Apr 25, 2024
Algorithm ranks peer reviewers by reputation — but critics warn of bias
An algorithm ranks the reputation of peer reviewers on the basis of how many citations the studies they have reviewed attracted. The...
Apr 17, 2024
Researchers want a ‘nutrition label’ for academic-paper facts
An ‘at a glance’ approach to publication details, such as journal acceptance rates and the number of peer reviewers, would promote...
Apr 16, 2024
Revealed: the ten research papers that policy documents cite most
An exclusive analysis of citations to academic papers in policy documents shows that economics and interdisciplinary teams get the...
Apr 11, 2024
Is ChatGPT corrupting peer review? Telltale words hint at AI use
A study that identified buzzword adjectives that could be hallmarks of AI-written text in peer-review reports suggests that researchers...
Apr 9, 2024
A key chemistry journal disappeared from the web. Others are at risk
When Jonathan Goodman went looking for a paper published by the popular chemistry journal Heterocycles, he realised something odd. Not...
Apr 5, 2024
Gates Foundation mandates preprints
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation says it will mandate all researchers to post preprint articles stemming from any research the...
Mar 26, 2024
Larger or longer grants unlikely to push senior scientists towards high-risk, high-reward work
Offering professors more money or time isn’t likely to dramatically change how they do their research, a survey of US-based academics has...
Mar 15, 2024
Why is plagiarism apparently more common in research funded by the NSF than the NIH?
Figures just out reveal that the US National Science Foundation (NSF) received 54 allegations of research misconduct in the 2022–23...
Feb 11, 2024
COVID’s preprint bump set to have lasting effect on research publishing
The COVID-19 pandemic saw an explosion in publication of preprint articles, many by authors who had never produced one before. Now it...
Feb 8, 2024
Fake research papers flagged by analysing authorship trends
A research-technology firm has developed a new approach to help identify journal articles that originate from paper mills — companies...
Jan 19, 2024
Is the academic social networking site ResearchGate still relevant?
In recent months, the academic social networking site ResearchGate has come under scrutiny after the site's deal with the publisher MDPI,...
Jan 11, 2024
Self-citations in around a dozen countries are unusually high
Academics in 12 countries are excessively citing their own scholarly papers, according to an analysis of 24 years of data. The whole...
Jan 5, 2024
US project seeks standard way to communicate research retractions
In a bid to standardize how updates to scientific papers — such as retractions, corrections and expressions of concern — are...
Dec 28, 2023
Kathryn Harkup: science communicator, best-selling author, and goth enthusiast
If you’ve ever wondered about the science behind some popular-culture classics such as William Shakespeare’s plays, Agatha Christie’s...
Dec 19, 2023
Has your research influenced policy? Use this free tool to check
Ever wondered whether your research has influenced policy? Now, there’s a free tool that allows you to check. The whole article was...
Dec 7, 2023
US agency launches experiments to find innovative ways to fund research
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has partnered with the Institute for Progress (IFP), a think tank based in Washington DC,...
Nov 28, 2023
UAE university breaks ties with beleaguered nanoscientist
The University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates has parted ways with nanoscientist Yarub Al-Douri after C&EN published an article...
Nov 20, 2023
Exposing a most unscrupulous journal
I report on a journal who seems to be responsible for, among other charges, the identity theft of several prominent researchers from...
Oct 19, 2023
Malaysia won’t pay for researchers to publish in certain journals
Malaysia’s Ministry of Education will no longer pay for article processing charges when researchers at institutions in the country...
Oct 11, 2023
Crystallography Databases Hunt for Fraudulent Structures
In 2022, a study revealed that about 800 papers published in crystallography and exotic-chemistry journals originated from a paper mill....
Oct 11, 2023
How thousands of invisible citations sneak into papers and make for fake metrics
In 2022, Guillaume Cabanac noticed something unusual: a study had attracted more than 100 citations in a short span of less than two...
Sep 20, 2023
Crossref acquires Retraction Watch Database
Crossref, an open registry of unique identifiers for scholarly metadata, has acquired the Retraction Watch database, which houses records...
Sep 15, 2023
Science publishers settle lawsuits with ResearchGate
The American Chemical Society and Elsevier have reached a legal settlement with the academic social networking site ResearchGate. The...
Sep 13, 2023
Former Cornell scientists made up data in 12 research studies
Researchers formerly based at Weill Cornell Medical College, which is part of Cornell University, made up data in 12 published research...
Sep 1, 2023
Chemist made-up data in 4 NIH grant applications
A chemist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville made-up data in four grant applications to the US National Institutes of Health, a...
