Weekend reads: Ghost authors proliferate; science goes to the movies; pricey grant fraud

The week at Retraction Watch featured the results of a massive replication study, yet another retraction for Diederik Stapel, and a messy situation at PLOS. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Who ya gonna cite, to paraphrase Ray Parker, Jr.? A survey found that a third of papers in biology, physics, and the social sciences had at least one guest author, and more than half had at least one ghost author.
• Maybe we need Ghost Author Busters: “When you mix classic movie lines with nerd humor, you get #scienceamoviequote.” The Los Angeles Times reports. Here’s one we made it into.
• “In the NSF’s Priciest Grant-Fraud Settlement, Northeastern U. Will Pay $2.7 Million,” reports The Chronicle of Higher Education.
• “We’ve often said that, like democracy, the old model of peer review in journals is the least bad system we have,” writes Adam Rutherford. “I’m beginning to wonder if it’s fit for purpose.”
• Papers with shorter titles get more citations, Nature reports based on a new study with a short title.
• Retractions: A philosophical exploration by Teresa Marques.
• According to a new analysis, “p-hacking happens but is not a first order concern,” writes Uri Simonsohn. “That’s reassuring, but falsely reassuring.”
• “Give 10 preferred reviewers, and 10 non-preferred (yes, that sometimes happens) without qualification, and it looks to the editor like a ‘stitch-up’ – i.e. you are trying to control the peer review of your paper.” Journal editor Andrew Moore reflects on author-suggested reviewers.
• Play conflict of interest bingo! See Daniel Goldberg’s “poor rationalizations for the permissibility” of such conflicts.
• “Academic research could be strengthened by thinking more and doing less,” says foundation president Susan Fitzpatrick.
• What’s Academic Karma, and how does it work? A conversation with co-founder Lachlan Coin.
• The fake peer review scandal is shining a light on China, reports Felicia Sonmez.
• Here’s “a novel approach for plagiarism detection in scientific digital libraries, which does not reveal contents of unpublished documents, but allows for early detection of plagiarism attempts.”
• “Corrections are always embarrassing to the authors,” writes Bethany Brookshire. “But they also are essential to scientific research.”
• “If there is a Stock Critique that is a more reliable way to kill a grant’s chances than ‘There is no discernible hypothesis under investigation in this fishing expedition’, I’d like to know what it is.” DrugMonkey angsts over NIH grant review.
• A nursing journal editor explains why a paper about sexual abuse in daycare won’t be retracted.
• Want peer review in a day? No problem, says this journal (via Jeffrey Beall).
• “Errors are inevitable; lack of transparency is not,” writes Anthony De Rosa, introducing NewsDiffs — a technology for news sites that journal publishers might want to look at.
• A study found “that three demographic characteristics that should be unrelated to research productivity—name origin, uniqueness of one’s family name, and the number of initials used in publishing—in fact have a very strong influence on it.” Find out why (subscription req’d).
• “Cite newer, relevant references, especially those published by X 2012, and X 2008. Best wishes, Dr. X, Associate Editor.” Kelly Oakes gathers more comments from Shit My Reviewers Say.
• Data-sharing in low and middle income settings: A special issue of the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Ethics.
• Why applying for a grant is like playing the lottery, by Melanie Stefan.
• Is it time for “a verifiable badge for placement at point-of-service that identifies an entity (freelancers, commercial vendors, publisher, journal, etc.) as having been vetted…for meeting the minimum standard of responsible conduct in the offering of publication services?”
• The New England Journal of Medicine quietly replaced a disclosure statement after being notified that an author had served as an expert witness.
• Here’s what happens when a peer reviewer doesn’t have that much to say, courtesy of Bradley Voytek.
• Are “tanker jets” spraying coal-fly-ash in the atmosphere, or is this journal publishing pseudoscience? asks Jeffrey Beall.
• In a follow-up from a story we wrote about, Alice Dreger has resigned from her post at Northwestern. Find out why.
• “Avoiding accusations of plagiarism can be easily achieved by following a few simple conventions of referencing and punctuation, and academic authors are advised to protect their own reputations by following these conventions.” (sub req’d)
• Economics needs a replication journal, says Christian Zimmermann of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.
• The Academy Track: On its fifth anniversary, mBio looks at the justifications for this method for certain scientists to contribute papers, modeled on the PNAS direct submissions pathway.
• Is it high noon for dodgy drug trials in China? Sydney Woodhead wonders.
• “We need to educate to avoid hidden biases:” Marilyn Renfree on solving the challenge of gender balance in science.
• Why does so much science turn out to be wrong? asks Peg Fong.
• The future of society journals may involve a lot of advertising, suggest Stephen Jezzard and Gavin Sharrock.
• “There really is no excuse for not having data openly available to support papers these days,” says Jon Tennant.
• Do most open access journals really not charge authors? Hard to say, says David Crotty.
• The open access movement “is effectively lobbying in favor of one set of commercial interests over another set of commercial interests,” says Peter Kenny.
• According to a new study, “there are mutations in many genetically modified mouse models that could well be confounding their phenotypes,” says Derek Lowe with a sigh.
• What’s important to scientific authors? A survey tries to find out.

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