Weekend reads: More Impact Factor scrutiny; $10 million fine for overbilling; protected Canadian fraudsters

The week at Retraction Watch featured the loss of a Harvard researcher’s PhD for misconduct, and the harrowing tale of a whistleblower. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

The Impact Factor will soon belong to private equity and money management firms, as Thomson Reuters announces it will sell its Intellectual Property & Science business for $3.55 billion. That was one of a number of items on Impact Factor this week:

• Now is the time to re-evaluate how — and whether — the Impact Factor is used, our co-founders argue in STAT.
• “Let’s move beyond too simplistic notions of ‘misuse’ and ‘unintended effects’ in debates” on the Impact Factor, says Sarah de Rijcke.
• How to move past journal Impact Factors. (Laurie Goodman, BMC Blog Network)
• Just how effective are researchers’ strategies for publishing in high-Impact Factor journals? A new arXiv preprint takes a look.
• “From their point of view, it does not matter whether the article is ever read by a scientist, only that its citations will be harvested by bots.” There’s a new class of cheaters in academic publishing, driven by the desire for impact. (Mario Biagioli, Nature)
• Where they published, not what, will determine whether or not a group of historians keep their jobs. (Chris Havergal, Times Higher Education)

And there was plenty of other material:

• Columbia University has been fined $10 million for overbilling the NIH. (Sheila Kaplan, STAT)
• “If you were going to be a fraudulent scientist or plagiarist, or you want to steal grant money, Canada is an excellent place to live.” As is true in many countries, Canadian privacy laws keep the names and misdeeds of fraudulent researchers secret. (Michael Robinson, The Star)
• Findings from an experimental setup to study competition called the Art Exhibition Game “could explain why many ground-breaking studies in science end up in lower-tier journals,” write the authors of a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
• “Academics have shunned books and monographs in favour of journal articles over the past two decades,” Times Higher Education reports, based on a new analysis. (David Matthews)
• Andrew Gelman tried his first preregistered replication, and it was a lot of work.
• A statistics journal has introduced a new position: Associate Editor For Reproducibility. (AMSTAT News)
• When Fiona Godlee lost out on the editorship of The Lancet in 1995 to Richard Horton, she thought “life was over. But one kind mentor told me I would live to be grateful, and she was right.” (The BMJ)
• Why did it take social science years to correct a simple error about psychoticism? Jesse Singal dives into a story we covered last month.
• Is the “bad apple” narrative of scientific fraud more correct, or the “bad orchard?” asks Roy Poses. (Health Care Renewal)
• There’s a new preprint server in town, SocArXiv, for the social sciences. (Philip N. Cohen)
• How to improve reproducibility in neuroimaging research, from Krzysztof J. Gorgolewski and Russell A. Poldrack. (PLOS Biology)
• A finding on how to date rocks “will worry climate scientists,” says The Economist in the second of two stories looking at studies questioning previous results.
• Chris Pascal, the former director of the U.S. Office of Research Integrity who recently passed away, remembered by John Dahlberg in the ORI Newsletter. Elsewhere in the newsletter, staff share stories of Dahlberg, who recently retired from the agency.
• What are the seven biggest problems facing science? Vox spoke to 270 scientists to find out.
• Canada has reversed a move to online peer review, following an outcry by the nation’s scientists. (Wayne Kondro, Science)
• A lot of scientists would like to peer review, but have never been asked, says a new Taylor & Francis survey that also looked at how researchers feel about being paid to review.
• Is there a scientific method, or isn’t there? Derek Lowe examines a recent piece that claimed there wasn’t one. (In The Pipeline)
• “We have a problem with academic conference registration fees,” says Craig Lundy. (The Research Whisperer)
• “In journals, it’s all about the wedding, never about the marriage,” says Andrew Gelman.
• So many scientists, so few faculty positions: Gina Kolata takes a look. (New York Times)
• “Peer review should be thought of as an intermediate stage in the review of a paper,” says Bob Reed. (The Replication Network)
• “I predict that article-level innovations will continue to unite and disrupt the publishing landscape,” writes Stephanie Dawson. (Research Information)
• “Repeated measurements of a few subjects, or even just one individual, can be more informative than casting the net widely.” A new paper argues that less is more when it comes to psychology studies. (Neuroskeptic, Discover)
• Celebrity culture is increasingly defining the scientific discourse. What role should scientific celebrities be playing? (Timothy Caulfield and Declan Fahy, Slate)
• Can UK academics pronounce Eastern European names? Marta Wróblewska finds out the hard way. (PhD Life)
• 5 ways supervisors can promote research integrity: Tips straight from the Office of Research Integrity.
• A law student buys an essay from a paper mill — and is now so appalled, she wants advice on how to get her money back. Good luck with that. (Rebecca Smithers, The Guardian)
• Conflicting papers have led to a very public stem cell skirmish, and one of the researchers is someone we’ve covered repeatedly. (Paul Knoepfler, The Niche)
• Research shows that it’s not gender that determines who gets NIH grants — it’s race, according to a new study. (University of Kanas press release)
• How well does U.S. President Barack Obama take to editing? JAMA editor in chief Howard Bauchner reveals all. (Arielle Martinez, Chronicle of Higher Education)

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