Amend:An integrated platform of retracted papers and concerned papers

Purpose:The notable increase in retraction papers has attracted considerable attention from diverse stakeholders.Various sources are now offering information related to research integrity,including concerns voiced on social media,disclosed lists of paper mills,and retraction notices accessible through journal websites.However,despite the availability of such resources,there remains a lack of a unified platform to consolidate this information,thereby hindering efficient searching and cross-referencing.Thus,it is imperative to develop a comprehensive platform for retracted papers and related concerns.This article aims to introduce“Amend,”a platform designed to integrate information on research integrity from diverse sources.Design/methodology/approach:The Amend platform consolidates concerns and lists of problematic articles sourced from social media platforms(e.g.,PubPeer,For Better Science),retraction notices from journal websites,and citation databases(e.g.,Web of Science,CrossRef).Moreover,Amend includes investigation and punishment announcements released by administrative agencies(e.g.,NSFC,MOE,MOST,CAS).Each related paper is marked and can be traced back to its information source via a provided link.Furthermore,the Amend database incorporates various attributes of retracted articles,including citation topics,funding details,open access status,and more.The reasons for retraction are identified and classified as either academic misconduct or honest errors,with detailed subcategories provided for further clarity.Findings:Within the Amend platform,a total of 32,515 retracted papers indexed in SCI,SSCI,and ESCI between 1980 and 2023 were identified.Of these,26,620(81.87%)were associated with academic misconduct.The retraction rate stands at 6.64 per 10,000 articles.Notably,the retraction rate for non-gold open access articles significantly differs from that for gold open access articles,with this disparity progressively widening over the years.Furthermore,the reasons for retractions have shifted from traditional individual behaviors like falsification,fabrication,plagiarism,and duplication to more organized large-scale fraudulent practices,including Paper Mills,Fake Peer-review,and Artificial Intelligence Generated Content(AIGC).Research limitations:The Amend platform may not fully capture all retracted and concerning papers,thereby impacting its comprehensiveness.Additionally,inaccuracies in retraction notices may lead to errors in tagged reasons.Practical implications:Amend provides an integrated platform for stakeholders to enhance monitoring,analysis,and research on academic misconduct issues.Ultimately,the Amend database can contribute to upholding scientific integrity.Originality/value:This study introduces a globally integrated platform for retracted and concerning papers,along with a preliminary analysis of the evolutionary trends in retracted papers.

Research misconduct in hospitals is spreading:A bibliometric analysis of retracted papers from Chinese university-affiliated hospitals

Purpose: The number of retracted papers from Chinese university-affiliated hospitals is increasing, which has raised much concern. The aim of this study is to analyze the retracted papers from university-affiliated hospitals in China’s mainland from 2000 to 2021. Design/methodology/approach: Data for 1,031 retracted papers were identified from the Web of Science Core collection database. The information of the hospitals involved was obtained from their official websites. We analyzed the chronological changes, journal distribution, discipline distribution and retraction reasons for the retracted papers. The grade and geographic locations of the hospitals involved were explored as well.Findings: We found a rapid increase in the number of retracted papers, while the retraction time interval is decreasing. The main reasons for retraction are plagiarism/self-plagiarism(n=255), invalid data/images/conclusions(n=212), fake peer review(n=175) and honesty error(n=163). The disciplines are mainly distributed in oncology(n=320), pharmacology & pharmacy(n=198) and research & experimental medicine(n=166). About 43.8% of the retracted papers were from hospitals affiliated with prestigious universities. Research limitations: This study fails to differentiate between retractions due to honest error and retractions due to research misconduct. We believe that there is a fundamental difference between honest error retractions and misconduct retractions. Another limitation is that authors of the retracted papers have not been analyzed in this study.Practical implications: This study provides a reference for addressing research misconduct in Chinese university-affiliated hospitals. It is our recommendation that universities and hospitals should educate all their staff about the basic norms of research integrity, punish authors of scientific misconduct retracted papers, and reform the unreasonable evaluation system.Originality/value: Based on the analysis of retracted papers, this study further analyzes the characteristics of institutions of retracted papers, which may deepen the research on retracted papers and provide a new perspective to understand the retraction phenomenon.

