Retracted studies and papers

Publisher investigating “serious concerns” about article on ivermectin, COVID, and the microbiome
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/01...rmectin-covid-and-the-microbiome/#more-126454

INTRO: The publisher Frontiers has published an expression of concern for an article that proposed “ivermectin protects against COVID-19” via effects on the microbiome. The article, “Microbiome-Based Hypothesis on Ivermectin’s Mechanism in COVID-19: Ivermectin Feeds Bifidobacteria to Boost Immunity,” was published in July 2022 in Frontiers in Microbiology... (MORE - details)
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‘Kafkaesque nightmare’
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/01...rant-pi-after-med-schools-misconduct-finding/

EXCERPTS: . . . As we’ve previously reported, Stacy Blain, an associate professor of pediatrics and cell biology at SUNY Downstate, has alleged the university discriminated against her for decades because of her sex, and that the investigation’s finding of misconduct was the result of retaliation after she complained of the discrimination.

[...] Blain asked a judge to order SUNY Downstate not to initiate disciplinary proceedings or other “adverse employment actions” against her, not to contact journals asking for retractions of her papers, and to reinstate her as the principal investigator on two grants from the National Institutes of Health from which she’d been removed.

In denying the request, Judge Frederic Block ruled this week that Blain had failed to prove “that there is a likelihood of success that she will prevail on the merits. [...] On the federal level, ORI is reviewing the finding of research misconduct. Its decision will not be rendered for some indeterminate period of time and there is no certainty that it will agree that Dr. Blain is culpable.

[...] Block concluded that the evidence Blain presented thus far did not establish sex discrimination or retaliation by SUNY Downstate: "There is no evidence that SUNY Downstate took any action that it would not have taken against a similarly situated male professor." (MORE - missing details)
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‘Kafkaesque nightmare’
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/01...rant-pi-after-med-schools-misconduct-finding/

EXCERPTS: . . . As we’ve previously reported, Stacy Blain, an associate professor of pediatrics and cell biology at SUNY Downstate, has alleged the university discriminated against her for decades because of her sex, and that the investigation’s finding of misconduct was the result of retaliation after she complained of the discrimination.

[...] Blain asked a judge to order SUNY Downstate not to initiate disciplinary proceedings or other “adverse employment actions” against her, not to contact journals asking for retractions of her papers, and to reinstate her as the principal investigator on two grants from the National Institutes of Health from which she’d been removed.

In denying the request, Judge Frederic Block ruled this week that Blain had failed to prove “that there is a likelihood of success that she will prevail on the merits. [...] On the federal level, ORI is reviewing the finding of research misconduct. Its decision will not be rendered for some indeterminate period of time and there is no certainty that it will agree that Dr. Blain is culpable.

[...] Block concluded that the evidence Blain presented thus far did not establish sex discrimination or retaliation by SUNY Downstate: "There is no evidence that SUNY Downstate took any action that it would not have taken against a similarly situated male professor." (MORE - missing details)
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Some of these retraction stories should be made into a Netflix docudrama. Who knew retractions could be so scandalous? -_O
 
Exclusive: Deepfake pioneer to lose two papers after misconduct finding of faked data
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/01...-papers-after-misconduct-finding/#more-126466

INTRO: Two papers coauthored by a computer scientist whose work on visual effects has been credited in big-name Hollywood movies will soon be retracted after a publisher’s investigation found falsification of data in the articles.

Retraction Watch has also learned that the University of Southern California (USC) found that Hao Li “falsely presented his research” in the two publications while he was a professor there. [...] Both of the articles to be retracted date from 2017. “Avatar digitization from a single image for real-time rendering” was published in ACM Transactions on Graphics, and “Pinscreen: creating performance-driven avatars in seconds” accompanied a presentation at the ACM computer graphics conference SIGGRAPH 2017 Real Time Live! (MORE - missing details)

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Scholar calls journal decision on ‘comfort women’ paper ‘rotten at the core’
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/01...t-women-paper-rotten-at-the-core/#more-126477

EXCERPTS: The journal that published a hotly contested article by a professor at Harvard Law School arguing that Korean women forced into sexual slavery during World War II were willing prostitutes has reaffirmed a prior expression of concern over the paper, but stopped short of retracting the article.

[...] “For the denialists, this is a victory,” she [Alexis Dudden] told Retraction Watch. “The IRLE decision is rotten at the core.”

