Weekend reads: Scientist slams bloggers; men love their own work; public science broken?

The week at Retraction Watch featured a paper on reincarnation being retracted because it was plagiarized from Wikipedia, the swift retraction of a paper claiming that women’s makeup use was tied to testosterone levels, and a lot of news about trachea surgeon Paolo Macchiarini.  Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Those who can, publish,” says a scientist in Current Biology. “Those who can’t, blog.” Leonid Schneider has more details in a Q&A here.
• Men cite their own work 60-70% more often than women do, according to an analysis by Carl Bergstrom.
• Marc Edwards, who helped expose the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, tells The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Steve Kolowich that public science is broken. See more about Edwards’s work in this post from April.
• Amgen has published three failures to confirm high-profile science, in a new channel at F1000Research, according to Monya Baker at Nature.
• Why is it so damn hard to get a paper retracted? Our latest STAT column.
• “Write as if you don’t have the data,” says Howard Aldrich. Some researchers actually submit papers that way, too, of course, but those aren’t the ones he means.
• The PubPeer Foundation, the organization that runs the post-publication peer review site, has been designated a tax-exempt charity by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, meaning that it can now accept tax-deductible donations.
• Collaboration “cannot be based on imposed restrictions to data access and cannot be contained in professional silos,” says the executive committee of the International Society of Computational Biology in a response to a recent NEJM editorial, and “the use of expressions such as ‘research parasites’ clearly does not help.”
• Stem cell scientist Paul Knoepfler has found his “niche” as a blogger, an often critical but always thoughtful one, says Karen Weintraub of STAT.
• “Make journals report clinical trials properly,” says Ben Goldacre.
• Scientific misconduct in cancer research is “a distasteful subject that requires acknowledgment and attention,” says Maurie Markman.
• “What can be done to control the frequency of retraction for reasons of unethical behavior?” asks Peter Greco, an orthodontics journal editor.
• A Twitter “nerd-fight” involving Jonathan Eisen has revealed a long scientific feud, WIRED‘s Matt Simon reports.
• A bogus journal in Poland has a completely fake editorial board, says Jeffrey Beall.
• The PhD thesis of a presidential candidate in Peru is under scrutiny for plagiarism. (Colin Post, Peru Reports)
• Doctors and scientists are questioning the validity of a trial used to justify approval of an anticoagulant, Deborah Cohen reports at The BMJ.
• A story of the potential link between pot and psychosis that we covered recently got a bit more confusing. Find out how, from Alison Knopf at Alcoholism & Drug Abuse Weekly.
• Ghostwritten papers seem to be more highly cited than their non-ghostwritten counterparts, according to a study by Philippe Gorry.
• A legendary dinner of mammoth at the Explorers Club turns out to be a hoax, James Gorman reports at The New York Times.
• Elsevier’s WebShop is helping authors avoid rejection, says the company’s Irina Nikitina.
• Here’s a journal with an entirely fake editorial board, courtesy of Jeffrey Beall.
• What do reviewers want from peer review? Wiley’s Verity Warne has some answers.
• Scholars are criticizing a proposal by Academia.edu to charge authors for recommendations, Corinne Ruff of The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.
• The US Geological Survey has released some of the scientific data behind a proposed ban on a type of sealant, nearly five years after a FOIA request by a trade group.
• A prominent biology professor at the University of Chicago has resigned amid a sexual misconduct investigation, reports Amy Harmon at The New York Times.
• “Do the benefits of sharing data outweigh its risks?” asks John Mandrola in Medscape. “How you answer that question depends on the position of your lens.”
• Northwestern University has lost a round in a court battle over unauthorized testing of patients, Paul Basken at The Chronicle of Higher Education reports. (sub req’d)
• “[H]olding a Canada research chair has a significant positive effect on scientific performance but other types of chairs do not have a significant effect,” according to a new study in Scientometrics.
• Bonus: A number of scientific publishing watchdogs, including our Ivan Oransky, got together at the Gaming Metrics conference at the University of California, Davis, this week. Here’s a photo of Ivan, Center For Scientific Integrity board member Liz Wager, Science correspondent John Bohannon, PubPeer’s Brandon Stell, the University of Rochester’s Paul Brookes, Vroni Plag’s Debora Weber-Wulff, and Scholarly Open Access blogger Jeffrey Beall.

Retractions Outside of the Scientific Literature

• A Nigerian TV network will have to air a retraction once a day for three months after losing a libel suit to a politician.
• The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple compares and contrasts how various news organizations handled the retraction of a piece by The Intercept.

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