This week at Retraction Watch featured nine more fake peer review retractions, this time from Elsevier, and an update to the retraction count for one-time record holder Joachim Boldt. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- A statistician smackdown: “Methodological and Reporting Errors in Meta-Analytic Reviews Make Other Meta-Analysts Angry.” (sub req’d)
- Despite known problems, many biomedical researchers don’t bother checking for imposter cell lines, reports Declan Butler.
- “When things go wrong: correcting the scientific record.” Thoughts from EMBO Journal editor Bernd Pulverer.
- “Why perform research on research?” ask John Ioannidis and colleagues in a new paper. For more on the subject, check out the “Improving Biomedical Research” conference Ioannidis and others are hosting at Stanford next month.
- Want better reproducibility? Stop studying humans, says Max at Medium.
- “Babies often suffer unnecessary pain in clinical studies,” reports Frederik Joelving at Reuters.
- A site that sells vitamins has retracted an article “because some of the sections in this article may not comply with Australia Therapeutic products advertising regulation.”
- A New York Times op-ed on stool banking earns a significant correction to how it described the results of a study.
- “Scientists can draw very different meanings from the same data,” writes Arielle Duhaime-Ross of a new study in Nature.
- Journal editors are rethinking peer review, reports Paul Voosen at The Chronicle of Higher Education (sub req’d).
- JAMA launches a new journal, JAMA Cardiology.
- A look at data policies at economics journals by Sven Vlaeminck and Lisa-Kristin Herrmann suggests there’s room for improvement.
- “Tired of blurry withdrawals.” A profile of Retraction Watch in Norwegian.
- “What is the role of the journal in the future?” One of a number of questions for HighWire’s John Sack.
- What’s the deal with altmetrics? Danielle Padula and Catherine Williams explain.
- Taking small steps: NIH reviewers will now be asked to include “rigor and transparency questions.”
- “Publishing is broken. Tenure is broken. Peer review is broken. Academia is broken.” Oh, stop it, says Stephen Heard.
- A progress report on replication in economics, from Maren Duvendack, Richard W. Palmer-Jones, and W. Robert Reed (from May).
- The case for making economics research easier to replicate: The Wall Street Journal’s Anna Louie Sussman writes about a new paper we highlighted last week.
- “Although insider trading is illegal, recent high-profile cases have involved physicians and scientists who are part of corporate governance or who have access to information about clinical trials of investigational products.”
- How is technology improving the reliability of scientific evidence? Amy Rogers takes a look.
- “Medicine needs to change its approach to releasing new, important information,” say Eric Topol and Harlan Krumholz.
- “Researchers with disabilities are making their fields more accessible,” writes Amanda Keener in The Scientist.
- Archiving older versions isn’t just a problem for scientific journals: News outlets face the same challenge, says Meredith Broussard.
- A science consultant is pushing back against writers who’ve investigated his work.
- “It is sobering that of over 1,000 publications from leading UK institutions, over two-thirds did not report even one of four items considered critical to reducing the risk of bias, and only one publication reported all four measures,” write the authors of a new study.
- “Boring research is more likely to replicate.” Discuss at Andrew Gelman’s blog.
- Do academy members publish better papers? asks Phil Davis.
- A journal in the Philippines charges high article processing charges, and exaggerates its impact factor, Jeffrey Beall reports.
- How about a manifesto for the “public understanding of big data?” Mike Michael and Deborah Lupton have some ideas (
sub req’dSAGE has made this freely available after we posted). - Here’s how legacy publishers with co-opt open access, by Joseph Esposito.
- Following reporting by BuzzFeed’s Azeen Ghorayshi about a sexual harassment investigation, Geoffrey Marcy, a prominent University of California, Berkeley astronomer is resigning. And The New York Times public editor responds to calls for a story on the subject to be retracted.
- Here’s what happened when a group of researchers tried to repeat a headline-grabbing study, courtesy of Carolyn Johnson.
- “Having formal training in both writing/editing and medicine is a unique skill set,” says Preeti Malani of JAMA and the University of Michigan.
- Is “triple-blinding” the way to minimize bias? Robert MacCoun and Saul Perlmutter think so.
- A very awkward retraction from a Danish newspaper about whether a princess had plastic surgery.
- “[R]esearchers continue to view open access publishing with disinterest, suspicion and skepticism,” writes Stephen Pinfield.
- The David Publishing Company is a “among the most annoying scholarly open access publishers,” says Jeffrey Beall.
- The work of Jens Förster suffers two more failed replications.
- The “effectiveness of talk therapy in treating depression is overemphasized because of publication bias,” writes Suzette Gutierrez.
- “Honest disagreement about methods may explain irreproducible results,” says The Economist.
- Does pressure to publish impede innovation? Colleen Flaherty reports for Inside Higher Ed.
- Who reads science blogs? asks Paige Jarreau.
- Open access papers are more likely to be shared on Twitter and Facebook, writes David Matthews at Times Higher Education of a new study.