientific clout is growing as US influence wanes: the data show how.”
• “APC waivers and Ukraine’s publishing output: Evidence from 5 commercial publishers.”
• Researchers find that concerns raised during clinical practice inspections “almost never appear in the medical literature,” including some inspections that “casted doubts on data reliability.”
• “The inconsistent academic peer review process.”
• “Safeguarding the integrity of scientific literature in the 21st century,” an article by Ben Mol and colleagues.
• “Retraction and Reflection: The Gunung Padang Controversy and the Challenges of Peer Review in Archaeological Prospection.” A link to our coverage on the controversial pyramid paper.
• “Issues arising in post-publication debate should be carried forward systematically and thoroughly to subsequent studies.” Hilda Bastian reflects on the process leading to two new Cochrane reviews on HPV vaccines.
• “Plain language summaries, and why we need them now more than ever.”
• “Conflict of Interest and financial disclosure policies of journals that publish weather and climate research.”
• “Open funder metadata is essential for true research transparency.”
• “Conditions of Academic Journal Censorship Complicity and Resistance in China: An Interview Study.”
• Researcher uses Lithuania as an example of “dismantling domestic journal publishing infrastructure” following a preprint’s call-to-action for re-communalization of academic publishing.
• “There’s no excuse for journals to require formatting.”

Upcoming Talk:

• “Scientific Integrity Challenged by New Editorial Practices,” featuring our Ivan Oransky (February 12, 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].

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