[...] In his article, Ramseyer argued that the “political dispute between South Korea and Japan over the wartime brothels called ‘comfort stations’ obscures the contractual dynamics involved.” Instead, Ramseyer used game theory in an effort to show that the women negotiated voluntary contracts for sex work. The article, published online in December 2020 and titled “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War,” has been cited eight times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Ramseyer also stated in an op-ed in JAPAN Forward that the narrative of comfort women as sex slaves was “pure fiction.”... (MORE - missing details)
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How scientific is ‘peer-reviewed’ science?
https://www.acsh.org/news/2023/01/31/how-scientific-‘peer-reviewed’-science-16803

EXCERPTS (Henry I. Miller, MS, MD): 'Peer review' of scientific articles before publication is often considered the 'gold standard' of reliability, but its luster has become tarnished by greed -- the desire of the research community to tap into research funds, the pressure on scientists to publish or perish, and publishers of scientific journals seeking to maximize profits.

[...] Far too often, it fails. Many articles that pass through it are methodologically flawed, contain fraudulently manipulated data or obviously implausible claims, and should not have been accepted. Sometimes the editors and reviewers are part of the deception... (MORE - missing details)

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Former Harvard researchers lose PNAS paper for reusing data
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/02...lose-pnas-paper-for-reusing-data/#more-126484

INTRO: A group of cancer researchers once all based at Harvard have earned a retraction after acknowledging data duplication “errors” in an article published more than eight years ago.

The paper, “Synthetic lethality of combined glutaminase and Hsp90 inhibition in mTORC1-driven tumor cells,” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in December 2014. It has been cited 52 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The study informed a clinical trial from Infinity Pharmaceuticals on a drug for people with lung cancer, according to Dimensions, a scientific research database... (MORE - details)
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Nature on “decolonizing” mathematics
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/02/02/nature-on-decolonizing-mathematics/

INTRO: The latest issue of Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, has a long (4-page) feature about the “decolonization” of mathematics.

As we’ve learned to expect from this kind of article, it points out gender and ethnic inequities among mathematicians, ascribes them to structural racism existing today, and seen as ubiquitous in math, and and then proposes untested ways to achieve equity in math (proportional representation of groups) by infusing the teaching of math with aspects of local culture.

The problem with this paper, like similar “decolonization” screeds, is that while it certainly means well (I agree that everyone should have the chance to learn math), and is sensitive to differences among cultures, it gives no evidence that “decolonizing” mathematics (that is, removing its “whiteness” and “Westernness”, and using as math subjects features of the local culture) actually works. It’s a gift package of suggestions and assertions wrapped around, well, nothing... (MORE - details)
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Prolific autism researcher has two dozen papers retracted
https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/prolific-autism-researcher-has-two-dozen-papers-retracted/

INTRO: An autism researcher lost two dozen papers to retraction in January, eight years after the publisher was made aware of potentially troubling editorial practices. Elsevier, the publisher, cited undisclosed conflicts of interest, duplicated methodology and a “compromised” peer-review process as reasons for the retractions... (MORE - details)

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Prominent Korean heart doctor earns two retractions in a month
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/02...earns-two-retractions-in-a-month/#more-126499

INTRO: Two Korean journals last month pulled papers by a prominent cardiologist at Yonsei University, Professor Hui-Nam Pak, with one retraction notice citing “issues related to scientific misconduct.” (MORE - details)
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How fishy email addresses tipped off a sleuth to a paper mill
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/02...ped-off-a-sleuth-to-a-paper-mill/#more-126509

EXCERPTS: Anna Abalkina noticed something odd about a psychology paper [...] The corresponding author was affiliated with a university in Russia, but his email address had a domain name from India.

The unusual domain name was part of a pattern Abalkina, of the Freie Universität Berlin, noticed in hundreds of papers that seemed to have been produced by paper mills.

Six of those papers, including the one on youth extremism, had been published in the Journal of Community Psychology, a Wiley title...

[...] Besides the fishy email domains, other red flags in the articles included a disorganized structure that made it hard to follow the experiments described, and no attention to ethical review even of experiments involving human subjects.

“All six papers had serious flaws; we judged that none would be published if proper peer review and editorial scrutiny had taken place,” Abalkina and Bishop write... (MORE - missing details)

Academic paper mill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_paper_mill
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Psychology studies that go viral are likelier to be bogus
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/psychology-replication/

KEY POINTS: Researchers ran a text-analyzing machine learning model on over 14,000 psychology papers published in top journals between 2000 and 2019, assessing each paper's likelihood of being replicated. They found that highly cited papers were no more likely to be replicated. They also found that papers which received more media attention were less likely to be replicated. There was some good news from the research. Between 2010 and 2019, average replication scores increased, hinting that psychology as a field may be growing more rigorous. (MORE - details)

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The Whack-a-Mole problem: Hijacked journal still being indexed in Scopus even after discovery
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/02...d-in-scopus-even-after-discovery/#more-126513

INTRO: Have you heard about hijacked journals, which take over legitimate publications’ titles, ISSNs, and other metadata without their permission? We recently launched the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, and will be publishing regular posts like this one to tell the stories of some of those cases.

