Here’s another installment of PubPeer Selections:
- Commenters are sniffing around a paper about whether dogs’ poop habits change with the Earth’s magnetic field.
- What if grants were distributed randomly? That’s one response to a paper on “Big Science, Small Science, or the Right Mix.”
- The authors of a paper in Science Translational Medicine respond to questions about a paper by posting what they say is an entire original Western blot, but a commenter is unconvinced.
- Two different responses from authors whose work is being chosen for replication by the Cancer Biology Reproducibility Project. One responds on PubPeer, while the other stops responding to the Project.
- “[I]t’s a matter of concern that a paper with such a deluge of honest errors could slip through the cracks of the peer-review system,” says a commenter on a paper in the Journal of Molecular Structure.
Related to the grant distribution issue: the Brain Initiative grant recipients were announced today http://www.braininitiative.nih.gov/nih-brain-awards.htm
Although not in life sciences, I follow the field as someone with depression who hopes at some point there will be some significant developments in this area (even as a side benefit of other research). I can only hope the method for selecting these grant recipients performs better than the “random” baseline :).
Commenters are sniffing around a paper about whether dogs’ poop habits change with the Earth’s magnetic field.
I read that paper and assumed it was a tribute to the pioneering research into magnetotaxy in humans conducted by Lucius Shepard, as described in his documentary “Green Eyes”.
Three things I learned from it:
1. Magnetoception is present in every species that the Czech group have examined.
2. One male Borzoi can piddle six times as often as all the other dogs combined.
3. A dog can be fooled into thinking that a wire-frame parasol is providing it some privacy.
About the 3rd story (author responding with “full image”), the response laughable, so I went over to PubMed and pulled the first open access paper I could find from the same authors. Quel surprise…
https://pubpeer.com/publications/0FAA9C738879BF98C52B4A057DDA33
2 more examples from the same authors…
https://pubpeer.com/publications/4248C31A95C0C55BDC8BAE4B1B663A
https://pubpeer.com/publications/6D95DD763C9FA5D3394DD6FB966626
This despite the claim that “there is no splicing or any mistakes in these gels”
Investigation underway:
https://pubpeer.com/publications/594024F08E2810D685E94D47CF973E#fb14905
Interestingly, Nassim Taleb also recommends to split grant money evenly among researchers: http://edge.org/conversation/understanding-is-a-poor-substitute-for-convexity-antifragility
4th story: In the “Cancer Biology Reproductibility Project” link, it says that “The study results will be published piecemeal in PLoS ONE; Iorns expects that they will all be done by September 2014.”
It seems that the project is not going at the expected speed…
Reading the reply given by the authors at pubpeer, where they provide an explanation that does not fit the published data, I do not expect that all of their results will be reproduced… It is curious how this article was cited 327 times. Do the people analyze the articles before citing them?
forgot the link: https://pubpeer.com/publications/B1C028796E9137389615799320FB1C#fb14865