Kate Travis

1 month ago | retractionwatch.com | Kate Travis

Amid efforts by the Trump administration to “put an end to fraudulent and wasteful spending” and “enhance” accountability, two key offices charged with investigating fraud and holding scientists and institutions accountable for federal spending have seen top leadership depart. Retraction Watch has learned that most — if not all — research investigators at the National Science Foundation’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) will be leaving their jobs.

2 months ago | retractionwatch.com | Kate Travis

The 3,000+ journals in the Springer Nature portfolio published over 482,000 articles in 2024, according to data published this week on a new research integrity page on the company’s website. The page also shares a data point you don’t typically get from publishers: 2,923 articles were retracted. The numbers are a small part of the page, which outlines the tools the publisher uses for quality control, what prompts a research integrity investigation, and what happens during such investigations.

2 months ago | retractionwatch.com | Kate Travis

A 2017 paper coauthored by Nobel laureate Thomas Südhof has been retracted. The article, “Conditional Deletion of All Neurexins Defines Diversity of Essential Synaptic Organizer Functions for Neurexins,” was published in Neuron in May 2017 and has been cited 145 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

2 months ago | retractionwatch.com | Kate Travis

When scientists face critique of their published work, they should be proactive in responding to the issues and to questions about it from the public and the media, says Science editor-in-chief Holden Thorp in an editorial in the Feb. 14 Science. “In an age of growing, intense attacks on science, silence can be detrimental to both public trust and the careers of scientists who are under scrutiny,” writes Thorp and coauthor Meagan Phelan, communications director for Science.

2 months ago | retractionwatch.com | Kate Travis

Science is finally considering retracting a 2010 paper claiming the discovery of a bacterium that could substitute arsenic for phosphorus in its chemical makeup. “We feel the best thing to do would be to retract the paper,” the journal’s editor-in-chief Holden Thorp told the New York Times in an article published Tuesday.