This week at Retraction Watch featured a big new study of retractions, another that looked at scientist productivity over time, and a new statement on how to use p values properly. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- A freelance reporter for Science, Michael Balter, has been fired shortly after publishing a story on sexual harassment allegations. A statement from Science publisher AAAS here.
- This could go down in history as one of the most highly cited “scientific papers” to ever be retracted. (McSweeney’s)
- “Somebody explain to me again why we have journals,” asks Steve Shea.
- “An influential psychological theory, borne out in hundreds of experiments, may have just been debunked,” writes Daniel Engber at Slate. “How can so many scientists have been so wrong?“
- In BBC Radio 4’s “Saving Science from the Scientists,” Alok Jha wonders “whether science is as rigorous as it should be.
- Why did the timeline for this potential Alzheimer’s drug keep shifting? Our latest for STAT.
- “She wanted to do her research,” writes Hope Jahren in The New York Times. “He wanted to talk ‘feelings.’”
- “Every time Emily Temple-Wood receives an inappropriate email, she writes a Wikipedia entry about a woman scientist,” writes Jef Akst at The Scientist.
- Gender bias in academia, a bibliography, from Danica Savonick and Cathy N. Davidson.
- What should be done when there are disagreements over whether a paper has problems? asks Jonathan Eisen.
- Advocates are increasingly using predatory journals to make their cases, says Jeffrey Beall.
- The fight over the PACE trial of chronic fatigue syndrome has some scientists balking at releasing their data, reports Amy Dockser Marcus in the Wall Street Journal. (sub req’d) Meanwhile, PLOS ONE has determined that some of the data should be released. Background available here.
- In “The Case of the Missing Data,” F. Perry Wilson explains that “how it’s accounted for can turn elections, and medical research studies.” (MedPage Today)
- “Academics should be encouraged to openly publish all their research funding proposals, successful or otherwise,” says Ross Mounce. (Times Higher Education)
- In Berkeley? Come see our Ivan Oransky speak Tuesday.
- The controversial paper mentioning “the Creator” has put the fear of God into PLOS, writes Paul Basken at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
- Science writer Carl Zimmer has “gotten a bit leery about just how far [scientists’s] enthusiasm for communication is getting.” (Cell)
- “Why it pays off to pay us well: The impact of basic research on economic growth and welfare.” (Research Policy, sub req’d)
- “There is a clear positive relationship between being a top journal in impact factor ranking…and having an open [data] policy.” (Scientometrics, sub req’d)
- “Statisticians such as myself should recognize that the point of criticizing a study is, in general, to shed light on statistical errors, maybe with the hope of reforming future statistical education,” says Andrew Gelman.
- Helene Hill, who has spent about 15 years “trying to expose what she believes to be a case of scientific misconduct,” has published her evidence, along with Joel Pitt, on Science Open. The work is not yet peer-reviewed.
- A new button is designed to encourage data sharing. (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Nature).
- No, the U.S. government did not spend more than $400,000 on a study of gender and glaciers, reports Andy Cush at Gawker.
- Two students at Lehigh were banned from labs following incidents involving hamsters, Rebecca Wilkin reports at The Brown and White.
- How can the journal Social Psychology increase replicability? Outgoing editor Christian Unkelbach weighs in. (sub req’d)
- Emerson Murphy-Hill, the author of a new study of gender bias in open-source software, describes what it was like to get so much media attention. (PeerJ)
Retractions Outside of the Scientific Literature
- How much would you pay to retract a message? (TechCrunch)
- Introducing…the Retraction Prevention System!
- “Issue an embarrassing retraction” as a crossword clue.
Update, 2 p.m. Eastern, 3/12/16: Clarified Michael Balter’s status as a freelance reporter in first item.
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The link to Michael Balter’s blog doesn’t work – says “Sorry, the page you were looking for in this blog does not exist.” This link works: http://michael-balter.blogspot.nl/2016/03/why-did-sciencemagazine-terminate-me.html
Fixed, thanks.
I wish RW would stop giving so much attention to Jeffrey Beall and repeating his “predatory journals” mantra. Yes, there are bogus “journals” out there, and there may be value in calling them out. But Beall perversely turns this into an argument for closed access.
See all those “subscription required” notes in the “Weekend Reads”? Beall wants more of them. See all those nice links to items in open-access journals that anybody can read? Beall wants them to go away.
I know that RW is just linking to things that are out there, without necessarily endorsing them. But there are many more things out there than it is feasible to link to. RW inevitably makes choices about which ones to promote, and it this is an unfortunate choice.