Fintech platforms:Lax or careful borrowers’screening?

Can peer-to-peer lending platforms mitigate fraudulent behaviors?Or have lending players been acting similar to free-riders?This paper constructs a new proxy to investigate lending platform misconduct and compares the FICO score and the LendingClub credit grade.To examine whether the lack of verification by the Fintech platform affects lenders’collection performance,I explore the recovery rate(RR)of non-performing loans through a mixed-continuous model.The regression results show that the degree of prudence taken by the lending platform in the pre-screening activity negatively affects the detection of some misreporting borrowers.I also find that the Fintech platform’s missing verification information(e.g.,annual income and employment length)affects the RR of non-performing loans,thereby hampering lenders’collection performance.

Who is innocent in authorship misconduct?

Recently, the editorial office received a requisition from one of the co-corresponding authors of an article published in Zoological Research in 2003. This researcher claimed he was not informed that he was listed as an author during the entire manuscript submission and publication process. Moreover, he had a concern about the reliability of the data in the paper. Therefore, he would like to withdraw his authorship of this particular article or withdraw this article entirely. The editorial office forwarded the letter to the other authors to collect comments, and the first author completely denied the co-corresponding author＇s claim of unawareness of authorship by providing archived emails between them. Setting aside what really happened 13 years ago, in this case, it may be interpreted that either this cocorresponding author himself is announcing his honorary authorship （either by passively being added to the byline or actively accepting the offer） in this article, or is trying to avoid taking （potential） responsibility regarding the research content by using honorary authorship as a defense. Meanwhile, the first author has been accused of offering honorary authorship to a senior researcher.

Build infrastructure in publishing scientific journals to benefit medical scientists

There is urgent need for medical journals to optimize their publishing processes and strategies to satisfy the huge need for medical scientists to publish their articles,and then obtain better prestige and impact in scientific and research commtmity.These strategies include optimizing the process of peer-review,utilizing open-access publishing models actively,finding ways of saving costs and getting revenue,smartly dealing with research fraud or misconduct,maintaining sound relationship with pharmaceutical companies,and managing to provide relevant and useful information for clinical practitioners and researchers.Scientists,publishers,societies and organizations need to work together to publish internationally renowned medical journals.

Under-reporting of Adverse Events in the Biomedical Literature

Purpose: To address the under-reporting of research results, with emphasis on the underreporting/distorted reporting of adverse events in the biomedical research literature.Design/methodology/approach: A four-step approach is used:(1) To identify the characteristics of literature that make it adequate to support policy;(2) to show how each of these characteristics becomes degraded to make inadequate literature;(3) to identify incentives to prevent inadequate literature; and(4) to show policy implications of inadequate literature.Findings: This review has provided reasons for, and examples of, adverse health effects of myriad substances(1) being under-reported in the premiere biomedical literature, or(2) entering this literature in distorted form. Since there is no way to gauge the extent of this under/distorted-reporting, the quality and credibility of the ‘premiere’ biomedical literature is unknown. Therefore, any types of meta-analyses or scientometric analyses of this literaturewill have unknown quality and credibility. The most sophisticated scientometric analysis cannot compensate for a highly flawed database.Research limitations: The main limitation is in identifying examples of under-reporting. There are many incentives for under-reporting and few dis-incentives.Practical implications: Almost all research publications, addressing causes of disease, treatments for disease, diagnoses for disease, scientometrics of disease and health issues, and other aspects of healthcare, build upon previous healthcare-related research published. Many researchers will not have laboratories or other capabilities to replicate or validate the published research, and depend almost completely on the integrity of this literature. If the literature is distorted, then future research can be misguided, and health policy recommendations can be ineffective or worse.Originality/value: This review has examined a much wider range of technical and nontechnical causes for under-reporting of adverse events in the biomedical literature than previous studies.

