Weekend reads: Novartis fires scientist for faking data; journal accepts F-bomb-laden spam paper

The week at Retraction Watch began with a case of a South Korean engineer who had to retract ten studies at once. Here’s what was happening elsewhere, along with an update on a story we covered a few days ago:

• We have an update on the case of a former Vanderbilt scientist found to have faked dozens of images: Novartis has fired him for submitting the falsified papers in question as part of his job application (see update at end).
• “Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List:” Bogus Journal Accepts Profanity-Laced Anti-Spam Paper, Jeffrey Beall reports.
• In science, “team size has a continually increasing relation with the likelihood of a high-impact paper.”
• 100 million American diabetics in the dark? What the press got wrong.
• “Stop Developing Drugs for the Cancer That Killed My Mother,” says Elie Dolgin.
• Fascinating: When drugs are withdrawn from the market for commercial reasons rather than safety.
• A botched — and retracted — study of New Orleans high school performance raises bigger questions, NPR reports. More here.
• “BFF” makes it into a medical journal headline.
• “For both males and females, mathematical precocity early in life predicts later creative contributions and leadership in critical occupational roles.”
• Elsevier reports on a pilot of collaborative peer review.
• Two University of Washington faculty members have won an NIH prize for the best way to detect bias in peer review.
• Lenny Teytelman objects to “the ease with which scientists and universities can sell their prestige and reputation to repressive regimes.”
• Image manipulation makes national news in Italy.
• “Interpreting scholarly contributions solely on the basis of the number, and not nature, of citations is inherently flawed because contradictory as well as confirmatory findings feed into the same metric, capturing popularity at the expense of precision.” A Columbia business school professor wants to add superscripted letters to citations, noting whether the findings “are Consistent with the current findings, are Replicated by the current findings, are Inconsistent with the current findings, Failed to be replicated by the current findings, were used to build Theory, or were used to cite Methodologies.” The effort “could be summarized and perpetually updated by an online indexing service.”
• “If I have serious doubts about your conclusions, then your data is less valuable to me than your protocols–the detailed methodologies you followed to derive that data.” Never mind the data, says David Crotty, where are the protocols?
• Rush Holt, a physicist and retiring member of Congress, will replace Alan Leshner as CEO of the AAAS and executive publisher of Science.
• The director of a Paris journalism school has been suspended from her job for plagiarism. And journalism has a plagiarism problem, says the Columbia Journalism Review.
• To provide context and more effectively discuss the data, the authors of the re-analysis included figures (images) from previous studies in their own paper,” two PLOS staffers write of the most recent entry in the stripy nanoparticles saga. “However, the original figures were published in journals that owned the copyright of all the written content. And here is where we ran into a problem, and one that was far from simple.”
• The NIH and FDA are tightening rules on clinical trial data reporting.
• Researchers explain how 14 people had 58 eyes.
• The Hewlett Foundation is funding research into scientific reproducibility.