Weekend reads: FDA nominee authorship questions; low economics replication rates

The week at Retraction Watch featured a mysterious retraction from PLOS ONE, and a thoughtful piece by a scientist we’ve covered frequently on where we went wrong in that coverage. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Is Economics Research Replicable? Sixty Published Papers from Thirteen Journals Say ‘Usually Not.’”
• FDA commissioner Robert Califf took his name off now-published papers raising concerns about agency oversight, Sheila Kaplan reports for Stat News.
• “How scientists fool themselves – and how they can stop,” from Regina Nuzzo for Nature.
• How much should scientists check other scientists’ work? asks Shirley Wang at The Wall Street Journal.
• “Scientists clearly cannot rely on the traditional avenues for correcting problems in the literature.” PubPeer responds to an editorial slamming the site.
• “Research is about finding the truth, not (just) about publishing (another) paper (because you need more),” says Ruth Loos.
• An impressively long list of ways to say “not quite statistically significant” from Matthew Hankin, courtesy of Academia Obscura.
• “Rather than expecting people to stop utilizing metrics altogether,” says Brett Buttliere, “we would be better off focusing on making sure the metrics are effective and accurate.”
• A journal submission inspired by Iggy Azalea? Kirk Englehardt explains.
• A pre-registration site for parapsychology? Andrew Gelman is skeptical.
• Meet the billionaires who want to cut waste in science: A Q&A with Laura Arnold of the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, which funds The Center For Scientific Integrity, our parent non-profit organization.
• The Transparency and Openness Promotion guidelines “run counter” to Epidemiology’s goal of “encourag[ing] creativity and novelty,” writes the editor, so the journal won’t be signing on.
• “How do we play the ‘impact factor’ game with publications, knowing how flawed that index is! It’s sometimes so hard to know where to try to publish! Help!” Chris Buddle responds.
• A journalist has won economic damages and a retraction from the New Zealand Defence Force, following a lawsuit.
• “No, Scientists Have Not Found the ‘Gay Gene,’” says Ed Yong.
• The “proper response to abuses” of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to harass scientists is not “to advocate blocking citizens or reporters from using the FOIA,” writes Ralph Nader.
• A California libel retraction statute has been extended to online publications, Eugene Volokh reports.
• A judge has thrown out a lawsuit filed by a neurology institute against Steven Novella for posts on Science Based Medicine.
• “Something has happened to the way I read scholarly articles,” says Aaron Barlow.
• “A scientist who helped organize a call for a federal investigation of the fossil fuel industry—for allegedly orchestrating a cover-up of climate change dangers—has himself become the target of a congressional probe,” Warren Cornwall reports for Science.
• “What should I do about self-plagiarism?” asks a Metafilter user.
• The BMJ doubled down on its errors with a “clarification” to an article about dietary guidelines, Arielle Duhaime-Ross reports for The Verge.
• “The worst thing that a society learns from situations like this is that universities are not trustworthy,” says the former president of the American Association of University Professors of a case in which documents reveal close ties between academics and fracking proponents.
• “But are editors just ‘neutral’ custodians of the global knowledge pool,” asked Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India at a recent conference, “or should they have a different role in advancing science and equity?”
• “[W]e accept that New South Wales Police have at no point alleged any involvement by [music producer Andrew] McManus in any drug syndicates, drug importation of money laundering.” A retraction from ripitup.com.au.
• The University of Minnesota “will no longer test experimental drugs on mentally ill patients who have been involuntarily confined to a locked psychiatric unit under a 72-hour hold.”
• “[T]he introduction of notions of intellectual property into the regulation of scientific and scholarly research tends to obfuscate the proper aims of the latter,” says Alexander Peukert (in German; sub req’d).
• “The growing user base of Academia.edu presents new issues for the sharing and dissemination of research,” says Alastair Brown.
• More publishers are trying to fool researchers with journals and conferences that sound like others, Jeffrey Beall reports.
• Martin Samuels writes a defense of mistakes in clinical medicine. Paul Levy is not impressed.
• There is a “lack of high-quality studies comparing the effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness, of dental auxiliaries and dentists in performing dental care,” says Derek Richards.
• “Let no one tell you that ‘Scholarly communication hasn’t changed,’” says HighWire’s John Sack.
• The “study of data itself is an excellent entry point to reflect on the activities and claims associated to the idea of scientific knowledge,” say Sabina Leonelli and Louise Bezuidenhout.
• What about peer-reviewing data? asks Sarah Callaghan.
• Tenure is “what built American higher ed,” says Sol Gittleman.
• “Multiple authorship of nuclear physics publications creates a problem with the assessment of an individual author’s productivity relative to his/her colleagues and renders ineffective a performance metrics solely based on annual publication and citation counts,” writes Boris Pritychenko.
• A new publisher is “acting suspiciously like the OMICS Group,” says Jeffrey Beall.
• Two researchers say they have come up with “a taxonomy of fifteen different types of potential funding-induced bias.”
• Sure, says Andrew Gelman, “math is cool, but it’s a rare work of political science that uses math to exclude dissenters.”

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