Nursing and Allied Health: Current News & Research

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations.
• Do men or women retract more often? A new study weighs in.
• Chinese basic research funding agency penalizes 25 researchers for misconduct.
• Remembering Mario Biagioli, who articulated how scholarly metrics lead to fraud.

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 60,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?

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

• “Journal plagued with problematic papers, likely from paper mills, pauses submissions.”
• The Trump administration may be walking back the announcement that it’s cutting contracts with Springer Nature, according to an update from Nature. 
• Research papers from 14 institutions contained hidden prompts directing AI tools to give them good reviews.
• “RFK Jr. says medical journals are ‘corrupt.’” Former NEJM editors say they “know he’s wrong.”
• “Mass Leak Showed the Harvard Law Review Assessed Articles for DEI Values. Some Authors Say That’s Not a Problem.”
• “Amid White House claims of a research ‘replication crisis,’ scientists offer solutions” while some call it “overblown.”
• “Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications.” Coverage in Nature & New York Times.
• “Indians are gaming US immigration to get Einstein visas meant for top scientists” using paper mills.
• “In a male-dominated field, my success became misconduct,” says “principal investigator of a multimillion-euro European project.”
• NIH-funded research is now open-access. But could cuts to funding “have a noticeable effect on publication volumes?”
• “Different Methods Of Identifying Preprint Matches Yield Diverging Estimates Of Rates Of Preprinting.” 
• What incentives do companies need to publish research? 
• “Exclusive: NIH still screens grants in process a judge ruled illegal.”
• “Journal Editors Do Not Need To Worry About Preventing Misinformation From Being Spread”: A debate from the European Association of Science Editors conference.
• “Why it’s important to know who did what in a research paper.”
• “Why too much biomedical research is often undeserving of the public’s trust.”
• Researcher who “published one article every three days” loses 16 papers.
• Researcher “advocates a shift toward ethical, responsible, and transparent use of LLMs in scholarly publication.”
• “Panel with AI experts to review appeal” of university student “penalised for academic misconduct” in Singapore.
• “Are AI Bots Knocking Digital Collections Offline? An Interview with Michael Weinberg.”
• “Attitudes to sanctions for serious research misconduct”: Survey of sleuths and integrity officers.
• “AI, peer review and the human activity of science: When researchers cede their scientific judgement to machines, we lose something important.” 
• “Developing a Criteria Framework for Peer Review: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis.”
• “How Peer Review Became Science’s Most Dangerous Illusion.”

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 team@retractionwatch.com.

Mario Biagioli, a distinguished professor of law and communication at the University of California, Los Angeles — and a pioneering thinker about how academic reward systems incentivize misconduct — passed away in May after a long illness. He was 69. 

Among other intellectual interests, Biagioli wrote frequently about the (presumably) unintended consequences of using metrics such as citations to measure the quality and impact of published papers, and thereby the prestige of their authors and institutions. 

“It is no longer enough for scientists to publish their work. The work must be seen to have an influential shelf life,” Biagioli wrote in Nature in 2016. “This drive for impact places the academic paper at the centre of a web of metrics — typically, where it is published and how many times it is cited — and a good score on these metrics becomes a goal that scientists and publishers are willing to cheat for.” 

Such cheating takes the form of faking peer reviews, coercing citations, faking coauthors, or buying authorship on papers, among other tactics described in the 2020 book Gaming the Metrics: Misconduct and Manipulation in Academic Research, which Biagioli edited with Alexandra Lippman. 

“Mario saw the increasing reliance of metrics within scholarship, and their gaming, not simply as a moral problem but rather as an intellectual problem,” said Lippman, whom Biagioli mentored in a postdoctoral fellowship. “Mario was interested in how the gaming of metrics fundamentally changed academic misconduct from epistemic crime – old fashioned fraud – to a bureaucratic one – the post-production manipulation of impact.” 

Lippman and Biagioli organized a conference at the University of California, Davis, in 2016 on the topic, from which the book Gaming the Metrics followed. “To create a serious conversation about this new issue, Mario invited not only historians of science, computer scientists, anthropologists and other scholars but also misconduct watchdogs and other practitioners from the trenches to share their research, expertise and perspectives,” Lippman said. 

That conference “can be considered the moment when the milieu of the new style science watchdogs, to which belongs Retraction Watch, was launched,” said Emmanuel Didier, a sociologist and research director at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France. “It was the first time everyone met the other,” said Didier, who participated in the meeting. 

