The week at Retraction Watch featured doubts about the effects of oxytocin, aka the “love hormone,” and a report on how common reference errors are. Here’s what was happening elsewhere, with apologies for the later-than-usual posting:
- A major success story drug for the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences may have downplayed problems in its early development as a journal prepares a correction on a related paper. (Meredith Wadman, Science)
- Do we need the Nobel Prizes? The latest from our co-founders in STAT. Maybe we just need to update them, says Gabriel Popkin. (New York Times)
- “My own PhD supervisor has tried a number of methods over the past two years to convince me to revisit my doctorate and write papers for publication.” Is it fair to pressure PhD graduates to publish their theses? (Academics Anonymous, The Guardian)
- What’s causing the reproducibility crisis? Geoff Cumming blames p-hacking. (The Conversation)
- PLOS Genetics has appointed a preprints editor, Casey Brown. Such editors “will identify preprints of broad interest to the PLOS Genetics community, based on our own expertise, commenting, and social media activity,” says Brown. “These manuscripts will be brought to the attention of the editorial board at PGEN. If the manuscript is deemed of sufficient interest to the readership of PGEN, we will invite the authors to submit after which the article will enter the standard peer review process.”
- “We’ve found we still have a lot to learn about what it takes for research, even when done to high standards of reproducibility, to be replicated.” (Lorena A. Barba, Science)
- For many papers, accusations of fraud aren’t even necessary because the papers themselves are just manipulations of statistical noise, says Andrew Gelman.
- 14% of scientists have direct knowledge of cases of fraud. A paper argues that it’s time to address the elephant in the lab: scientific misconduct. (Trends in Ecology & Evolution)
- STATCHECK, an algorithm intended to find inconsistencies between a paper’s statistics and its p-values can throw up false positives and negatives, says a new preprint by Thomas Schmidt in arXiv. And see our guest post by STATCHECK’s co-developer here.
- Should advocacy research be held to the same standards of review as clinical trials? Peter B. Bach argues yes. (Journal of Clinical Oncology)
- Meet papr — an app that allows to you rate academic preprints at random. (Jeff Leek, Simply Statistics blog)
- “From the outside, it seems that [Karolinska] officials were tempted by the prospect that Macchiarini would revolutionize regenerative medicine and thus bring great prestige and worldwide acclaim.” Corporate culture has no place in academia, argues Olof Hallonsten. (Nature)
- Responses to Susan Fiske’s assertion that online post-publication review results in mob rule continue: There is no “tone” problem in psychology, argues Tal Yarkoni, and on the Simply Statistics blog, Jeff Leek calls for an end to statistical vitriol.
- PubPeer’s anonymous commenters have taken the peer review process into their own hands. (Stephen Buranyi, Motherboard). In an attempt to protect users from legal threats, “PubPeer Has (Probably) Stopped Collecting Anonymous Commenters’ IP Addresses,” reports Bob Grant at The Scientist.
- “Science and science publication used to be about the search for truth. We seem to have moved beyond that now.” Fake journals are aiding cheating scientists. (Tom Spears, Ottawa Sun)
- South Africa’s Medicines Control Council suspended a series of apparently illegal stem cell experiments at a state hospital following inquiries. (Anso Thom and Marcus Low, Spotlight)
- The “practice of data sharing is still a work in progress,” say the editors of Nature Physics, discussing a new initiative at the journal.
- Bad research hurts us all, Ben Goldacre tells Darren Saunders. (The Conversation)
- Michael Eisen explores “the relationship between gender and author order and composition in NIH-funded research.”
- “[M]edical academies can improve public health – and public trust – in biomedical research by working to assure that research results can be reproduced,” says the Interacademy Partnership for Health.
- What’s the best way to talk about conflicts of interest in research? asks Tamar Wilner. (Skeptical Inquirer)
- “Nutrition Research Integrity: To Believe or Not to Believe? That Is the Question!” says Esther Myers. (Nutrition Today, sub req’d)
- Members of the U.S. Congress want to know why the NIH is funding the International Agency on Cancer Research, known for its work on the risks of cell phones and bacon. (Kate Kelland, Reuters)
- Replication, the cartoon, by Maki Naro. (The Nib)
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In response to Bob Grant’s piece on PubPeer, why was PubPeer collecting IP addresses in the first place?
It is the default behaviour of web servers.
If it is a default, then please explain the following: “the platform’s administrators have attempted to cease IP address collection.” In other words, why was this effort not made earlier, and can the default be (easily) overridden? Bort, could you explain some technical details of this transition from “default” to overriding the default.
I am not a web administrator.
However, every single web server that you access logs your IP address when you access it. There are only a very small number (e.g., DuckDuckGo) who have gone through the efforts of completely disabling all IP address logging. Even 4chan, which is a major hub of internet anonymity (i.e., where the group Anonymous was born), logs IP addresses.
This is default web server behaviour, and disabling it requires technical know-how.
Oh great…
“These manuscripts will be brought to the attention of the editorial board at [PLOS Genetics]. If the manuscript is deemed of sufficient interest to the readership of PGEN, we will invite the authors to submit after which the article will enter the standard peer review process.”
What they’re saying is that authors will be offered the opportunity to pay PLOS’s outlandish open-access fees, even though the paper is already an open-access preprint.
I hope authors don’t fall for this.
Indeed. Plus, at least in my field, it is common practice to submit the paper to a journal at the same time the preprint is deposited on the arXiv. So do they really expect I will unsubmit the paper because of the stellar opportunity offer by PLOS?
That link points to the oxytocin item again.
Fixed, thanks.
For certain values of “fixed.” 😉 This one, I think, was intended.
Correct! Fixed, hopefully properly this time. Thanks again.
The Motherboard article on PubPeer appears to be a classic hit piece. This is evident from the very title, where the author slaps the “vigilante” label on PubPeer to make it sound bad. He then makes immediate comparisons to 4chan (the most reviled Internet forum in existence) in the first line, and proceeds to talk about “forcing journals to issue corrections”, as if PubPeer was some kind of mafia with infinite sway on editors and publishers. The rest is a pretty weak defense of a well-known character from the pages of RW without ever really addressing the flawed and dubious science being criticised.
The names of the seven authors of the recent letter in TREE (“Scientific Misconduct: The Elephant in the Lab. A Response to Parker et al.”, DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2016.09.006 ) are similar to the names of the seven persons in a complaint which was filed on 20 June 2016 to Uppsala University. See http://retractionwatch.com/2016/09/20/inquiry-finds-no-evidence-of-misconduct-in-high-profile-science-paper-flagged-by-allegations/
See http://retractionwatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/UFV-2016-1074_Report-from-preliminary-investigation_ENG-translation.pdf for a direct link to a document with the names of these seven authors.