Hijacked journal: Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies

What happened: The journal became a perfect target for hijackers when it expanded its title from “Linguistica Antverpiensia” and changed its web domain.

Fraudulent publishers hijacked the journal in 2021, re-registering the old, expired domain under the original, shorter name Linguistica Antverpiensia... (MORE - details)
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‘I was fired up’: Psychiatrist effort prompts retraction of antidepressant treatment paper
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/02...f-antidepressant-treatment-paper/#more-126524

EXCERPTS: . . . To Ross, there was no doubt the data was fake, although the corresponding author of the papers, Mahmoud S. Abdallah, a lecturer in clinical pharmacy at the University of Sadat City, vehemently denies this.

[...] He decided to share his suspicions with the journals that had published the two studies, Neurotherapeutics and CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics.

“Research misconduct is damaging in any field, but I am particularly disturbed by these articles,” he told them in an email from March 1, 2022, that Retraction Watch has seen. “Besides its harms to the research community, a fabricated clinical trial with clinically actionable conclusions has the potential to do real and immediate harm to patients.”

[...] In September, Neurotherapeutics pulled the first paper, “The Antidiabetic Metformin as an Adjunct to Antidepressants in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder: A Proof-of-Concept, Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Trial.” It has been cited 27 times, according to Clarivate’s web of Science... (MORE - details)
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Controlled experiments show MDs dismissing evidence due to ideology
https://arstechnica.com/science/202...show-mds-dismissing-evidence-due-to-ideology/

INTRO: It's no secret that ideology is one of the factors that influences which evidence people will accept. But it was a bit of a surprise that ideology could dominate decision-making in the face of a pandemic that has killed over a million people in the US. Yet a large number of studies have shown that stances on COVID vaccination and death rates, among other things, show a clear partisan divide.

And it's not just the general public having issues. We'd like to think people like doctors would carefully evaluate evidence before making treatment decisions, yet a correlation between voting patterns and ivermectin prescriptions suggests that they don't.

Of course, a correlation at that sort of population level leaves a lot of unanswered questions about what's going on. A study this week tries to fill in some of those blanks by performing controlled experiments with a set of MDs. The work clearly shows how ideology clouds professional judgments even when it comes to reading the results of a scientific study... (MORE - details)
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Hawthorn effect: One of last century’s most influential social science studies is pretty bad
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/c...influential-social-science-studies-pretty-bad

INTRO: We love putting names to things, especially if those names are scientific. Just look at the variety of phenomena people love to refer to as the Dunning-Kruger effect: the idea that other people (not me!) overestimate what they know, the sighting of someone being aggressively wrong, or simply the belief that dumb people don’t know they are dumb.

The fact that science has studied a phenomenon and plastered a name over it feels good. But sometimes, when we dig into the origin of these scientific stories, we discover they have been heavily distorted in the telling. For example, the creation myth of modern placebo research, which has Dr. Henry Beecher running out of morphine while treating World War II soldiers and improvising with a saline solution to surprising results, simply crumbles when investigated. There is no primary source to support this story, but what a story it is!

Today, yet another scientific myth must come down. You may have heard that, a long time ago, factory workers were studied and their work environment was changed in different ways. No matter what the scientists did, the workers’ productivity increased. It’s the idea that being part of a study changes our behaviour, perhaps because of the attention we are receiving. This is known as the Hawthorne effect and it played a role in the inception of the human resources departments we have today.

But when we transport ourselves back a century to study what actually happened at the Hawthorne plant, we discover a series of experiments whose designs would not pass muster if a modern-day high schooler proposed them... (MORE - details)
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Teaching UBC medical scholars that biological sex is a ‘colonial imposition’
https://quillette.com/blog/2023/02/...that-biological-sex-is-a-colonial-imposition/

INTRO: You can study HIV in gay males—but your research sample must include females who have anal sex. You can study health outcomes in new fathers—but only if you agree that some fathers gestated and birthed their offspring. You also can study sexual violence inside of women’s prisons—but you must include those who currently, formerly, or occasionally “identify” as a woman.

