Weekend reads: OpenAI’s preprint dump; Taylor & Francis to leave Informa; arXiv’s preprint cap

A 2021 paper in Materials Science and Engineering on detecting brain tumors retracted as part of the efforts used the term “cerebral torment” in place of headache. Another from the same year published in Journal of Physics used “armada the board” in place of fleet management.

Less than 24 hours after OpenAI posted over 700 preprints describing major math results by an internal AI model, the company has withdrawn three of the manuscripts for errors.

Nicholas Longrich would like to set the record straight.

In what one sleuth called a “systemic failure,” a wildlife journal has issued corrections to a handful of papers not for an error in the articles but to include an item that wasn’t: ethics statements.

"Most people, upon becoming the subject of a Retraction Watch article, might wish to diminish that fact or move on quickly to try and course correct. I’m in the peculiar position of having a Retraction Watch article that largely exonerated my work from the scrutiny that it had faced."

Weekend reads: China intensifies crackdown on misconduct; AI flooding medical journals with ‘meaningless’ research; Sham scientific societies

A paper that called into question many central data linking carbon dioxide to the rapidly warming climate has been retracted for “significant concerns,” including “unsupported conclusions” and “inaccuracies” in the interpretation of the data.

“I was flabbergasted that someone could take the time to generate a paper that I believe is fake,” Rastle told us.

The publisher of a European Heart Rhythm Association journal is investigating a paper that lists the incorrect registration number for a clinical study of the Watchman FLX, a widely used but controversial heart implant.

We're honored to be the subject of a new paper: "[R]etraction Watch remains an illustrative case, a distinct digital‐age organisation that stands as a significant example of the long‐anticipated, but little‐realised, idea of watchdog science journalism," Declan Fahy writes.

Weekend reads: ‘The Weimar of knowledge’; ‘Could AI Be Better at Peer Review Than Humans?’; guidelines in South Korea ban hidden prompts, restrict AI use

Like many college professors today, Harvard's Sarah S. Richardson has seen AI-hallucinated citations in work submitted by her students. But she was surprised when an editor recently contacted her about a hallucinated citation involving her own work.

"If medical schools and universities don't want the literature to be overwhelmed with garbage," Oransky said, "then they should probably stop giving every applicant ... an incentive to publish a lot of crap."

Investigative records paint the picture of a professor who took financial and personal advantage of his students for years – from manipulating them into paying him rent to making them clean up after his dog – and grew vengeful when they spoke out about his alleged crimes.