The week at Retraction Watch featured a new grant to our parent non-profit organization, a retraction from the NEJM, and our first-ever retraction. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- Scientist and journals “are extremely reluctant to retract their papers, even in the face of damning evidence,” according to a draft of a government report leaked to David Matthews of Times Higher Education.
- “Are most academic papers really worthless?” asks Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times. “Don’t trust this worthless statistic,” he says, referring to “new” citation data that turns out to be 30 years old.
- “There are too many PhD students for too few academic jobs,” writes Julie Gould in Nature, “but with imagination, the problem could be solved.” And at Elsevier Connect, Paul-Andre Genest explains how he went from his PhD to publishing.
- “A recent claim that tardigrades got a sixth of their DNA from microbes is starting to unravel,” Ed Yong reports in The Atlantic.
- Federal U.S. regulators refuse to say which biolabs have been sanctioned, despite efforts by USA Today’s Alison Young.
- The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology is cutting the number of studies it will attempt to reproduce because costs were higher than they anticipated, Brendan Maher reports at Nature. And the STAT Signal podcast speaks to a venture capitalist who reproduces studies before making any investments.
- “The stigma of negative results is being broken, and that’s great,” writes Neuroskeptic. “Inconclusive results should be accepted too.”
- Publish or perish “promotes inaccuracy in science – and journalism,” Ivan argues in the AMA Journal of Ethics.
- “Research Integrity: What it Means, Why it Is Important and How we Might Protect it.” A new report from Science Europe.
- A new option at the Royal Society Open Science “offers the opportunity to have your paper accepted for publication before the data are even collected.”
- “When Charity is Outrage:” In The Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care, Pranab Chatterjee and colleagues look at “the benefits and pitfalls of incentivized peer review.”
- What does it mean when a paper uses the phrase “for the first time,” and why do such papers tend to appear in clutches? asks The Mole in the Journal of Cell Science.
- The NIH isn’t tracking gender-specific results in the trials it sponsors, reports Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News (via MedPage Today)
- “Not all science is groundbreaking,” Ivan and Adam argue in their new STAT column, “and that’s a good thing.”
- “Editors and publishers should use a standardized form to detail why they are pulling papers from the scientific literature,” argue Hervé Maisonneuve and Evelyne Decullier in The Scientist.
- What should you do when you realize your paper is fatally flawed? Kerry Grens highlights best practices, and our Doing The Right Thing category, in The Scientist.
- “Got just a single observation? New journal will publish it.” Science reports on the launch of Matters.
- “A prominent Ottawa scientist says he can no longer ‘in good conscience’ advise students to pursue a career in science in Canada ‘due to the dismal outlook we are facing,’” Elizabeth Payne reports at The Ottawa Citizen.
- Want to use PubMed better? See these tips from Hilda Bastian.
- Harvard Medical School is easing up on its contentious conflict of interest disclosure rules, Melissa Bailey reports at STAT.
- “Why Do We Ask Authors to Suggest Reviewers Anyway?” asks journal editor Eric Murphy, picking up on the fake review scandal.
- False Claims Act attorney John Thomas offers his list of red flags for misconduct in labs. (The Scientist)
- Pre-registrations of experiments “don’t actually tie researchers’ hands, they tie reviewers’ hands,” argue the researchers behind the Data Colada blog, who introduce a new site for pre-registration. The post prompted Simine Vazire to write this one.
- Autism research needs to update its publishing standards, Chris Gunter argues in Spectrum.
- Our first Five Year Watch feature in STAT last week prompted Om Malik to look back at what he’d written in 2010. And imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery: Check out Andrew Gelman’s “attempt at a punny, Retraction-Watch-style headline.”
- “Pirate research-paper sites” are making millions of papers of papers available despite copyright violations, Quirin Schiermeier reports in Nature.
- A new open access journal is offering to pay reviewers – sort of, says Jeffrey Beall. Meanwhile, another journal says it has no author fees, then charges an author a fee.
- A particular form of psychotherapy is being oversold based on selective reporting of results, argues a paper in the Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy. (sub req’d)
- A team of bioethicists has created an online, privacy-protected repository of consultations to help researchers grappling with issues in human subjects research.
- The self-correcting nature of science has been used to argue against demands by a member of the U.S. Congress for disclosure of government scientists’ emails. (New York Times)
- Which kinds of collaborations are more likely to lead to publications? Aijaz Shaikh offers a guide at Elsevier Connect.
Retractions Outside of The Scientific Literature
- “NO RETRACTION REQUIRED…DID NOT CALL THE POPE AN OLD WOMAN.” A classic from The New York Times, circa 1893.
- “So far as we know there was no reason whatever to question even by inference the accuracy of Dr. Everhart’s diagnosis in this case…” Another classic, this one circa 1898 from The Scranton Tribune.
- The Southern Poverty Law Center retracts tweets about a police department.
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