Another busy week at Retraction Watch. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “Why are dope-addicted, disgraced doctors running our drug trials?” asks Peter Aldhous.
- Could a biology student in Colombia be jailed for violating copyright?
- There was a lot of plagiarism news in the mainstream media this week: BuzzFeed fired an editor, Benny Johnson, for 41 cases of copying and pasting. A New York Times reporter apparently lifted from Wikipedia. And Slate pointed out cases of plagiarism about Wimbledon. All of this prompted Reuters’ Jack Shafer to explain what the real crime of plagiarism is.
- “How much fraud is too much?” asks the Open Innovation Blog.
- “A crisis of trust:” Our friends at PubPeer reflect on their experiences with post-publication peer review so far.
- “The seamier side of academia, lying, cheating and occasionally stealing, this is the world revealed by a blog which, by all rights, should be dry and boring, like its name, ‘Retraction Watch.'” The Washington Post profiles us. (And the Knight Science Journalism Tracker reminds reporters there are lots of stories at Retraction Watch just waiting for more follow up.)
- U.S. Representative Jackie Speier (D-San Francisco/San Mateo) “Blasts Science Magazine for Using Lurid Photo of Transgender Women on Cover.”
- The Kansas City Star raises questions about how a university’s business school climbed to the top of the rankings (quotes Ivan).
- Thomson Reuters is promising more transparency when it comes to the “vilified impact factor.”
- “If you are engaged in public debates on issues that people care passionately about, then you will be called names and worse,” says climate policy research Roger Pielke Jr.
- The university investigation of cardiology researcher Don Poldermans has concluded, Larry Husten reports.
- What can we glean from the fact that there has been “a surge of p-values between 0.040 and 0.049 in recent decades,” but that “negative results are increasing rapidly too?”
- Should academic librarians have tenure? asks Maura Smale.
- Duplicate publications may be the least serious type of misconduct we cover here at Retraction Watch, but Jeffrey Beall highlights the problems such practices can create for meta-analyses, following a paper we linked to in May.
- Did you follow the #alternatsciencemetrics hashtag on Twitter, in the wake of a suggestion for the Kardashian Index?
- Researchers take a look at the perception of fraud in Spanish scientific journals (paper is in Spanish).
- “It isn’t in our job description (not mine, anyway) to make what I’ve found work towards something the public will value,” says pseudonymous scientist The Mole.
- The AP apparently needs to figure out best practices for revising its tweets.
- “Figure 3 in fact doesn’t really exist. The authors submitted their data and their code to F1000Research, and the figure is generated ‘on the fly’ when the article is viewed.”
- Journalists are much more likely to emphasize the benefits of biobanking than the risks, according to a new analysis.
- Hmm: A study says “a number of issues have prevented science blogs from achieving wide-spread success.”
That last link to the pdf on science blogging seems to be broken…
Fixed, thanks.
See http://www.erasmusmc.nl/1172194/2014/4761159 for the full text of the new report of Erasmus University on Don Poldermans (report is in Dutch).
We all know how the impact factor is calculated, using three simple letters, A, B and C. The efforts by Thomson Reuters are slow, minimal and do not address key issues, including more transparency, open access, clarification of “review” boards for journal selection, etc. I have hammered out my criticism in 2013, already [1]. Of course, seeking a response from Thomson Reuters, I got none.
[1] http://www.globalsciencebooks.info/JournalsSup/images/2013/AAJPSB_7(SI1)/AAJPSB_7(SI1)81-83o.pdf
Re: the impact factor. On July 31, 2014, Frontiers in Plant Science was too young to have an IF. On August 1, 2014, the IF score was 3.6*, a higher score than some plant science journals that have been in existence, publishing good science, for decades. The unfortunate thing is that many plant scientists will be claculating the amount of money they can make off publishing in this IF score journal vs the amount of money they will have to spend on the open access fee.
* http://www.frontiersin.org/Plant_Science
I look forward to your Saturday roundups for good, but sometimes upsetting, reading.
Thanks.
Lew
[Perception of scientific fraud in the Spanish biomedical journals.]
[Article in Spanish]
Med Clin (Barc). 2014 Jul 26. pii: S0025-7753(14)00376-5. doi: 10.1016/j.medcli.2014.03.036. [Epub ahead of print]
Martín-Arribas MC, Martínez-Hervás I, Rodríguez-Lozano I, Arias-Díaz J.
This doesn’t seem to be available yet; it doesn’t come up anywhere on the journal’s website.
The University of Tokyo finds four researchers guilty of a cover-up, including Shigeaki Kato.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/08/01/national/science-health/four-tokyo-univ-researchers-involved-in-cover-up-of-dubious-papers/#.U90qZ8iCjIU
And here’s a useful page to keep track of the Japanese media’s coverage of Obokata, in English:
http://ajw.asahi.com/tag/Haruko%20Obokata
If the Colombian could face jail time for posting a colleague’s thesis online, then what about the dozens of apparently copyrighted PDF files administered by Dr. Abraham Blum (Israel) on his web-site? http://plantstress.com/
Just as one example, an Elsevier Ltd. copyrighted paper:
Original (payment acess only): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18467158
Free using Blum’s web-site: http://plantstress.com/Articles/up_drought_files/hRootSignal-Trends%202008.pdf
And others on the same page: http://plantstress.com/Articles/index.asp
See the full lists here (click on articles): http://plantstress.com/Articles/index.asp
Nobody on this page has responded to my queries and the copyright notice seems almost contradictory to what is being displayed: http://www.plantstress.com/about.htm
Tragedy has stuck in Japan in the Obokata case. Yoshiki Sasai (sub-director), who had – until the STAP case – commanded a strong career and several high-level prizes, has puportedly hung himself with a rope from a 4-5th floor of a building in the Riken center*. At the time when the revelations first came out, I had issued genuine concern about Obokata being at risk of suicide. Unfortunately, all eyes were focused on the wrong individual at the time.
* http://news.yahoo.co.jp/pickup/6125775
Is it somehow possible to limit the amount of posts by this particular reader of yours? It is getting beyond ridiculous and unfortunately the whole experience of your wonderful website is getting worse by each and every day.
the figure is generated ‘on the fly’
Ha ha VERY FUNNY.
The figures in the PeerJ preprint on p-values are very, very confusing (reporting numbers of papers as %, reporting numbers of papers of negative results, but percentages for positive etc.). I certainly hope it will get polished during the review process…