Weekend reads: Savage peer reviews, cosmology claim bites dust, $50 million diet pill hoax

This week at Retraction Watch featured polar opposites: Two new entries in our “doing the right thing” category, and one in our plagiarism euphemism parade. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Have peer reviews become more “savage?”
• “[T]he biggest claim in cosmology in years has finally officially unraveled:” BICEP2 bites the cosmic dust.
• The U.S. government has confirmed that one of Dr. Oz’s favorite diet pills is a total hoax, Julia Belluz reports. And here’s how a snake oil salesman turned an appearance on the show into $50 million.
• If McDonald’s is the leader in fast food, why can’t McMed International be the leader in fast publication?
• A judge has ordered Duke to release more documents in the Anil Potti case, which was scheduled to begin this week but was delayed because some participants had the flu.
• New FDA deputy commissioner Robert Califf, who was at Duke during the Potti case, and Tony DeMaria, former editor of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, sat down to talk about retractions.
• “Everything in science is based on publishing a peer-reviewed paper in a high-ranking journal. Absolutely everything,” Ivan told Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post for a feature about reproducibility that highlighted the work of the Center for Open Science. “You want to get a grant, you want to get promoted, you want to get tenure. That’s how you do it. That’s the currency of the realm.”
• “Science, writ large, has an ongoing challenge in communicating its ideas and conclusions to the general public,” writes Achenbach in a blog post about the story and other developments this week. “Separately, it has an internal, rearguard problem with irreproducible results. These are distinct battles, and shouldn’t be conflated.”
• “There is no Scientific Method,” argues the author of the Research Reviews blog.
• The Independent follows up on the investigation into the work of David Latchman, which we first reported on last week.
• Hundreds of generic drugs were withdrawn from the EU market after a manufacturer in India was found to have faked data.
• The birth control-brain tumor link has been oversold.
• Here’s how one teacher is using the Mona Lisa to explore plagiarism.
• Is peer review better anonymous or signed? asks the Grumpy Geophysicist.
• “Once a year, collect urine for 24 straight hours, lug it everywhere in an ice pack, then get it through airport security for a flight from Washington to Boston.” Paul Basken recounts his experience as part of a clinical trial.
• Does the new ownership of Inside Higher Education spell trouble for the publication’s independence?
• A climate change skeptic is being accused of violating conflict of interest disclosure rules. (Background on this story here.)
• More comments on the Jacob Hanna stem cell story, courtesy of Paul Knoepfler.
• “An array of potential ethical stumbling blocks awaits the editors of scientific journals.” So begins an editorial in an Israeli psychiatry journal.
• Yes, the media overreached on that soda-early menstruation story. But so did the authors of the study.
• In the words of Nature‘s Richard van Noorden, “Another week, another ‘Spam journals accepted my fake article!‘ sting.
• Researchers are urging caution in interpreting studies of mice and microbes.
• Are national news outlets in the U.S. ignoring local science fraud stories? Adam helps the Columbia Journalism Review suss that out.
• Retraction Watch is one of three sites that are “scary to French researchers.”
• What’s it like to be a whistleblower in college sports?
• The Karolinska Institute posted an update on the investigations into Paolo Macchiarini.
• Here are the world’s least cited scientific journals, courtesy of The Onion.
• “You’re signing a form that guarantees that our paid analysts and ghostwriters will write about this data only if it is in our financial interest.” Think anyone ever signed a consent form like that? asks Stuart Buck.