The week at Retraction Watch featured a number of legal cases by scientists trying to suppress criticism about their work. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “We note that you may well have completed an interesting study with an appropriate research design and methods but the manuscript in its current form does not convey that.” The Shit My Reviewers Say Tumblr.
- “Why do we send so many of our best stories to journals whose editors are not accomplished, experienced, practicing scientists?” asks Mark Johnston.
- Pure originality may just be an illusion, says Ann Friedman.
- Proof that anything can get past peer review?
- This will not come as a surprise to most of our readers: “A Glut Of Ph.D.s Means Long Odds Of Getting Jobs.”
- “[I]n fact a researcher’s career and achievements are rated by assessing the number, quality, and citations of publications as the fundamental metric.” And that’s the problem.
- A look at the background of a distributor of GcMAF, which is being sold as a cure for various diseases despite lacking approval and being the subject of retractions.
- Researchers at the University of Minnesota “inadequately reviewed research studies across the university and need more training to better protect the most vulnerable subjects,” according to an outside report following years of criticism by one of the school’s faculty, Carl Elliott.
- STM publishers generated about $10 billion in revenue in 2013, according to The STM Report, up from $8 billion in 2008.
- “The decision by Frontiers’ senior editors to support continued publication despite being made aware of the likely public health consequences of such a decision is incomprehensible, and appears to demonstrate indifference to, or a lack of understanding of, the journal’s responsibilities to its readers, contributors and to the wider community,” write the leaders of the HIVforum group.
- “The US Department of Agriculture has cited the University of Oklahoma for abusing baboons,” The Scientist reports.
- Are clinical requirements in many specialties “unnecessarily difficult and protracted?”
- What were PLOS Biology’s most-read papers in 2013 and 2014?
- Patient safety “guru” Charles Denham agreed to pay $1 million to settle claims he received kickbacks from a company in the field. See background here.
- “There is no reliable evidence that data fraud, the deliberate fabrication or falsification of data, is a common occurrence in clinical trials.”
- “Why We Doubt Scientific Findings:” The Diane Rehm Show featured Science editor Marcia McNutt, the Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach, and the Annenberg Center at Penn’s Kathleen Hall Jamieson.
- Is this the shortest review article ever published?
- Alzforum takes a look at the story of two Penn researchers who were banned from publishing in the Journal of Neuroscience.
- Here’s how to write a killer conference abstract.
- How does a fake publisher manage to publish 500 articles per month? asks Jeffrey Beall.
- Academic freedom means a University of British Columbia neuroscientist is free to look for links between vaccines and autism, says the university.
- Meanwhile, Nature worries that a U.S. Congressional investigation into industry ties among climate change researchers may be going too far.
- What is it about the BMJ and misleading press releases? asks Gary Schwitzer.
- The escape of potential dangerous bacteria from a Tulane lab has led to a pause of some research there, The Scientist reports.
- Matt Shipman has some selfish reasons why scientists might want to promote their work to the public.
- The U.S. Congress may vote soon on bills that critics say will weaken future regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency.
So I take it that ‘academic freedom’ is the new battle cry for every charlatan, quack and con-man attempting to wrap their biased agenda in a cloak of research respectability. It seems to be a theme in the list this weekend. It’s a bit surprising that the journals and academic institutes supporting and publishing tainted crap don’t have as much concern for their own reputations as they do for the supposed ideal of ‘academic freedom.’
Glad to see that at least the Dept of Ag takes its oversight of research subject protections seriously and that Baboon rights are receiving attention. Now if only the Office of Human Research Protections would do its job and take an interest in the debacle at the U of MN where mentally ill humans have been treated like disposable Petri dishes for psychiatric research for well over a decade. The case of Dan Markingson that brought this to a head is just one of a number of potentially preventable deaths attributed to Dept of Psychiatry research at the U of MN over the years. It’s appalling and embarrassing.
Proof that anything can get past peer review?
The latest issue of the journal in question (“Explore — the Journal of Science and Healing”) gives us
Two Meta-Analyses of Noncontact Healing Studies
That is, a straight-faced application of meta-analysis to the efficacy of prayer / reiki / etc. on healing humans in the second analysis, and in the first analysis, mice / yeast /cultured cells / plants whatever.
It has been delinked on the issue page, and the “gallery proof” link provided by Beall is dead.
The entire journal has been de-created and the link to its Archives is 404ed:
http://www.pharmaresearchlibrary.com/abmnp-2014-volume-1-issue-1/
I suspect that people who published in that triumphant first edition will not get their money back, but they will probably include the citation in their CVs anyway.
In relation to the report on misleading press releases, people might like to know about Behind the Headlines which every day analyses the science behind two media reports on health and puts them in perspective. It reported on the study on gout and Alzheimer’s disease and made clear that no conclusions could be drawn on causation from an observational study: http://www.nhs.uk/news/2015/03March/Pages/People-with-gout-have-lower-risk-of-Alzheimers-disease.aspx
The comment thread at the Frontiers Opinion Piece has developed into a new wonder of the Interweb, and I hope someone is preserving it in perpetuity for future generations to marvel at. If I may summarise:
1. The usual suspects turn up (Crowe, Bauer, Liversidge), repeating the usual claim that deaths from “AIDS” were really deaths from AZT toxicity, and that the drop in “AIDS mortality” actually resulted from a drop in AZT prescribing to below the lethal level.
2. A series of comments from Mika Thane refute those claims by comparing the time-lines of prescription guidelines and AIDS mortality, with suitable links to those time-lines.
3. The usual suspects attempt to buttress their claims by repeating them more loudly.
3. The usual suspects attempt to buttress their claims by linking to publications which, when read, in fact refute them.
4. 3. The usual suspects attempt to buttress their claims by demanding that Frontiers editors and publishers take down all comments from Mika Thane.
5. 3. The usual suspects attempt to buttress their claims by threatening Frontiers with a law-suit for being a party to Mika Thane’s comments, which they claim are fraudulent; they also threaten a law-suit if the Frontiers editors do take down Mika Thane’s comments and thereby meddle with the evidence required in the first law-suit.
I hope the Frontiers staff are enjoying the company of their new friends.
How much of the $10 billion in revenue in 2013 generated by STM publishers was through sales of or downloads of retraction notices, erroneous science, retracted papers, errata or corrigenda?
PTRS is a signatory of DORA. PTRS provides a detailed overview of its impact factor and other metrics, on the same page:
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/citation-metrics
Useful background about the PTRS on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Transactions_of_the_Royal_Society