Biagioli “had high expectations for excellence, a strong sense of adventure, and a constant twinkle in his eye along with a biting sense of humor,” Lippman said. He was “an expansive thinker,” she said, and his intellectual legacy “is also expansive through his work not only on scholarly metrics and misconduct but also on scholarly credit, intellectual property, copyright, academic brands, and scientific authorship.” 

Biagioli earned his Ph.D. in the history of science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. Before joining the UCLA faculty in 2019, he taught at many institutions, including Harvard University, Stanford, and UC Davis, where he founded the Center for Science and Innovation Studies. His books addressing the history of science include Galileo, Courtier, published in 1993. 

“I learned something from every conversation I had with Mario, and everything of his I read,” said our Ivan Oransky. “His way of looking at the structure of academia and scholarly publishing was unique, bracing, and constructive.”

Biagioli’s idea that “the article has become more like a vector and recipient of citations than a medium for the communication of content” is “a guide to what research assessment has become,” Oransky said. “He is already missed.”

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 team@retractionwatch.com.

In its second batch of misconduct findings this year, the organization responsible for allocating basic research funding in China has called out 25 researchers for paper mill activity and plagiarism. 

The National Natural Science Foundation of China, or NSFC, gives more than 20,000 grants annually in disciplines ranging from agriculture to cancer research. The NSFC publishes the reports periodically “in accordance with relevant regulations,” the first report, released in April, states. The organization awarded 31.9 billion yuan, or about US$4.5 billion, in project funds in 2023.

The NSFC published the results of its investigations on June 13. The reports listed 11 specific papers and 26 grant applications and approvals. 

The misconduct findings were similar to those in the NSFC’s first first batch in April. Offenses included  “buying and selling of experimental research data” and “plagiarism, forgery and tampering.” As a result, NSFC barred those researchers from applying for or participating in grants for three or five years, and, in some cases, required grant recipients to pay back funds they’d already received. 

Seven of the studies on the list, coauthored by 14 of the sanctioned researchers, were retracted before the report was released. 

An email to the NSFC asking whether the organization informed the journals about the misconduct findings bounced back, but correspondence with several of the journals suggests the NSFC did not contact them. 

Two of the papers that haven’t been retracted came from Oncotarget, an embattled journal. Elena Kurenova, the scientific integrity editor for the publication, told us the articles were already under investigation before the NSFC findings, but the journal was “not aware of the current NSFC report.” Kurenova told us given the results of their investigation and the report, “the Editorial decision was made to retract these papers.” 

Four of the papers listed in the report come from journals published by Dove Press, part of Taylor & Francis: two in Onco Targets and Therapy (and retracted in 2022 and 2023), one in Cancer Management and Research, which the journal retracted in 2021, and one in the International Journal of Nanomedicine.  

The editor-in-chief for the International Journal of Nanomedicine, which has not retracted the paper included in the report, did not respond to our request for comment. 

Mark Robinson, media relations manager from Taylor & Francis, told us the article from International Journal of Nanomedicine was “already under investigation” before the report was released. He also said NSFC didn’t contact the journals about their report.

Two researchers named in the report, Yao Yang and Jinjin Wang, of South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou, included a paper they wrote in their grant applications that was retracted in 2024. NSFC penalized them for “buying and selling papers” and “unauthorized marking of other people’s scientific fund projects,” among other offenses. Neither responded to our request for comment. 

Another paper by Yang and Wang, published in Water, had those same offenses  and had not been retracted when NSFC’s report was released. Jovana Mirkovic, journal relations specialist at MDPI, which publishes Water, told us in an email the journal would be “issuing a retraction notice for this article.” She did not respond to our follow-up email regarding whether the investigation began before our email or whether she was aware of the NSFC report. 

He Juliang, who listed affiliations with Guangxi Medical University, had two of his projects revoked. The notice says the “allocated funds” were “recovered” from the researcher. Juliang did not respond to our request for comment. 

Wen Zhong, who listed affiliations with Jiangxi University of Science and Technology in Ganzhou, used a retracted paper in the application form, progress report, and final report of a project, according to the NSFC. The report also says he committed “plagiarism, forgery and tampering, use of other people’s signatures without consent, and unauthorized marking of other people’s fund projects.” Zhong did not respond to our request for comment. 

Ten of the researchers were sanctioned after they “plagiarized the contents of other people’s fund project applications,” the report states.

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 team@retractionwatch.com.