Weekend reads: “Unfeasibly prolific authors;” why your manuscript will be rejected; is science broken?

booksThe week at Retraction Watch featured revelations of yet more fake peer reviews, bringing the retraction total to 250. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

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8 thoughts on “Weekend reads: “Unfeasibly prolific authors;” why your manuscript will be rejected; is science broken?”

  1. The article by Wager et al. makes fascinating reading. Did they check whether the prolific authors featured on Pubpeer?

    1. no, we didn’t, but we did check that none of their articles had been retracted … but that’s an interesting suggestion — thanks (and I’m glad you enjoyed the article)!

  2. Eassom’s reason #8 for manuscript rejection is maddening and has to change. Authors should not be beholden to publishers to squeeze manuscripts into antiquated, essentially arbitrary printing formats or length/reference limits. This is an online world, where space limitations do not apply and color tif files are just as easy to deal with as black and white. Open access journals often have more relaxed standards, but they still require too much up-front work from the authors. Last time I checked my pay stub, I don’t work for Wiley.

    Science publishing was in some ways on the vanguard of the Uberification movement, but they’d better be careful lest the peer-to-peer paradigm come to full fruition and authors realize how little they need publishing houses.

  3. DS Latchman 480 publications
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=latchman%20ds

    Two 2015 retractions.

    1.J Biol Chem. 2002 Apr 19;277(16):13693-9. Epub 2002 Feb 1.
    Antiapoptotic activity of the free caspase recruitment domain of procaspase-9: a novel endogenous rescue pathway in cell death.
    Stephanou A1, Scarabelli TM, Knight RA, Latchman DS.
    Author information
    1Medical Molecular Biology Unit, Institute of Child Health, University College London, 30 Guilford Street, London WC1N 1EH, United Kingdom.

    2015 Retraction notice: http://www.jbc.org/content/290/3/1454

    2. J Cell Sci. 2005 Apr 15;118(Pt 8):1629-39. Epub 2005 Mar 22.
    STAT-1 facilitates the ATM activated checkpoint pathway following DNA damage.
    Townsend PA1, Cragg MS, Davidson SM, McCormick J, Barry S, Lawrence KM, Knight RA, Hubank M, Chen PL, Latchman DS, Stephanou A.

    2015 retraction notice: http://jcs.biologists.org/content/128/5/1064.long

  4. Somebody that many here seem to admire greatly (unjustifiably, in my opinion) also has a ridiculously large number of publications to his name. I am speaking of John Ioannidis. For 2014, for example, pubmed lists 77 publications for Ioannidis (http://tinyurl.com/q8yfjgs). That’s about 1.5 a week.

  5. The Aschwanden piece is a nice read (and the applet is hilarious), but I feel like it’s dancing around the elephant in the room that is how researchers are (not) trained.

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