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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Drummond Rennie (1936-2025): A towering figure in medical journals in his own words
• Exclusive: Journal bans drug safety database papers as they flood the literature
• Why has this microRNA review paper been cited more than 2,000 times? 
• Publisher investigating DNA contamination paper that authors say CDC vaccine committee will consider
• Exclusive: Iraqi physicist fired by ministry over massive publishing scam

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500.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):

• “Paper by memory institute director garners expression of concern over image integrity.” A correction for the same author we covered in May. 
• “Harvard Sues Ex-HBS Professor Gino for Defamation, Accusing Her of Falsifying Evidence.”
• “Autism and Vaccine Scientist Arrested for Allegedly Stealing $1 Million from CDC.” He was indicted in 2011.
• “A Call for Retraction: How a Journal Condoned Psychedelic Therapy Abuse.”
• “Atlantic Settles Writer’s Suit Over Article It Retracted.”
• “We force people to do things they’re not prepared to do, and we shouldn’t blame them if they do things wrong,” John Ioannidis says of publishing pressure. Plus, his recent paper on “Provenance and Funding of Extremely Cited Biomedical Articles.”
• University “fires tenured professor following investigation into misconduct” at equine lab.
• “Far more authors use AI to write science papers than admit it, publisher reports.”
• “The policy and practice of postpublication critique is seriously neglected in psychology journals,” say researchers.
• “What do researchers acknowledge ChatGPT for in their papers?”
• Researcher creates databases with over 375,000 peer review documents to aid in finding probable review mills.
• “Which studies make headlines – and which remain invisible – often comes down to journal prestige“: An interview with the author of a recent paper on “How Journalists Navigate Predatory Journals.”
• “Scientists write and review papers without getting paid, and their institutions have to pay for access.”
• “‘Shut out’: Journal fires editor after publishing research refuting ‘warming climate.'”
• Insights following a peer review poll: “Researchers ‘polarised’ over use of AI in peer review.” “AI peer review needs to be peer-reviewed.” “Lack of geographic diversity in peer review skews ‘publishable’ research.”
• Why NIH’s caps on article processing charges “could backfire.” 
• “Scientists decry NIH pledge to end some human fetal tissue research.”
• “‘Publish or perish’ evolutionary pressures shape scientific publishing, for better and worse.”
• “A new method for evaluating research project proposals shows us how much we don’t know about collective decision making.”
• “Make research accessible. It benefits all chemists.”
• “To fight the war on science, higher education needs to reimagine the most important career milestone for faculty.”
• Attorney proposes model to explore “what could be the potential impacts (good, bad, or indifferent) of citation gaming.”
• “Peer review crisis is stalling India’s scientific progress.” 
• Researchers say the “rapid growth in redundant publications (a 17-fold increase between 2022 and 2024) is suggestive of a systemic failure of editorial checks.”
• “The rising danger of AI-generated images in nanomaterials science and what we can do about it.”
• “‘Lipstick on a pig’: how to fight back against a peer-review bully.”

Upcoming talks

• “Doctors’ Lounge“: An evening “examining the quality control challenges that we all face in our quest to stay current as medical practitioners” featuring our Ivan Oransky (September 29, virtual)

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