The week at Retraction Watch featured our annual roundup of the year’s top retractions for The Scientist, a retraction from Science, and claims about a book Aristotle never wrote. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- The NFL won’t fund a much-vaunted research project into concussions as planned, says ESPN.
- “In this paper I argue that by publishing anonymously, we can decrease the incidence of inaccurate heuristics in the current scientific communication system,” writes Paul Hanel in arXiv.
- Five selfish reasons to work reproducibly, from Florian Markowetz in Genome Biology.
- An Austrian university has stripped a Nobel Prize winner of some honors because he was a member of the Nazi Party.
- The AAAS will not proceed with the nomination of Patrick Harran – who settled charges following the 2008 death of his lab tech – as a Fellow.
- “A postdoctoral researcher at Tsinghua University was killed in a Dec. 18 fire in a chemistry laboratory on the Beijing campus,” Chemical & Engineering News reports.
- Requesting data isn’t harassment, and refusing to share data isn’t science. Our new STAT column.
- “A lecturer exposed as a former undercover police officer who had sexual relationships with activists he was spying on has resigned from his academic posts.” A bizarre story from Times Higher Education.
- “In the era of online publications reaching wider audiences, mistakes are easier to detect and report, and beware if Clare Francis stumbles across such misdemeanours…” (Jyoti Shah, Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England; full article requires subscription)
- The Journal of Emergency Practice and Trauma describe
their firstanother journal’s experience retracting a paper. - Was Henry Gray, of Gray’s Anatomy, a plagiarist, as has been alleged? A new analysis says he wasn’t, but the researcher who did that work hasn’t released his findings yet, says a paper in Clinical Anatomy. (sub req’d)
- Why would we expect academia to be an a-hole free zone? asks Martin Kich. Why indeed?
- “Is scientific peer review a ‘sacred cow’ ready to be slaughtered?” asks David Gorski.
- The chances of publishing in the top quartile of journals actually isn’t 25%, says a study in Scientometrics. (sub req’d)
- Metrics “will not improve scientific governance,” says Eric Giannella.
- “Not prolific in research, but not lazy either: Meet the ‘academic artisans.’” (Times Higher Education)
- “In science, the future is a treacherous place,” writes Carl Zimmer in a piece at STAT separating hope from hype in 2016.
- “Researchers voiced serious concerns about the honesty and normality of subjects, the politics of the laboratory, and their own experimental conduct.” Interviews with psychology researchers about their work decades ago. (Isis)
- Is string theory science? Physicists are asking philosophers, David Castelvecchi reports in Nature.
- Andrew Gelman offers “rapid post-publication peer review.”
- Prosecutors in Italy are accusing researchers of “spreading disease and order a halt to the culling of infected trees,” Nature’s Alison Abbott reports.
- Natascha Chtena offers five “great reads about graduate life and work.”
- Today’s experiments: Worse than Stanley Milgram’s?
- Another index, the zp index, this one for quantifying the efforts of junior researchers. (Scientometrics; sub req’d) And a group of researchers suggests the 4 C’s of research assessment, in Research Policy.
- Will the $25 billion publishing market ever be disrupted? asks Jason Schmitt.
- Jeffrey Beall has questions about JMIR Publications, and publisher Gunther Eysenbach has answers.
- In the nine days following an announcement about new findings from the Large Hadron Collider, physicists have posted 95 manuscripts on arXiv, David Castelvecchi of Nature reports.
- “Is ‘conference fatigue’ harming academia?’” asks Times Higher Education.
Retractions Outside of The Scientific Literature
- BlackBerry is offering users a better way to retract.
- The Washington Post retracted a cartoon depicting presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s children as trained monkeys.
- Why do the Mast Brothers’ responses to allegations about their chocolate sound a lot like what scientists accused of misconduct say?
- “Mistakes are bound to happen in the news business, but some are worse than others,” writes Margaret Sullivan of recent errors by The New York Times.
- A poet has returned a prize after allegations of plagiarism.
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A comment Re sharing of raw data: Of course RetractionWatch is right, but does the principle go as far as to making it acceptable to make a career of analyzing other researchers’ data? If I have fun inventing new methods of analyzing data underlying other people’s papers, how far can I go, and do I have to make the original authors my co-authors? Is there a moral or formal limit to this traffic?
I suppose that would depend on whether the reanalysis is materially adding to the understanding of the issue at hand. I know of cases where the original authors didn’t want to deal with any criticism and the only recourse was to publish an alternative interpretation of the data. In such cases, there are often three desirable outcomes: 1) the reinterpretation is correct and the science advances; 2) the reinterpretation is not correct and the original work is confirmed and strengthened; 3) the nature of the problem is uncertain and a robust debate advances the science.
Although every situation has its specific details, too often it seems, publication seems to be its own end, and “getting it right” just something “nit-pickers” worry about. If data collection is only a way to build careers and egos, it should not be publically funded.
In the interests of being pernickety, the retraction letter in the “Journal of Practice and Trauma” is not about a retraction in this journal. There are two new journals (in English) which originate in Kerman and Sinjar Universities (or medical schools) in Iran. The first issue of “Report of Health Care” embarrassingly started with a paper which had already been published elsewhere – and which is now stamped “RETRACTED.” A letter was then published in the “Journal of Practice and Trauma” which castigates the authors of the retracted paper – without naming them – and seems to call for academic sanctions against these unfortunates. Sounds as if this is local medical politics exactly as practiced world wide.
Good catch, we’ve edited the sentence, thanks.
In the publishing anonymously paper, the author suggests that conferences could be anonymised by requiring presenters to choose a title very different from the relevant paper(s). I can see it now:
“If you’re interest has been whetted, I’ve written two paper going into this in much more detail … but I’m not allowed to tell you what they are.”
It also seems to totally miss that conferences are one of the main venues in which you give/receive informal feedback and suggestions, which’d become almost impossible. The amount of extra work the author is proposing in terms of dealing with the community/other scientists, it reads like chopping off your hand to fix your hangnail.