Weekend reads: Idiotic reviews; wrong metrics in China; questions about preprints

The week at Retraction Watch featured the corrections of papers claiming that conservative beliefs were linked to psychotic traits, and a new member of our leaderboard, from philosophy. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Here’s how to handle an idiotic review, from Stephen Heard.
• “Fraud, bureaucracy and an obsession with quantity over quality still hold Chinese science back,” writes The Economist.
• Emilie Marcus, the editor of Cell, has a lot of questions about preprints. Lenny Teytelman responds.
• It’s time for science to evolve its way out of bad patterns, argue our co-founders in STAT.
• “Yesterday I made the decision to formally withdraw a chapter from an edited volume about themes for teaching Introductory Psychology,” writes Rajiv Jhangiani. Find out why.
• Researchers have made a breakthrough in public relations, promoting a study before it appears, says Andrew Gelman.
• “Notable cases of misconduct in oncology,” from Ajai Raj, Clinical Oncology News.
• How well do scientific collaborations work? It depends, according to a new paper in Scientometrics. (sub req’d)
• Columbia University broke the embargo on research by some of its scientists, prompting PNAS to lift the embargo early.
• An analysis shows that “there are precious few women heading scholarly publishing organizations or their Boards,” writes Alice Meadows. (Scholarly Kitchen)
• “Is Science Built on the Shoulders of Women?” A new study in Academic Medicine examines gender differences in contributorship.
• What university title and salary would you like? You can have virtually any, thanks to this site.
• An Army buddy’s call for help sent a biophysicist on a quest to understand brain injury, Jon Hamilton of NPR reports.
• “A university investigation into an academic, demoted after publishing research into racism on Brisbane buses, was so “infected by error” as to be useless, a workplace tribunal found.” (Jorge Branco, Brisbane Times)
• “How should we treat science’s growing pains?” asks Jerome Ravitz. (The Guardian)
• A graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder wants the university “to adopt a campus-wide transparent research policy requiring academics to publish data and information about their experiments.” (Sarah Kuta, The Daily Camera)
• Ranjit Chandra, found guilty of committing misconduct, failed to appeal the loss of a libel suit he brought against the CBC in time. (Glenn Payette, CBC)
• NIH decides to determine if there is a racial bias in its grantsmaking process. (Jeffrey Mervis, Science)
• A piece in Cancer Cytopathology highlights the growing trend of predatory journals. (Bryn Nelson)
• “How one California university faked students’ scores, skated by immigration authorities — and made a fortune in the process.” Molly Hensley-Clancy has the story for BuzzFeed.
• “This is not a simple story of author financial conflicts of interest, but rather a complex tale of ghost management of the entire process of bringing a drug to market.” A recent paper in Accountability in Research: Policies and Quality Assurance.
• “Who wrote that op-ed?” asks Paul Farhi of The Washington Post. “The New York Times isn’t sure.”
• What role do patents play in the reproducibility crisis? Jacob Sherkow takes a look in an SSRN preprint.
• A University of Missouri employee embezzled more than $740,000 over 15 years from a research center, Rudi Keller of the Columbia Tribune reports.
• “In all disciplines, first and last authors typically contribute to more tasks than middle authors,” reports a new preprint.
• Elsevier has acquired Hivebench, a lab notebook tool. (Harald Boersma, Elsevier Connect)
• Why are so many researchers moving to Qatar? Sarah Huggett and Lucy Goodchild van Hilten try to find out. (Elsevier Connect)
• “How did something as truly awful as panel discussions become the default format?” asks Duncan Green. (The LSE Impact Blog)
• Jill O’Neill wonders why we’re not talking about what the scholarly record is becoming. (Scholarly Kitchen)
• Want to be an entrepreneur on the side? Adriene Koh has some suggestions. (The Professor Is In)
• “How long does it take to do a PhD?” asks The Thesis Whisperer.
• “Gene editing can drive science to openness,” says Kevin Esvelt. (Nature)
• On television, “researchers use personal accounts as a way of reframing news stories introduced by the program hosts,” says Rony Armon. (Public Understanding of Science, sub req’d, now free to access)
• Google has launched Science Journal, which is not a science journal. (Napier Lopez, The Next Web)