This week at Retraction Watch was dominated by the Science same-sex marriage study, after we broke the news Wednesday morning that one of its authors had requested its retraction. (And crashed our servers in the process.) So the first section of this Weekend Reads will focus on pieces following up on that story:
- The New Republic’s Naomi Shavin told the story of how we broke the story, and how the study fell apart.
- Jesse Singal of New York Magazine interviewed Donald Green, the co-author who asked for the retraction.
- Ivan spoke to NPR’s On The Media about the study, and what the story says about peer review.
- “”The incentives to publish today are corrupting the scientific literature and the media that covers it.” We wrote a New York Times op-ed for today’s paper, “What’s Behind Big Science Frauds?“
But there was plenty more happening this week:
- Publisher Frontiers has fired 31 editors amid a debate over editorial independence, Martin Enserink reports.
- How the biggest fabricator in science history was caught: We tell the story of Yoshitaka Fujii in Nautilus.
- Neuroskeptic has a helpful guide to p-hacking.
- “Lies Out Of The Lab:” Die Welt looks at scientific fraud (in German).
- “With 1014 authors, an article by Leung et al. in the May issue of G3 has the largest author list of any paper published in the journal,” notes the Genetics Society of America.
- Does that study showing Academia.edu can boost citations hold any water? asks Phil Davis.
- The mechanism behind the ability of young blood to slow down aging in mice is being questioned. The senior scientist on the work, Amy Wagers, had to retract high-profile papers five years ago when a post-doc manipulated images.
- “The research article as we know it has been around, in one form or another, for over 300 years,” says Daniel Shanahan. “And for 300 years, it has scarcely changed.”
- Reviewers (and Editors) Behaving Badly: Ivan’s presentation at the Council of Science Editors meeting this week.
- The mythical stories we tell about scientific discoveries are destructive, argues Leonard Mlodinow.
- A page proof-stage update to a PNAS paper forced an editor’s note in The New York Times.
- UK universities are slow to publish reports of misconduct investigations, Nature’s Lizzie Gibney reports.
- A piece by Jeffrey Beall about what the open access movement doesn’t want you to know has set off criticism.
- The Science paper wasn’t the only same-sex marriage study called into question this week. A look at the infamous Regnerous study raised a lot of concerns.
- The views of many conservative U.S. politicians on science funding, in just several hundred words.
- “One of the trickiest times for any research team is when you have to work out what you can do with a reduced amount of money.”
- A study is questioning the promise of bone marrow transplants for Rett syndrome, Jessica Wright reports.
- Russian scientists have been cut off from Springer journals after a funder didn’t pay the bill, Nature reports.
- “In a previous correction on this post, we corrected something that was actually correct. So we have corrected that correction.” Awesome.
- “47% of authors agree or strongly agree that they feel pressured to publish more articles rather than fewer, higher-quality articles.” A report from a publishing conference organized by Elsevier.
- Disclosure vs. confidentiality: Debra Parrish reviews the Anversa lawsuit against Harvard.
- The Voinnet case prompts a look at the Swiss system for dealing with fraud allegations.
- ORCID, the scientist registry, has a plan to recognize peer review efforts.
- What effect will the removal of prostate cancer data from a national U.S. database have on research?
- The U.S. Department of Defense is taking a look at whether scientists applying for its grants face gender bias.
- In a survey of nearly 500 studies of ecology, evolution, and behavior, “while 248 articles included experiments that could have been influenced by observer bias, only 13.3% of these articles indicated that experiments were blinded.
- If only gunshots could be retracted.
There was so much going on elsewhere, in fact, that we’ll have a second batch of Weekend Reads posted on Monday, which is a national holiday here in the U.S. (and elsewhere).
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I would like to perhaps have some opinion from other RW readers, if I may please post this here?
I recently received a very unusual email, from a researcher (no names/affiliations/gender here) who is also chief editor of a small journal. I did not know this person before. According with online repositories, this person exists and has dozens of papers published, particularly from the last few years. The email apparently departed from this person’s institutional email account.
This researcher was claiming to have read several papers of mine, and to have now just prepared a manuscript from his/her own lab results. (Note: the topic of which was actually not quite within my sphere of expertise). Then he/she invited me to revise and correct the manuscript, include myself as a co-author, and submit it to any journal I please. I have never seen this.
My doubts are: i) how common could this be? Did anyone here ever get such an email? ii) I am amazed to see this person has dozens of papers, some even coauthored with established researchers. Do I take it from that these researchers accepted the “offer”? Or worse, perhaps they are not aware of these manuscripts? iii) Should I contact someone else about this?
Sorry for using this space, and thanks in advance.
BR,
My first thought would be to insure that the e-mail address was a valid address and the address of the individual in question. I have a friend who received an e-mail inviting them to present a message at a religious meeting in England that have every appearance of being genuine. But when you examined the reply e-mail addresses, it was obvious that they were not the same addresses as the purported individuals sending the invitation. The follow-up to this is that had my friend accepted the invitation, there would have been request from the organizers for funds to facilitate the processing of the visa and other documents. And that was the scam – the receiver sends funds to the scammer.
One has to really look at what is going on in this process to know what is happening. How many of the manuscripts cited were actually published?
Thanks, the paper does seem to be an actual paper coming from an actual person with real affiliation/funding/students/peers. However I think maybe the best to do is to live and let die as Vladimir pointed out below; digging into this could generate more problems than solutions. I am very disappointed at the extent science has been growing into a facade, very quickly.
