Weekend reads: Go ahead, plagiarize and sabotage your colleagues; star surgeon’s days at Karolinska numbered

The week at Retraction Watch featured a case of a disappearing journal, lots of bad news for Olivier Voinnet, and advice on what to do when you make a mistake. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Ever wanted to sabotage your colleagues? Now you can, in a game. (Tracy Vence, The Scientist)
• “You can publish a paper with up to 40% plagiarism in this Journal,” reports Jeffrey Beall.
• As a three-part documentary airs on Paolo Macchiarini in Sweden, his days at the Karolinska Institutet appear to be numbered, Dagens Medicin reports (in Swedish).
• Haruko Obokata says she was framed for the STAP stem cell fraud, Paul Knoepfler reports.
• Rejections at arXiv have led to a spat over the preprint server’s screening process, Zeeya Merali reports at Nature.
• “Don’t let transparency damage science,” say Stephan Lewandowsky and Dorothy Bishop in Nature, urging ways to “distinguish scrutiny from harassment.” More from Lewandowsky here­­­, and a response from Nicole Janz, on which Lewandowsky and Bishop comment, here.
• Where does the New England Journal of Medicine stand on transparency? Our new column for STAT on “research parasites.”
• Meet Gary Schwitzer, “the guy who calls out B.S. health news for a living.” (Men’s Health)
• Here’s how Eric Lander morphed from a science hero into a punching bag. (Sharon Begley, STAT)
• Can you live up to the titles you choose for your papers? asks Howard Aldrich.
• A paper on the “power pose” is just the “latest example of scientific overreach,” write Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung in Slate.
• “Last Wednesday, the editors of the leading medical journals around the world made a propsal that could change medical science forever.” Read more from Harlan Krumholz. (NPR)
• “Research quality declines with scientists’ age, study finds” (David Matthews, Times Higher Education)
• Researchers are urging Elsevier to lower fees for publishing in Cognition, Jane Hu reports at The Atlantic.
• “Science demands transparency,” says John Cochrane. “Yet much research in economics and finance uses secret data.”
• Registered replication reports (RRR) “allow us to assess the size and reproducibility of important findings, bypassing the problems of publication bias (all results are published, regardless of outcome) and variability or flexibility in design and analysis (a common protocol is followed and pre-registered).” Alex Holcombe introduces a new RRR. (Perspectives on Psychological Science)
• Andrew Gelman has two new reasons not to trust published p-values.
• JAMA has jumped the shark, says Bernard Carroll.
• Want to use social media to increase your citations? Here’s how. (SAGE Connection)
• Here’s how quality control could save your data, from Monya Baker at Nature.
• More researchers are engaging in self-experimentation, reports Shirley Wang at the Wall Street Journal. (sub req’d)
• “Plagiarism is theft — but of what?” asks Neuroskeptic.
• “Nothing makes you feel stupid quite like reading a scientific journal article.” Adam Ruben’s advice in Science on keeping up with the literature.
• “We find that more collaboration with the same researcher is actually no better for advancing creativity: publications produced early in a sequence of repeated collaborations with a given coauthor tend to be published better and cited more than papers that come later in the collaboration with the same coauthor.” (Scientometrics; sub req’d)
• Here’s how to write the introduction to a journal article, from Pat Thomson.
• Zuleyka Zuvallos on how to stop the sexual harassment of women in science (The Conversation).
• There was an error in a Science paper claiming that “humans across the whole of Africa carry DNA inherited from Eurasian immigrants,” according to Ewen Callaway at Nature.

Retractions Outside of the Scientific Literature

• Luckily, not us, but would have been fun: “Joint Development Authority Demands Retraction of Watchdog Blog.”
• “A Kansas legislator who came under criticism after banning women from wearing plunging necklines and short skirts when testifying before his committee has apologized and retracted the guidelines.”
• Lessons from a book author’s retraction, from a police association president.

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