Weekend reads: Silenced Anil Potti whistleblower revealed; how to identify scientific crackpots

The first full week of 2015 featured a few drug company-related retractions. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Duke University would have avoided embarrassment, a misconduct investigation and a lawsuit, had its top administrators paid closer attention to a thoughtful report by a medical student who saw problems in the lab of the disgraced scientist Anil Potti,” The Cancer Letter reports.
• An Epistemology of Scientific Crackpottery: “He violated the 1st commandment of science: When nature speaks, listen.”
• Journals must do more to stop authors from using “tricks of the trade” to increase their chances of being published, urge two researchers at Lund University.
• “[T]he review and editing of scholarly papers is a critical element of academics’ work and should be recognized as such by their institutions and funding bodies,” argue a number of journal editors in Australia, Alice Meadows writes.
• Romanian scientists are angry that prime minister Victor Ponta — who renounced his PhD in December following charges of plagiarism — issued an “emergency” governmental decree that “allows people to relinquish their doctoral degrees through the ministry of education, without an explanation,” Nature reports.
• “Telling The Story Behind The Retraction:” A Q&A Ivan did with Wiley in which he describes his favorite Retraction Watch merchandise.
• “Researchers are working to automate the arduous task of identifying—and amending—mislabeled sequences in genetic databases,” The Scientist reports.
• A day in the life of an academic, as portrayed by cats.
• “Elsevier Launches Open Access Journal That Will Publish Sound Research Across All Disciplines.”
• Pulse International (Pakistan) has a report from the Second International Conference on Publication Ethics in Shiraz, Iran.
• The one chart you need to understand any health study, from Vox.
• Robin Bisson describes the Genetic Expert News Services (GENes), which “aims to help reporters cover genetics.”
• In other news that could help journalists do a better job, Health News Review is back after a hiatus, thanks to funding from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.
• “One of Science’s Most Famous Quotes Is False,” says Michael Specter, with an alley-oop from Carl Zimmer.
• “[I]f much-honored faculty are copying without attribution, it’s harder to motivate instructors at these universities to insist that their hard-pressed students write everything in their own words,” writes Andrew Gelman.
• The top retractions of 2014: Ivan talks to German public radio.
• The president and CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and two colleagues, suggest a “new way of evaluating academics’ research output using easily obtained data.”
• Many sites are ending comments, Columbia Journalism Review reports. Here at Retraction Watch, we’ll continue to moderate heavily, but will keep them. Item two on this recent Weekend Reads is a good example of why.
• “Three reasons why good science writing is worth defending:” A farewell Knight Science Journalism Tracker post from Paul Raeburn.
• “The Retraction Watch site is littered with the wreckage of numerous careers, but it serves an important purpose apart from the dubious pleasures of Schadenfreude.”
• “Men (on the Internet) don’t believe sexism is a problem in science, even when they see evidence,” reports Rachel Feltman.
• “Academic dishonesty and misconduct: Curbing plagiarism in the Muslim world,” a paper from Intellectual Discourse.
• Um, about that paper claiming that Lyme disease can be sexually transmitted…
• “How much money do journal publishers make? A lot,” says Skeptical Scalpel.