Weekend reads: What’s wrong with peer review; a retraction poem; how journal formats mangle science

The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a paper on the effects of fracking, authors who retracted a paper when they realized they’d been studying the wrong species, and a story about why a paper linked to an alleged doping scandal in Norway was retracted. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “In 2017, researchers again found plenty to criticize.” Drummond Rennie and Annette Flanagin introduce a package of papers in JAMA from the recent Peer Review Congress. And John Ioannidis and Stelios Serghiou discuss their paper on the exponential growth of bioRxiv. (MedicalResearch.com)
• “The paper of my enemy has been retracted/And I am pleased.” An adapted poem. (Andrew Gelman)
• “Why are we continuing to allow paper journal formats to mangle our science?” (Craig Jones, The Grumpy Geophysicist)
• “Too often, I suggest, academic journals are filled with complex language because authors are too lazy or too incompetent to write clearly or, worst of all, because they want to make their writing seem grander and more important than it actually is.” (Richard Smith, BMJ; Smith is on the board of directors of our parent non-profit organization)
• Does publishing more papers mean lower quality? Peter van den Besselaar and Ulf Sandström say maybe not. (LSE Impact Blog)
• “Do Norwegian academics who publish more earn higher salaries?” (Frode Eika Sandnes, Scientometrics; sub req’d)
• Cascading journals, in which papers rejected from “top” titles are offered to other titles in the same family, seem tempting to many publishers. But they may not be for everyone, says Phil Davis. (The Scholarly Kitchen)
• In Pakistan, “228 cases of plagiarism in research publications have been received since 2007 of which 182 were resolved through various actions against researchers.” (Sumaira FH, UrduPoint)
• Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka will donate his salary to the stem cell facility he directs, “to take responsibility for data fabrication in a paper by one of its researchers.” (Japan Today) In a related editorial, the Asahi Shimbun says “It is, however, not simply enough to keep telling students not to commit research misconduct.”
• Journals, says Richard Smith, “are far less transparent than listed for-profit companies.” (BMJ; Smith is a member of our parent non-profit organization’s board of directors)
• “[T]hrowing people off an editorial board for expressing an opinion really kind of puts us in a dicey area,” says the editor of a journal whose editorial board includes two researchers whom Angela Saini notes hold extreme views of race unsupported by evidence. (The Guardian)
• Time to end peer reviewer fraud, says Publons.
• “Southern Illinois University’s medical school has halted all herpes research, one of its most high-profile projects, amid growing controversy over a researcher’s unauthorized methods offshore and in the U.S.” (Marisa Taylor, Kaiser Health News)
• “Switzerland contributed nearly three times more papers to the 1% of highly cited papers indexed by the Scopus database in 2013 than would be expected given its total output,” Dalmeet Singh Chawla reports. (Nature Index)
• “Replication is not enough,” say Marcus R. Munafò and George Davey Smith, who make a case for triangulation. (Nature)
• “Thesis acknowledgment is an under-appreciated form of genre literature, one that rivals the haiku for potency of meaning packed into brevity.” (Claire Jarvis, Chemistry World)
• A former prof who edited a retracted essay about oral sex returns to campus to talk about academic freedom. (Adrian Wan, The Daily Northwestern)
• New software analyzes a paper’s reproducibility by looking at the papers that cite it. But is the approach too simplistic? (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Science)
• “Journal editing cannot be learned in higher education, and alternative training opportunities are not readily available.” (Valerie Matarese and Karen Shashok, F1000 Research)
• A researcher may have pushed to publish a study of diesel paid for by Volkswagen “so that the institute could collect $71,000.” (Jack Ewing, New York Times)
• “A leading organization has said that sexual harassment is scientific misconduct,” says Scientific American. “Where are the others?”
• A professor in Canada says universities “should recognize rankings as a smokescreen and pull out.” (Canadian Association of University Teachers Bulletin)
• Pardis Sabeti’s op-ed calling for civility ignored it in psychology and oversold it in her own field of human genomics, Daniel Engber says. (Slate)
• Two researchers funded by a “climate science denial group” are targeting “‘open access’ journals with dubious quality controls to get their work published.” (Graham Readfearn, DeSmog Blog)
• “I am writing this open letter to you, the people who produce the Impact Factor reports, in good will and because I believe you can improve it.” (Julián Monge-Nájera, Revista de Biología Tropical)
• In many journals, there are “disproportionately fewer females in prestigious authorship positions.” (Jon Brock, Nature Index)
• A Harvard team, backed by Elsevier, is “developing a tool to detect manipulated and misused images en route to publication.” (Lucy Goodchild van Hilten, Elsevier Connect)
• “Conducting and reporting replications should become an integral part of PhD projects and should be taken into account in their assessment.” (Arnold Kochari and Markus Ostarek, PsyArXiv)
• “[T]he leaders of Elsevier have now decided that the epoch of journals will soon be over.” (Richard Smith, BMJ)
• “Results showed that more reputed authors were less likely to be rejected by editors when they submitted papers receiving negative reviews.” (Journal of Informetrics)

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