AMDnet:An Academic Misconduct Detection Method for Authors’Behaviors

In recent years,academic misconduct has been frequently exposed by the media,with serious impacts on the academic community.Current research on academic misconduct focuses mainly on detecting plagiarism in article content through the application of character-based and non-text element detection techniques over the entirety of a manuscript.For the most part,these techniques can only detect cases of textual plagiarism,which means that potential culprits can easily avoid discovery through clever editing and alterations of text content.In this paper,we propose an academic misconduct detection method based on scholars’submission behaviors.The model can effectively capture the atypical behavioral approach and operation of the author.As such,it is able to detect various types of misconduct,thereby improving the accuracy of detection when combined with a text content analysis.The model learns by forming a dual network group that processes text features and user behavior features to detect potential academic misconduct.First,the effect of scholars’behavioral features on the model are considered and analyzed.Second,the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique(SMOTE)is applied to address the problem of imbalanced samples of positive and negative classes among contributing scholars.Finally,the text features of the papers are combined with the scholars’behavioral data to improve recognition precision.Experimental results on the imbalanced dataset demonstrate that our model has a highly satisfactory performance in terms of accuracy and recall.

Authorship misconduct

DEAR EDITOR： We read the publication by Liu （2016） on authorship misconduct with a great interest. In fact, the authorship misconduct is no uncommon and has to be managed, Liu （2016） noted that ＂Proper authorship embodies honesty, integrity, fairness and transparency, which surely are the very essence of any scientific pursuit.＂ Due to the present requirement on academic publication to support academic rank, several forms of authorship misconduct can be seen. Of interest,

Sexual assaults in therapeutic relationships: prevalence, risk factors and consequences

A law has been passed in Germany (paragraph 174c StGB), which prohibits therapists from having sexual contact with their patients. This provides the background for a follow-up survey to the previous study completed by Becker- Fischer and Fischer in 1995. The results of this survey are discussed here on the basis of the current status of research concerning preva- lence and risk factors of sexual assaults in therapeutic relationships. The focus of the re- search lies in determining the specific condi- tions of sexual assaults in psychotherapy and psychiatry, risk variables of the therapists and patients, the effects it has on the patients as well as the legal consequences it results in. To en- sure the comparability of the data, an online version of the Questionnaire about Sexual Con- tacts in Psychotherapy and Psychiatry (SKPP;Becker-Fischer, Fischer & Jerouschek) was cre- ated and a survey of N = 77 affected patients was conducted. The majority of the participants in the study reported a serious decline in their overall well being following the incident. How- ever only very few undertook legal steps - only in three cases did it come to a legal procedure. The assumption that sexual contacts in psy- chotherapy result in extremely damaging con- sequences to patients, was affirmed. Despite the changed legal situation, therapists in Ger- many are still not held legally responsible more often than they were 10 years ago. Based on these results a more intensive education of the patients concerning their legal rights is recom- mended.

Ethical publishing in intensive care medicine:A narrative review

Ethical standards in the context of scientific publications are increasingly gaining attention. A narrative review of the literature concerning publication ethics wasconducted as found in Pub Med, Google Scholar, relevant news articles, position papers, websites and other sources. The Committee on Publication Ethics has produced guidelines and schedules for the handling of problem situations that have been adopted by professional journals and publishers worldwide as guidelines to authors. The defined requirements go beyond the disclosure of conflicts of interest or the prior registration of clinical trials. Recommendations to authors, editors and publishers of journals and research institutions were formulated with regard to issues of authorship, double publications, plagiarism, and conflicts of interest, with special attention being paid to unethical research behavior and data falsification. This narrative review focusses on ethical publishing in intensive care medicine. As scientific misconduct with data falsification damage patients and society, especially if fraudulent studies are considered important or favor certain therapies and downplay their side effects, it is important to ensure that only studies are published that have been carried out with highest integrity according to predefined criteria. For that also the peer review process has to be conducted in accordance with the highest possible scientific standards and making use of available modern information technology. The review provides the current state of recommendations that are considered to be most relevant particularly in the field of intensive care medicine.

