Gender equity in retractions

From the abstract of a fascinating study published in PLoS ONE on May 3, 2023: … this study investigated gender differences in authorship of retracted papers in biomedical sciences available on RetractionWatch. Among 35,635 biomedical articles retracted between 1970 and 2022, including 20,849 first authors and 20,413 last authors, women accounted for 27.4% [26.8 to …

NCBS retraction – addenda

My take on the NCBS paper being retracted, and the polarised conversation that has erupted around the incident, is here. The following are some points I’d like to add. a. Why didn’t the editorial and peer-review teams at Nature Chemical Biology catch the mistakes before the paper was published? As the work of famous research-fraud …

Appa Rao Podile made fellow of science academy that published his problem paper – some questions

Appa Rao Podile, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Hyderabad, has been elected a fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) in spite of one of his three papers – which The Wire had identified in April 2016 as containing evidence of plagiarism – having been published by the academy. According to the citation, he “has made important contributions …

The Indian Science Congress has gutted its own award by giving it to Appa Rao Podile

An award of the Indian Science Congress has become subverted into becoming an instrument of negotiation for political agents: “You let me interfere in your duties, I will give you a fancy-sounding award”.

Podile, plagiarism, politics

If Appa Rao is the first politically appointed VC at the University of Hyderabad, how can anything he does not be examined through a political lens?