Weekend reads: Duplication rampant in cancer research?; meet the data detective; journals behaving badly

This week saw us profiled in The New York Times and de Volkskrant, and the introduction of our new staff writer. We also launched The Retraction Watch Leaderboard. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Are a quarter of basic cancer studies full of data duplication? That’s what a new study says, and editors are ignoring the issue. More from Neuroskeptic.
• Meet the image detective who roots out manuscript flaws at EMBO Press.
• 39 journals have had their Impact Factors suspended for excessive self-citation or citation stacking, Phil Davis reports. Here’s the list.
• Cell editor in chief Emilie Marcus wants readers’ opinions on how to tackle allegations of scientific misconduct.
• A survey finds “the persistence of major differences between the peer review processes used by different disciplines.”
• Science journalists are unhappy with Nature.
• “Why on earth would anyone hijack a predatory or low quality journal?” Jeffrey Beall is perplexed.
• More issues for Paolo Macchiarini? Swedish prosecutors are now looking into the tracheal transplants he performed.
• EMBO Journal editor Bernd Pulverer urges his counterparts at other publications to sign the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, better known as DORA, to end the tyranny of the Impact Factor. PNAS editor Inder Verma says something similar.
• Drug companies “routinely hide the reasons their drugs are rejected from investors,” says the FDA, reports Matthew Herper.
• Journalists like MedPage Today’s Parker Brown don’t just report on the scientific literature, they correct it (see end of story).
• An, um, scientific retraction.
• How big is the reproducibility problem? asks Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News? And what can be done to fix it? Here’s a great job at a foundation that’s trying.
• Power of the media? More than 60,000 Australians stopped or cut back on their statins after a now-withdrawn ABC television program, says a new study.
• What’s the real lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment? Maria Konnikova explains.
• “The Problem with Tenure Isn’t Tenure Itself,” writes Martin Kich.
• The NEJM and the BMJ are having a clash of the titans over conflict of interest policies, Tara Haelle notes. Meanwhile, leading figures argue in Environmental Science & Technology that disclosure matters.
• Fake data, the comic version.
• How long are typical postdocs in chemistry? asks See Arr Oh.
• A sad tribute to the memory of a post-doc, in the acknowledgements of a paper. More from the Backreaction blog.
• “The web will either kill science journals or save them,” says Julia Greenberg in WIRED.
• New excuse for academics who steal data: I was creating art!
• “Rampant fraud at medical schools leaves Indian healthcare in crisis,” Reuters reports.
• OK, fine, we’ll give you those documents, U.S. government officials tell a reporter, but only if you never file a Freedom of Information Act request again.
• A well-deserved honor (and Retraction Watch knows first-hand): WordPress and its parent company, Automattic, earn a perfect Who Has Your Back score from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
• What’s wrong with the manuscript submission process? A grumpy author chimes in.
• The p value is a hoax, says Perry Wilson, but here’s how to fix it.
• Drug companies pay female doctors less than male doctors for speaking and research, Pharmalot reports.
• The row over the future of the Medical Journal of Australia continues (subscription required).
• How should reviewers respond when authors disagree with their recommendations? Thomas Gaston, of Wiley, offers suggestions.
• Some guidelines to avoid vexing authorship disputes, from Emma-Louise Aveling and Graham Martin.
• “Something has gone very wrong with science,” argues William Reville.
• The New York Times “half-apologizes” for its story on the Berkeley balcony collapse, according to Erik Wemple. A take from our friends at Sorry Watch.
• Would you rather submit to the Journal of Chest, or CHEST?
• “If people would stop faking photos, then they wouldn’t have to be worried about being called out.”
• Jesse Singal, who did great work on the LaCour Science retraction, is back with an in-depth look at allegations surrounding Alice Goffman’s work.
• Commonly used health data smacks of pseudoscience, says a new review.
• A doctor loses his license for performing horrible sexual experiments on his students, BuzzFeed reports.

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