Sep 1, 2023
One academic paper’s journey through the mill
In the summer of 2020, Anna Abalkina came across an advertisement online: a website was selling authorship of a chemistry paper that it...
Sep 1, 2023
Women scientists are less likely than men to submit papers to high-impact journals
Women scientists are significantly less likely than men to submit papers to the prestigious journals Nature, Science, and the Proceedings...
Aug 29, 2023
Flawed chemistry papers can take more than a year to be retracted
Almost 59% of the chemistry papers retracted in the last two decades were pulled due to research misconduct, and the process often took...
Jul 18, 2023
Small gap found in error reporting at JACS
More than 97% of the studies that have been retracted or corrected by the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) in the last 2...
Jul 4, 2023
Preprints become papers less often when the authors are from lower-income countries
Data suggest that a lack of resources is making it difficult for researchers in low-income countries to turn preprints into peer-reviewed...
Jun 15, 2023
Nick Wise, Scientific Sleuth and Fluid Dynamics Researcher
Alongside his research in engineering and fluid dynamics at the University of Cambridge, Nick Wise has what he calls a “weird hobby.”...
Jun 12, 2023
Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza retracts another study
Gregg L. Semenza, a professor of genetic medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who won the Nobel Prize in...
Jun 5, 2023
The OPCW’s never-ending fight to eliminate chemical weapons
In 1997, the Chemical Weapons Convention—a first-of-its-kind global disarmament agreement—came into force. The treaty was championed by...
May 25, 2023
Survey Finds Cheating Is Common in Graduate School
According to the results of a survey published last month, more than 16% of recipients of a prestigious graduate research fellowship in...
May 17, 2023
Dedicated committee needed to tackle research reproducibility problems in the UK
A report released by the science, innovation and technology committee of the UK House of Commons is recommending that a subcommittee...
May 9, 2023
Prominent nanoscientist retracts paper after PhD students flagged error
The authors of a 2018 nanoscience paper have retracted the article after three doctoral students highlighted a problem with its methods....
May 9, 2023
Researchers who agree to manipulate citations are more likely to get their papers published
Researchers who are coerced by editors into adding superfluous citations in their manuscripts are more likely to succeed in publishing...
May 9, 2023
Chemist in India loses seven papers, blames outsourcing of images
A chemistry researcher in India has had seven of his papers retracted after the publisher concluded that some images in the papers showed...
Apr 21, 2023
New tool detects papers originating from paper mills
A new tool has been launched to detect studies that are the product of paper mills, which churn out subpar scientific papers that...
Apr 21, 2023
Earthquake destroyed data, claims Japanese prof found to have faked results
A professor of cell biology in Japan faked data in an influential cancer study published in Nature Neuroscience in 2019, according to an...
Apr 7, 2023
Highly-cited chemist is suspended for claiming to be affiliated with Russian and Saudi universities
The University of Córdoba has suspended a highly-cited chemist for 13 years after finding that he had claimed to be affiliated with a...
Apr 7, 2023
Five years after saying it won’t retract Macchiarini paper, journal does so
In 2018, the journal Respiration was adamant that it wouldn’t retract a 2015 paper co-authored by once-respected transplant surgeon Paolo...
Mar 26, 2023
Exclusive: Australia space scientist made up data, probe finds
A space scientist formerly based at the University of Sydney made up data in an unpublished manuscript, an investigation by the...
Mar 15, 2023
‘Spell-checker for statistics’ reduces errors in the psychology literature
A free-to-use tool designed to detect statistical errors is significantly reducing the number of mistakes creeping into papers, suggests...
Mar 8, 2023
‘Elite university’ strategies might boost profile and rankings — but at what cost?
In this week's Nature, a new editorial comment article argues that some country's strategies of boosting the profiles and rankings of a...
Mar 7, 2023
French National Center for Scientific Research faulted over chemistry lab misconduct probe
Research integrity experts have written an open letter to the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) urging it to...
Mar 6, 2023
A Conversation with Renee Wegrzyn, inaugural director of ARPA-H
In September 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden appointed applied biologist Renee Wegrzyn as the inaugural director of the Advanced Research...
Feb 27, 2023
Chemistry bots under threat from changes to Twitter’s API rules
More than a dozen chemistry bots that rely on Twitter’s application programming interface (API) to function could become defunct if the...
Feb 24, 2023
US Office of Research Integrity received 269 allegations of research misconduct last fiscal year
The US Office of Research Integrity (ORI) received a total of 269 complaints of alleged research misconduct between Oct. 1, 2021 and...
Feb 24, 2023
‘Golden tickets’ on the cards for NSF grant reviewers
The US National Science Foundation (NSF) is considering piloting a funding model under which grant peer reviewers are given ‘golden...