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 …

Why it’s important to address plagiarism

Plagiarism is a tricky issue. If it’s straightforward to you, ask yourself if you’re assuming that the plagiariser (plagiarist?) is fluent in reading and writing, but especially writing, English. The answer’s probably ‘yes’. This is because for someone entering into an English-using universe for the first time, certain turns of phrase and certain ways to …

NCBS fracas: In defence of celebrating retractions

Continuing from here… Irrespective of Arati Ramesh’s words and actions, I find every retraction worth celebrating because how hard-won retractions in general have been, in India and abroad. I don’t know how often papers coauthored by Indian scientists are retracted and how high or low that rate is compared to the international average. But I …

Dealing with plagiarism? Look at thy neighbour

Four doctors affiliated with Kathmandu University (KU) in Nepal are going to be fired because they plagiarised data in two papers. The papers were retracted last year from the Bali Medical Journal, where they had been published. A dean at the university, Dipak Shrestha, told a media outlet that the matter will be settled within …

A conference’s peer-review was found to be sort of random, but whose fault is it?

It’s not a good time for peer-review. Sure, if you’ve been a regular reader of Retraction Watch, it’s never been a good time for peer-review. But aside from that, the process has increasingly been taking the brunt for not being able to stem the publishing of results that – after publication – have been found …