Weekend reads: Criminal charges for plagiarism; NFL scientific interference; the authorship explosion

The week at Retraction Watch featured a move by the Journal of Biological Chemistry that we’re applauding, a retraction by a high-profile nutrition researcher, and an announcement about a new partnership to create a retraction database. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• 200 professors in South Korea will be charged Tuesday with copyright violations for “changing the covers of existing books by other people and publishing them in their own names,” The Korea Herald reports.
• The NFL tried to have a paper by Bennet Omalu, who studies brain damage in former football players, retracted, a new book reveals (via Wall Street Journal, sub req’d).
• How we moved from mostly single-authored papers hundreds of years ago to more than 5,000 authors on a single paper: Hilda Bastian explains.
• Jeffrey Warrender has “A Simple Framework for Evaluating Authorial Contributions for Scientific Publications” in Science & Engineering Ethics (sub req’d).
• Blood transfusions from embryonic stem cells? Not so fast, our Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky write in their newest column for STAT, something they’re calling Five Year Watch.
• Astrophysics papers with links to data get “on the average significantly more citations per paper than papers without links to data,” according to a new preprint deposited in arXiv.
• Medical abstracts demonstrate “an over-representation of p values immediately below 0.05 (between 0.01 and 0.049) compared to those immediately above 0.05 (between 0.05 and 0.1),” researchers found in a new paper in BMC Research Notes.
• “Indeed, it is ironic that important sources for public dissemination of details of retractions are not scientific journals, but rather the media in general and blogs such as Retraction Watch, which is often cited as a secondary source by scientific papers,” writes Tarcisio Abreu Saurin in a Science & Engineering Ethics letter calling for a new framework for scientific publishing (sub req’d).
• Is this the most bungled clinical trial ever? asks Derek Lowe.
• FiveThirtyEight’s Christie Aschwanden asked a bunch of scientists to explain p values. The results are hiliarious.
• In nanotechnology research, an “ethics-to-practice gap” exists, according to a new paper in Science Communication (sub req’d SAGE has made this article freely available after we posted). And a paper in Scientific & Engineering Ethics argues that “no ethics” principle has been common in science (sub req’d).
• “Why Retraction Watch remains necessary.” Thanks, Andrew Gelman!
• “For most young researchers, academic research is the love of their life,” asks Sibylle Anderl in Times Higher Education. “But how much can and should be sacrificed for this love?”
• Science, writes Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, “is vulnerable to all the comedy inherent in any social activity: group thinking, self-pleasing, and running down the competition in order to get the customer’s (or, in this case, the government’s) cash.”
• Joining a lengthening list of European government ministers, Denmark’s science minister has been accused of plagiarizing his PhD thesis.
• Writing a scientific paper is a form of storytelling, says Chloe Warren.
• High publication demands are “a great incentive for people to be dishonest and to take shortcuts,” says David Colquhoun in Lab Times.
• Hinnerk Feldwisch-Drentrup takes a look at the ethical issues involved in the chocolate-diet hoax study (in German).
• When it comes to scientific misconduct, “What is the link between cured sausage and dishonest authorship practices?” asks Giovanna Badia.
• What should you do about a toxic collaborator? wonders Tseen Khoo on The Research Whisperer.
• The Duke institute run by FDA commissioner nominee Robert Califf and that coordinated a study of a blood thinner “is trying to determine whether the use of potentially malfunctioning medical devices affected the trial results,” the Program on Government Oversight reports.
• How do editors use peer reviews? Margaret Kearney explains at Wiley Exchanges.
• When are journal metrics useful? asks Elizabeth Gadd.
• Should you publish your ideas in a peer-reviewed journal, or as an op-ed? DeWitt Scott answers in Insider Higher Ed.
• Are some researchers fabricating data? asks Alan Gaby at The Townsend Letter.
• Want to learn how to write better grants? Go to Grant Camp! (Jonathan O’Donnell at The Research Whisperer)
• A survey of human subject research protections in Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland showed “substantial gaps in the scope and content of relevant policies and major impediments to program performance” (Science & Engineering Ethics, sub req’d).
• Is peer reviewer fatigue a real thing? asks Angela Cochran at Scholarly Kitchen.
• “Among the factors that determine success in a competition for an academic position, the number of the applicant’s career years in the same university as the committee members assumes greater weight for male candidates than for females.” A look at gender bias in academic recruitment, in Scientometrics (sub req’d).
• Is this more “template plagiarism?” asks Jeffrey Beall. And is this evidence of article brokers?
• What were the most challenging aspects of peer reviewing in 2015? Wiley’s Jill Yablonski-Crepeau takes a look.
• “Academia.edu has launched a service called PaperRank, which gives each article on the site a score based on how many recommendations it has received from other researchers,” Times Higher Education reports.
• “I don’t mind the idea of publishing negative data but it won’t burn down the house of bad ideas,” says the Mole in the Journal of Cell Science.
• How are researchers incorporating new scholarly communication tools into their research workflows? Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer take a look.
• “Chinese researchers have little enthusiasm for, or even awareness of, the global trend towards openly sharing data,” according to a new white paper from Nature Publishing Group.
• The Berkeley Initiative For Transparency in the Social Sciences has just announced $300,000 in funding for 10 Social Science Meta-Analysis and Research Transparency (SSMART) grants, designed “to support and encourage important meta-research in the social sciences, with the ultimate goal of strengthening reliability and validity of social science research findings.”

Retractions Outside Of The Scientific Literature

• A damning tale in New Mandala may not have been quite so damning.
• “The Namibia Statistics Agency has retracted the youth unemployment figures it announced last Wednesday.”
• “Ms. Weismann and the Campaign for Accountability regret and have withdrawn their submissions requesting an investigation of Sheldon Adelson.”
• “Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon said this week, ‘Forty years ago, a dark chapter was written in the UN’s history, and despite the retraction of the resolution, the hypocrisy and delegitimization against Israel still echo in the halls of this organization.’”