Each of these examples reflects actual guidance for researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Faculty of Medicine, one of Canada’s top medical schools. The document in which they’re contained, Gender & Sex in Methods & Measurement: Research Equity Toolkit, offers a case study in the process by which ideologically-driven pedagogical mandates associated with DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—are metastasizing throughout STEM... (MORE - details)

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How many times can a journal be hijacked?
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/02/24/how-many-times-can-a-journal-be-hijacked/#more-126596

INTRO: Have you heard about hijacked journals, which take over legitimate publications’ titles, ISSNs, and other metadata without their permission? We recently launched the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, and will be publishing regular posts like this one to tell the stories of some of those cases.

Certain legitimate journal types are particularly susceptible to hijacking, including niche or trade journals published in English or local languages, print-only journals, and journals indexed in international databases like Web of Science or Scopus. Hijackers typically avoid journals from big, reputable publishers such as Springer, Wiley, and Elsevier.

As a result, multiple networks of hijacked journals created by different cybercriminals target the same legitimate journals, potentially causing the same legitimate journals to have multiple clone websites... (MORE - details)
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The week at Retraction Watch featured
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/02...abbi-costly-spreadsheet-mistakes/#more-126581

Paper with authorship posted for sale retracted over a year after Retraction Watch report
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/02...ed-over-a-year-after-retraction-watch-report/

Five years on, convicted transplant surgeon earns expressions of concern from Lancet
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/02...eon-earns-expressions-of-concern-from-lancet/

Harvard surgeon has five papers pulled following internal investigation
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/02...pers-pulled-following-internal-investigation/

Exclusive: Prof stole former student’s identity to edit two journal special issues
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/02...-identity-to-edit-two-journal-special-issues/

Here’s what was happening elsewhere... (MORE - details)
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Two years ago, an author asked a journal to withdraw a paper. It still hasn’t.
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/03...a-journal-to-withdraw-a-paper-it-still-hasnt/

EXCERPT: . . . the article, “Outward foreign direct investment and economic growth in Romania: Evidence from non-linear ARDL approach,” which appeared in August 2020 in the International Journal of Finance and Economics, was included in the January 2022 issue of the journal. It has been cited 10 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

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Chemist who cooked data claims PhD years after it was revoked
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/03...s-phd-years-after-it-was-revoked/#more-126626

EXCERPT: By the time Shiladitya Sen was officially declared guilty of research misconduct in 2018 by U.S. federal officials, The Ohio State University had long since stripped him of his doctorate in chemistry. Years later, however, Sen is still billing himself as a PhD in the signature of his work email at a company that provides lab mice and other animals to many scientists...
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Accommodating coercion: Authors, editors, and citations
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048733323000380

ABSTRACT: Some editors try to artificially inflate their journals' citation count by coercing authors, telling them to add citations referencing their journal even though the review process did not identify any bibliographical shortcomings. However, coercing authors for citations does not, by itself, inflate a journal's citation count; for coercion to be effective, authors must comply with the editor's demands and add those superfluous citations.

In this study, we suggest that editors might use their publication authority to sort by or motivate compliance by accepting manuscripts of authors who acquiesce and rejecting studies by those who do not. Data was collected by conducting a survey of academics and includes responses of over 1000 scholars who have been coerced, our results suggest that acquiescence is positively associated with the publication decision, authors who added the coerced citations report significantly greater publication success than those who resist.

In addition, we find that authors who acquiesce to coercion also report being more likely to submit to coercive journals in the future and to add superfluous, journal-specific citations before submitting manuscripts. We close with a brief discussion about the ethics of coercion and policy changes that can help reduce these abuses... (MORE - details)

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Papers that get more media coverage ‘less likely to replicate’
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/papers-get-more-media-coverage-less-likely-replicate

INTRO: The more media coverage that an academic paper gets, the less likely its findings are to be successfully replicated, according to a study focused on psychology scholarship.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 30 January, says that ideally “media should cover credible and rigorous research. Yet in reality, the mainstream media tends to highlight research that finds surprising, counterintuitive results.”

“Media attention and replication success are negatively correlated,” it concludes... (MORE - details)

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Leaked: EU member states set out to reform scientific publishing
https://sciencebusiness.net/news/Un...r-states-set-out-reform-scientific-publishing

INTRO: EU countries want to ensure the scientific publishing industry is fair and sustainable as it moves towards open access models, according to the first draft of council conclusions seen by Science|Business.

