The week at Retraction Watch featured a retraction by a Nobel laureate, the eight excuses journal editors hear in responses to questions about data, and a description of a “disease” that affects many scientists. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “About that peer-review crisis …There isn’t one, at least in terms of quantity, according to a new study of article submissions and reviews completed in the social sciences.” (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed)
- “’Predatory’ conferences now outnumber official events organised by scholarly societies,” Jack Grove reports. (Times Higher Education)
- “Criticizing a scientist’s work isn’t bullying,” says Simine Vazire. “It’s science.” (Slate)
- “Scientific criticism of psychology research is good. Bullying is bad.” How to be a civil critic. (Approaching Significance)
- “Senior academics ‘take too much credit’ in co-authorship,” Rachael Pells reports. (Times Higher Education)
- How about this for the next lab meeting? The Publishing Trap, a “board game which helps research students, early-career researchers and the wider academic community to learn about and discuss the importance of copyright literacy in relation to academic publishing and scholarly communication.” (Chris Morrison and Jane Secker, LSE Impact Blog)
- More journals offer results-free review, or “results masked review.” (Jennifer Franklin, Elsevier Connect)
- Andrew Gelman thinks it’s “great to have your work criticized by strangers online.”
- “Three years ago, I was reading up on recent research in my field, when I stumbled on a sentence that read quite familiar.” (Anonymous, The Guardian)
- “Despite the value that [negative and replication] studies add to the scientific literature, they remain rare. Why?” (Alejandra Clark, PLOS Blogs)
- “Why The Forward Took Down a Story About Elie Wiesel.” (Jane Eisner, The Forward)
- The recent retraction of a study by food researcher Brian Wansink “points to a larger truth,” says Aaron Carroll. (New York Times)
- “A Paper Claiming Wi-Fi Is Linked To Autism Has Been Accused Of Pseudoscience,” reports Tom Chivers. (BuzzFeed)
- “This is a seriously flawed paper, and the results seem to me consistent with chance alone.” Neuroskeptic takes another look at paper in PNAS that has already earned a correction because of his previous comments. (Discover)
- Three professors at Dartmouth College are placed on leave for “serious misconduct.” (AP via Washington Post)
- A mathematician asks, “What would the world be like without formal peer review? (The Times Literary Supplement)
- Dalmeet Singh Chawla considers the future of double-blind peer review in physics. (Physics Today)
- A Swiss university has dissolved its astronomy institute and is investigating allegations that a professor mistreated students. (Gretchen Vogel, Science)
- “What kind of open access future do we want?” Tony Ross-Hellauer and Benedikt Fecher offer two possible scenarios. (LSE Impact Blog)
- “Think of your role as an inspector verifying the validity of the experimental results and conclusions of the paper.” An AI conference issues a reproducibility challenge. (International Conference on Learning Representations 2018)
- “We are talking about victims and not ‘accomplices.'” Sonia Morin considers what happens to students working under researchers who commit misconduct. (Perspectives SSF, in French)
- “Should you share your scientific data?” Michael P. Milham, Arno Klein, and Cameron Craddock make an attempt to quantify the benefits to the scientific community. (The Scientist)
- “Research integrity has become complacent and lacks transparency.” Adrian O’Dowd reports on an evidence session of the UK’s parliamentary science and technology committee’s inquiry into research integrity. (The BMJ)
- “The bar for claiming statistical significance is simply too low,” says Valen Johnson. (The Conversation)
- “We’ve been publishing plagiarized content. It’s our fault, and we’re sorry.” A newspaper apologizes. (Mad River Union)
- “Why do so many Nigerian researchers publish in predatory journals?” asks Jackie Opara. (ResearchResearch)
- “There are no theoretical or statistical obstacles to making direct replication a routine aspect of psychological science.” (PsyArXiv)
- “A feminist psychologist was dragged through the mud for her mistakes. Did she deserve it?” Dan Engber’s take on Amy Cuddy. (Slate)
- A website runs an embargoed Stanford press release verbatim, which forces PNAS to lift an embargo early. (Embargo Watch)
- Want to improve reproducibility? Two scientists “advocate for a 5-year reflection on papers with seemingly high clinical/translational potential, published alongside the original paper where authors reflect on the quality, reproducibility and impact of their findings.” (Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine)
- “When the International Agency for Research on Cancer assessed the best-selling weedkiller glyphosate, significant changes were made between a draft of its report and the published version. The agency won’t say who made the changes, or why.” (Kate Kelland, Reuters)
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