Weekend reads: Lying academics; journals to blame for bad behavior; why bad science is funded

The week at Retraction Watch featured a first in transparency from Canada, and the second retraction for a fan of a conspiracy theory. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• How do we stop the liars of academia? Robin Harris has a few ideas. (ZDNet)
• Journal demands for “impossible results” are fueling questionable research practices, says a new paper. (Ellie Bothwell, Times Higher Education)
• We need to talk about the bad science being funded, says Simon Gandevia. (The Conversation)
• Thousands of studies are using contaminated or misidentified cell lines for their research, and journals are doing nothing to alert readers. The latest from our co-founders in STAT.
• “If my calculations are correct, this is an increase of infinity per cent of federal funding dedicated to replication studies.” A Dutch agency will provide 3 million Euros for replications. (Monya Baker, Nature)
• A German social psychologist will not receive tenure as originally planned after being suspected of data manipulation, the latest incident in an unraveling career. (Frank van Kolfschooten, Science)
• A senior scientist loses his job after cooking data. (Shimona Kanwar, The Times of India). He and his team are no strangers to retractions, as we’ve reported extensively.
• “It just shouldn’t have happened.” Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention seems to have ignored the most standard safeguards, like the free software that checks for plagiarism. (Maggie Haberman and Michael Barbaro, New York Times)
• The proceedings of the 4^th World Conference on Research Integrity have been published, in Research Integrity and Peer Review.
• A challenger to the gene editing technology CRISPR may have reproducibility problems, Paul Knoepfler reports. (The Niche)
• In China, among scientists who train elsewhere, “Returnees with domestic degrees, instead of those with foreign degrees, are actually the driving force of China’s research output growth.” (Tian Fangmeng, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, sub req’d)
• In the UK, “only 0.1% of all professors are Black females.” (Deborah Gabriel, “Race, Racism and Resistance in British Academia,“ sub req’d)
• “[S]cholars remain highly productive across the life-span of the career (i.e., 40 years), and…productivity increases steeply until promotion to associate professor and then remains stable,” according to a new preprint by Cassidy Sugimoto and colleagues.
• Institutional review boards (IRBs) “need to recognize the problem of reproducibility and take what steps they can to ensure that the studies individuals are recruited to participate in are designed and carried out on the basis of valid prior scientific findings,” say Arthur Caplan and Barbara Redman. (IRB: Ethics & Human Research)
• The CIHR gong show: David Kent reflects on recent turmoil at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research over a new peer review system, now abandoned. (University Affairs)
• Google Scholar has released its 2016 edition of Scholar Metrics. Find out how their rankings compare to others.
• Kent Anderson is concerned about Wellcome’s new publishing initiative. (The Scholarly Kitchen)
• Here’s “why most academics will always be bad writers,” from Noah Berlatsky. (Chronicle of Higher Education)
• In pediatric forensics, peer review results “in a significantly higher quality of medico-legal reports,” says a new study by Uditha Kariyawasama. (Forensic and Legal Medicine, sub req’d)
• A woman in Lexington, Kentucky has been ordered to pay $4.5 million for fraud in National Institutes of Health Small Business Innovation Research grants. (Department of Justice press release)
• What should be next for reproducibility in computational biology? ask Joanna Lewis and colleagues. (BMC Systems Biology)
• Eric Reeves, an expert on the Sudan, has retracted his prediction of a coup in that country.
• Among students, “increasing the severity of the punishment for cheating does not deter academic misconduct; however, several variables indicating an increased certainty of being caught did decrease the likelihood of cheating behaviors.” (Journal of Criminal Justice Education, sub req’d)
• “Does expertise matter in replication?” asks a new study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. (sub req’d)
• “In the last two years, more than a half dozen [National Collegiate Athletic Association] institutions have committed academic misconduct [involving student athletes], and the association says it is investigating another 20 for similar violations.” (Jake New, Inside Higher Ed)
• Graduate students are treated like secretaries in Chinese labs, reports Guo Quanzhi. (Sixth Tone)
• What happened when Margaret Ray submitted high school students’ essays to some likely predatory journals? (Jeffrey Beall, Scholarly Open Access)
• A law student claims that she earns 15,000 pounds per year writing papers for other students. (Aftab Ali, The Independent)
• When it comes to National Institutes of Health R01 grants, “fewer younger investigators are applying for these grants while the number of older investigators submitting proposals is higher than ever before.” (Rebecca Trager, Chemistry World)
• A recent paper on how citation distributions can skew the Impact Factor has generated a lot of discussion on The Scholarly Kitchen.
• “Dodgy data” underpins the sustainable catch limits on an endangered species of shark, according to an independent review. (Michael Slezak, The Guardian)
• Criminal charges were dismissed against one of Italy’s most well-known scientists after she was accused of deliberately setting off avian influenza outbreaks. (Luca Tancredi Barone, Science)
• “Overall these findings open the question of whether the amount of effort expended in peer review is justified.” (Danny Kingsley, Apollo discussion paper)
• The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is scrutinizing Elsevier’s recent acquisition of the Social Science Research Network. (Richard Poynder, Open and Shut?)
• A group of Zika researchers are being hailed for the openness and transparency of their data. (Donald McNeil, Jr., New York Times) But in STAT, our co-founders argued in February that this should be the rule, not the exception.
• The reproducibility crisis, retractions, and hypotheses altered after the data come in all tarnish the accuracy of the research record. Open research can help, says Danny Kingsley. (Unlocking Research)
• What happens when a whistleblower interviews for a position in the same department of an astronomical icon she helped topple for sexual harassment? (Sarah Scoles, Wired)
• What do you do when your academic career moves you across oceans five times? Dominik Fleitmann gives his survival tips. (Emily Sohn, Nature)

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