A slight glance at peer review

In order to ensure that the highest quality of literature is published, most journals utilize a peer review process for manuscripts submitted. Although the primary purpose for this process is to filter out "bad science", the process is not perfect. While there is a general consensus among researchers and clinicians that something must be done to improve upon the method for properly vetting manuscripts, there are conflicting opinions on how to best implement new policies. In this paper, we discuss the most well-supported suggestions to improve the process, with the hopes of increasing rigor and reproducibility, ensuring double-blinding, developing set guidelines, offering early training to reviewers, and giving reviewers better feedback and recognition for their work.

＂Winning Is Everything＂ as the Basis of Academic Misconduct Among Indonesian Students

Unethical behavior among university students such as cheating and plagiarism has weakened the character of honesty in education. This fact has challenged those who perceived education as a holistic process of internalizing values and norms that lead to the formation of students＇ moral principles and moral behaviour. Educators have played the role of ensuring the students to internalize and realized moral values and norms. A study of 360 students of the second semester who enrolled at the course of ＂ethical and personal development＂ at Atma Jaya Catholic University in Indonesia showed that unethical behavior such as cheating and plagiarism were rarely done. However, a deep look at the reason the students did academic dishonesty has prompted the permissiveness of student＇s moral life. This study proves that academic integrity among university students is worrisome, and it is worsened by the fact that they were enrolled in the course of ＂ethical and personal development＂. Seriously taking into consideration the strong desire of students to change the culture of academic misconduct, the authors argue that an educational model which is not oriented excessively to cognitive performance is needed. The authors argue that this position has to be practiced in line with the involvement of ＂clean＂ students who are involved as role models in influencing the formation of student awareness and ethical behavior.

Bioethical Questions in Brazilian Scientific Research

It is considered here that the ethical behavior of the Brazilian scientific community leaves a lot to be desired. Motives for ethical lapses can be summed up by one only: the haste to grow at any price in order to earn prestige and wealth, setting at naught those who don’t have the political support of the institution. With this intent, many researchers publish whatever they can, neglecting the fact that scientific research should serve the interests of the community—not their own.

China's new strategy for fighting misconduct in academic journals

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China issued its first policy related to academic ethics on May 30th,2018,together with the State Council.[1] It introduced in detail a raft of reforms aiming at the improvement of academic integrity across the research spectrum covering funding,job applications,peer-review,and publications.The new policy clarified that a high-level management system for scientific research integrity with clear responsibilities and efficient coordination should be established,requiring that the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) be responsible for the overall coordination and guidance of scientific research integrity in the fields of natural sciences,philosophy,and social sciences.

Modelling and Simulation of Misconduct Information Diffusion in Web Forum

Using the method of analogy, this paper built the social information field, information field force model and the information diffusion dynamics model to study the dynamic mechanism and the law of the movement regarding how misconduct information moves among nodes in the web forum. It also constructed the web forum misconduct information diffusion complex network simulation model to study the diffusion intensity of misconduct information and its influencing factors. The conclusion is that, under the force of the field, the information flows from the high potential node to the low potential node, during which resistance is generated inside and outside the diffusion channel. In the complex network of the web forum, the diffusion intensity of misconduct information displays an increasing trend as the possibility of reconnection among broken nodes becomes higher. The main factor that determines the diffusion intensity of the misconduct information is the average shortest path. It also increases when the interaction frequency turns higher.

Using a novel ensemble learning framework to detect financial reporting misconduct

Our research focuses on detecting financial reporting misconduct and derives acomprehensive misconduct sample using AAERs and intentional restatements.We develop a novel ensemble learning method, Multi-LightGBM, for highlyimbalanced classification learning. We adopt a human-machine cooperationfeature selection method, which can mitigate the limitation of incompletetheories, enhance the model performance, and guide researchers to develop newtheories. We propose a cost-based measure, expected benefits of classification,to evaluate the economic performance of a model. The out-of-sample testsshow that Multi-LightGBM, coupled with the features we selected, outperformsother predictive models. The finding that introducing intentional materialrestatements into our predictive model does not reduce the effectiveness ofcapturing AAERs has important implications for research on AAERsdetection. Moreover, we can identify more misconduct firms with fewerresources by the misconduct sample relative to the standalone AAERs sample,which is quite beneficial for most model users.