Weekend reads: How to prove (and find) false claims; confessions of a wasteful scientist

This week at Retraction Watch featured what may be a record for plagiarism, a paper retracted because the device researchers claimed to use hadn’t arrive in the institution yet, and a technical glitch, which meant you may have missed some of our posts. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Brilliant: “How to prove that your therapy is effective, even when it is not: A guideline,” in Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences. (sub req’d) More from SkeptVet.
• “Confessions of a wasteful scientist,” from David L. Hu. (Scientific American)
• “How to find out if scientists are screwing with you:” Joshua Krisch reports in Vocativ about a new preprint.
• On Vox’s The Weeds podcast, Sarah Kliff and Matthew Yglesias discuss the citation controversy over an economics paper we covered last week.
• “What does scientific reproducibility mean, anyway?” ask our co-founders in STAT.
• Economics lacks a clear agreed definition of replication, too, says Michael Clemens in a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Economic Surveys.
• “Why aren’t there more women in science?” asks Jenny Gristock in The Guardian. “The industry structure is sexist.”
• Peter Gotzsche and others are not happy with the way the European Medicines Agency has handled concerns over the safety of the HPV vaccine.
• “Only the day before the paper I reviewed was declined because of a rigged figure,” writes Kevin Folta. “Now a paper where I was an author was disgracefully disqualified for the same reason.” (Folta’s name may be familiar to Retraction Watch readers.)
• There’s a looming rift, a battle, and an identity crisis in science journalism, according to various reports. (Undark, Motherboard)
• Two years after the STAP stem cell scandal that enveloped her, Haruko Obokata says she’s received job offers from the U.S. and Germany. (Tomoko Otake, Japan Times)
• The UK government “has no central record of around £2.5bn a year it spends each year on research commissioned to develop public policy,” according to a new report from Sense About Science. (The Independent)
• A new paper sheds heat, not light, on the medical error controversy, says Skeptical Scalpel. (KevinMD/MedPage Today)
• Are Romanian psychiatrists using patients as guinea pigs? (Romanian Insider)
• Journal whitelists have a lot of weaknesses, says Jeffrey Beall.
• SAGE Open, five years on: A look from Dave Ross. (LSE’s The Impact Blog)
• A new index, the I-index, “is defined as an author’s percentage share in the total citations that his/her papers have attracted.” (Shaon Sahoo, Scientometrics, sub req’d)
• Daniel Lakens and colleagues have six practical recommendations to improve the reproducibility of meta-analyses. (BMC Psychology) And when it comes to meta-analyses, “chemical risk assessment is taking a cue from medicine,” write Paul Whaley and Lucy Goodchild van Hilten. (Elsevier Connect)
• A new book by Margaret Whitstock shows “how in the course of time the coordinated actions of industry, government, and the biomedical research community have degraded the basic rules of empirical science to produce a foreseeable and preventable tragedy,” writes John Noble, Jr. (Indian Journal of Medical Ethics)
• GigaScience is partnering with Protocols.io on “a new means of writing all research papers with citable methods that can be updated over time.” (Press release)
• “What causes peer review scams, and how can they be prevented?” asks Sneha Kulkarni. (Learned Publishing)
• eLife received a boost this week, with millions more pounds in funding pledged through 2022.
• Wikipedia is working on “OABOT,” a tool that adds links to free-to-read versions alongside paywalled articles.
• Don’t just look for large altmetric scores, says Andy Tattersall. Look for small ones, too. (LSE’s The Impact Blog)
• “Fraud is now the biggest enemy of science,” argues William Reville. (Irish Times)
• An architect is suing Princeton for damage to his reputation. (Nick Rummell, Courthouse News Service)
• “Aligning statistical and scientific reasoning:” Steven Goodman weighs in on p values and larger issues. (Science, sub req’d)
• How can we prevent the next OkCupid-like data sharing disaster? asks Limor Peer. (LSE’s The Impact Blog)
• “The stigma of failure slows scientific progress,” says Simon Oxenham. (PrimeMind)
• How to end the replication crisis: Ideas from Timothy Bates. (Medium)
• How does bad science end up surviving natural selection? Andrew Gelman riffs on a new preprint.
• How candy makers shape nutrition science. (Candice Choi, AP)
• Has chemistry evaded the reproducibility crisis facing other fields? asks Derek Lowe. (Chemistry World)
• Could publishers “use text mining to automate some aspects of the peer review process to address some of its limitations?” asks Daniel Shanahan. (BMC Blog)
• “Is photoshopping science universally wrong?” asks Kate Patterson. (The Conversation)
• “In addition, the feature failed to make it clear that Jonathan Lynch was joking when he suggested that students should “drop acid”. An amusing correction in Nature.
• Late on a manuscript deadline? Don’t worry, this guy turned in his article after 47 years. (Ricki Rusting, Scientific American)
• A search engine for biomedical preprints, posted – where else? – in bioRxiv.
• “Financial relationships between organizations that produce clinical practice guidelines and biomedical companies are common and infrequently disclosed in guidelines.” A new PLOS Medicine study with sobering results. Hilda Bastian offers her take.
• How to enhance reproducibility: Two proposals from Zoltan Boka. (The Winnower)
• How do academics make career decisions? A new study in Research Policy takes a look. (sub req’d)
• “It should be understood that authorship criteria needs to be met not only by the first author but all coauthors,” write Takako Kojima and J. Patrick Barron. (The Japanese Journal of Gastroenterological Surgery)

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