Dear BR, this kind of request to co-author was exactly what Ayden Jacob aka Benjamin Jacob Hayempour (and editor of his own journal at the time did) c.f. http://retractionwatch.com/category/benjamin-jacob-hayempour/
Who wrote on his LinkedIn page : “Radiologist or neuroscientist needed: we have a publishable manuscript on frontal lobe dysfunction and violent behaviour. We need 1 more coauthor to help finish this manuscript. It will get published. Email me for details.”
You could see that several “co-authors” appear to fall for this.
Yes, indeed! Scary, isnt it? As someone looking for ways of getting a job in the academia, I get very disappointed at seeing this kind of behavior spreading and becoming the rule… Thanks for pointing out!
It should be considered extremely irregular to get an authorship on a paper – well, manuscript – for revising it. You have no idea how data was obtained and you can’t vouch for its validity. My advice would be to add the email address to the list of blocked/junk emails and forget about it. Doesn’t matter if it’s an offer of an authorship or a claim to some Nigerian moneys – don’t waste your time. It ain’t how science works.
Yes thanks, I totally agree, however note I was not wondering whether not I should accept the offer. I am worried if I should do sth else than just ignoring it. It can actually have become “how science works” to a greater extension than we think. These people are apparently publishing a lot and getting funding and jobs, and god knows what the data comes from.
My bad. Didn’t want to imply that you were gullible enough to go through with this, just providing a generic advice what to do when stuff like this hits one’s mailbox. Unfortunately there isn’t much else one can do nowadays but ignore it. We ain’t got academic Interpol.
It’s not what science has become; the problem is that we have science and what successfully masquerades as science. PhD – of sorts – check. Academic affiliation – of sorts – check. Publication in peer-reviewed journal – of sorts – check. And there is so much of this, and it’s growing with every new day. Personally I can barely keep to not contributing to this – e.g. not accepting offers of Guest-Lead-Editor for some predatory journal. Fighting this – where would I get the time?..
Ivan and Adam, I have read your piece in NYT – an exchange program of sorts (“Look, your Will Shortz made it to the Sports pages” – “Here, your Retraction Watch guys have an op-ed”). A thoughtful but limited perspective. Limited probably by NYT space allocations. So here is my 2 cents. The trend for sensationalism in subject and absolutism in statements in the top journals is nothing new. And the “incentives” for academic publishing – top journal publication=recognition, appreciation, one’s own lab, R01, HHMI, etc – ain’t gonna change any time soon. But the problem isn’t that the “incentives” force _good_ scientist to “cut corners” – maybe just a little bit. It’s the bad ones we have to worry about.
In my opinion it is the massive influx of “scientists” with little to no abilities who are trying to advance their careers by clinging to the expectations of genius who has a Cell paper in the second year of the graduate school and a Science paper half-way into the first year of the postdoc tenure. Pressure is immense while acumen isn’t. Who is there to stop you mis-labeling the lanes on a Western blot?
Another thing to consider is that although it might appear that the manuscript A having been corresponded by a Nobel prize winner N has been reviewed in a top-ranked journal by another prize-winning PI – let’s call him/her M – we should consider the reality. Manuscript A is most likely written by a post-doc or a grad student from N’s lab and the reviewing was done by a similarly placed underling in M’s lab. Often with little intervention from M or N. ORI more often than not finds faults in postdocs and grad students, not PIs. Add to this the fact that Editors rarely exercise their right to demand raw data being made available to reviewers – for a good reason: seriously, is any reviewer going to try to re-check X-ray structure solution or recalculate some -omics data on 10-day notice? – and you’ve got yourself a battle of grad students mediated by an Editor, usually a former postdoc who at some point got disenchanted with climbing the academic pyramid (scheme).
Perhaps you might indulge a basic question – is there a way to recognize those whose work is replicating results?
In the time of Newton and Leibniz, publication was so little and egos so vast that Darwinian pressure worked.
Today, it’s like the early internet, where commenters strove to type “First!”
If there is no way to recognize those who replicate or debunk, then I suppose you get what you pay for.
Having listened to This America Life on the same-sex marriage study I didn’t find the results particularly surprising.
You had a gay person going out of his way to be empathetic to someone who was not a hard-core bigot but had some reluctance regarding same-sex marriage, what is less surprising he should be better at persuading them to change their mind than someone who did not have a personal investment in the issue? It helps if you have heard the recordings of a sample of these interactions to see how likely they were to be effective.
I didn’t find the magnitude of the effect reported that too surprising either. Clearly there is some issue with the documentation that needs to be looked into, but at the moment I would be looking at sloppy and/or inappropriate research practice/documentation rather than deliberation de novo falsification of a non-existent effect.
Not sure it was interesting enough to justify a paper in Science
Urologist warns against removing PSA data from SEER because it will affect ongoing research with that data?
Sure, just go ahead and keep crunching faulty data and then publishing it… And people wonder why CMS is turning its back on prostate cancer screening.
Gee, is here a Financial Conflict of Interest in that statement? The same Financial Conflict of Interest that has uro-oncology surgeons swearing up and down that the daVinci provides so many benefits to treatment… when the numbers do not support the statement, and while urologists sell a service with an elevated cost. And they’re screaming bloody murder when CMS whispers about discontinuing payment for those comparable services with elevated costs.
And in a related note… Will Urology Departments survive the transition from fee-for-service to fee-for-quality?
I see that the NYT item has sent AoA’s “Media Editor,” Anne Dachel – also known as the “Dachelbot,” by virtue of her hit-and-run, copy-paste comment flooding of news stories – into an incoherent frenzy.