When someone else stands up against predatory journals in the same way as Beall, maybe we will be able to do without him. At the moment he’s the only one.
Stands up against them? You make it sound like this is some sort of courageous act.
A lot of these “journals” are crap. There is value in having a list of them, but you and I can recognize them when we see them, can’t we?
There’s lots of science-related crap on blogs. And it might be helpful for somebody to make a list of “junk science blogs”. But if they tried to turn that into some kind of “argument” against science-related blogs in general (such as RW), making them out to be the biggest existing threat to science, that would be ridiculous. Beall has done something analogous, and we should not aid him.
Larry you speak as a veteran scientist who can recognize “crap” journal tittle. However many scientists who is working in Asia (China, India…) don’t recognize such fraudulent titles. They are more than happy to have their work published in those journals and spread the practice around. That’s how these publishing “predators” thrive. It’s always good to have an updated list and keep it in the spot light to increase the chance of people knowing of it.
Your argument is like you know the this is a scam and others probably know it is a scam so just ignore it, but there are a lot of gullible people out there.
I find it rather unfortunate that because you personally disagree with Beall’s stance regarding open-access that you would both admonish those who chose to link to his site and expect them to censor their content.
I too see value in the idea of open access and thus diverge from Beall’s overall stance. However, he is drawing attention to fraudulent publishing practices and highlighting the actions taken by those attempting to deceive and swindle researchers. He is the one of the few that is allocating the time to do so on a regular basis.
The scholarly journal to science blog comparison is not an equivalent one. We expect that there is some type of screening process (though not always foolproof) that will separate the science from the junk. While many people realise that you cannot always trust what is written in a random internet blog, they may hold the misconception that what’s published in a prestigious sounding journal must be accurate (even if researchers know this to be false). It’s held to a different standard. Further, an OA journal relies on APCs. The $ for these APCs frequently derives from organisations funded by governments and citizens. The resulting articles can be used in future research/promotion/grant proposals worldwide. Substandard science, journals, and con artists harm a significant number of people, even if indirectly.
@KK- “I receive plenty of invitations and announcements to publish in those journals – this means they still are thriving.”
How does having an efficient spamming system in place possibly define how well a journal is thriving? I suspect you’re missing a few criteria there.
The issue is not that I “personally disagree with Beall’s stance regarding open-access”. It is that these Beall posts are an integral part of his nonsensical anti-OA campaign. He eagerly catalogs bad or questionable things that happen in OA journals, while blissfully ignoring the more serious and harmful things that happen in closed-access publishing. He attributes everything bad in any OA journal to OA itself, and tries to turn the existence of obviously fake journals into some kind of argument that high-quality OA journals are evil. So, the objection is to linking to a well-disguised component of propaganda.
It is not censorship to omit a link from a list of suggested reads. In fact, we could come up with hundreds of candidate items for the list but only about a dozen made it. RW already makes choices about what to include and what not to, as I pointed out in my original remark, and it is legitimate to question those choices.
Color me confused. One study negates hundreds? Especially when the creator of the theory questions the methods used in that one study?
Science needs to give specific reason for firing its reporter. I read Balter’s blog and could not get answer for this.
An interesting alternative perspective on diversity
http://quillette.com/2016/03/10/the-great-diversity-scam/
This article doesn’t respond directly to anything said in the NYT article linked today. I’d need to see a challenge to allegations like that before I could really evaluate this. (It also reminds me way too much of the vocabulary and writing style used in global warming denial articles, but I suppose that’s a more subjective critique.)
Larry sorry BUT Beall’s blacklist can not be challenged!
What is important is to challenge Beall’s blog or list of predatory journals/publisher rather critiquing his preference in term of open access/subscription journals.
For instance, can you please give to RW readers your disagreement on this blog post: Advocates are increasingly using predatory journals to make their cases
Re Helene Hill:
“This analysis emphasizes the importance of access to raw data ”
What about those who may fabricate or manipulate raw data?
I concur with Larry that the list and his comments on some journals are really disturbing. Moreover, his advice to people who ask him about a particular journal – “don’t publish there”. I receive plenty of invitations and announcements to publish in those journals – this means they still are thriving.
The retracted paper in PLOS ONE mentioning “the Creator” lists “Renzhi Han, Ohio State University Medical Center, UNITED STATES” as Academic Editor. I am at the moment unable to locate this name at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/static/editorial-board