EU governments are working on a joint statement on the future of open access publishing, to be adopted under the current six-month Swedish presidency of the Council of member states. The conclusions are calling for immediate and unrestricted open access publishing to be “the default mode in publishing, with no fees for authors.”

The EU has been pushing open access policy for years through various initiatives and political statements, and it’s made a lot of headway... (MORE - details)
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The sex binary in animals: a defense by Colin Wright
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/03/08/the-sex-binary-in-animals-a-defense-by-colin-wright/

EXCERPTS: It is a constant uphill battle for biologists to keep defending the truth that animals have but two sexes, defined by whether they have the reproductive apparatus to produce small, mobile gametes (the males) or large immobile gametes (the females). I’m not going to go into this again as you can read my explanation here. I have a longer and more popular explanation coming out in a big paper in June (stay tuned).

There are just two sexes in animals (and in nearly all vascular plants): male and female. Clownfish are not a third sex (they change from male to female.) Seahorse males are not a third sex (they are males who produce sperm and carry the fertilized eggs of females around in a pouch). Hermaphrodites are not a third sex (they combine aspects of male and female sex), [...] There is no individual in animals or vascular plants that produce a third type of gamete. Ergo, sex is binary.

This assertion, accepted for decades by biologists, is offensive to ideological Pecksniffs because they want sex to be a spectrum, as gender is. (Gender and sex are different, and gender really isn’t a spectrum, but bimodal, with the distribution looking like the back of a two-humped camel, with one hump being those identifying as the male gender and the other identifying as the female.)

Under woke ideology, what you think is good in society must be seen as true in nature, an inversion of the “appeal to nature” that argues that something that’s natural is perceived to be good. In this new fallacy, which is still a fallacy, something that’s good is perceived to be natural.

[...] Colin Wright, who spends much of his career ably defending the two-sex paradigm against the onslaught of The Elect, has just fought off yet another attempt to argue that sex in humans (and presumably other animals) is a spectrum... (MORE - missing details)
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Wiley paused Hindawi special issues amid quality problems, lost $9 million in revenue
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/03...oblems-lost-9-million-in-revenue/#more-126674

Article retracted when authors don’t pay publication fee
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/03/09/article-retracted-when-authors-dont-pay-publication-fee/

Ob-gyn loses PhD after committee finds he made up research
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/03/08/ob-gyn-loses-phd-after-committee-finds-he-made-up-research/

Journals dismiss claims that Harvard researcher’s work on race is ‘pseudoscience’
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/03...er-work-on-race-is-pseudoscience/#more-126643
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More calls for not naming species after people
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/03/14/more-calls-for-not-naming-species-after-people/

INTRO (Jerry Coyne): I am so weary of people trying to change both the common and Latin names of species because doing so will magically render biology more inclusive. But I have yet to find a single person who left the field, or refused to enter it, because species were named after people, odious or otherwise.

In the case at hand, apparently all white people and men are odious, for the Nature Ecology & Evolution paper below, as well as a summary from Oxford University (click screenshot), are calling for the end of the practice of naming species after people, and mention whiteness and maleness several times—not as desirable traits! (Usually eponyms are meant as honorifics, taken from a famous biologist or a donor to research.)

For animals, you can change the common names of species if they’re found offensive (e.g., “gypsy moth” or “Bachman’s warbler”, which have been deemed offensive), but what you cannot do is change the Latin binomial of animals (e.g., Vermivora bachmanii has to stay), for doing so would play hob with the literature and with international scientific communication. (The botanical body for nomeclature has yet to weigh in on this issue.)

Clicking below, you’ll find the fourth or fifth article I’ve read that says exactly the same thing. I’m not going to critique these pieces in detail as I’ve done so previously. I’ll just excerpt some of the reasons why the authors think that animals shouldn’t be named after people, and add a few brief remarks... (MORE - details)
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When journals don’t meet their ethical guidelines, will anyone hold them accountable?
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/03...guidelines-will-anyone-hold-them-accountable/

When it takes two university-federal agency letters – and five years – for a journal to retract a paper
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/03...-five-years-for-a-journal-to-retract-a-paper/

Gov’t committee in Pakistan lets plagiarizing vice-chancellor off the hook
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/03...ts-plagiarizing-vice-chancellor-off-the-hook/

Here’s one article that won’t be making any top 50 papers list
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/03/14/heres-one-article-that-wont-be-making-any-top-50-papers-list/

After a sleuth reveals a paper with authorships advertised for sale, it’s retracted
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/03...dvertised-for-sale-its-retracted/#more-126685
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