Weekend reads: Why so much research is dodgy; why scientists should shun journals; ethical grey zones

The week at Retraction Watch featured a cancer researcher retracting 19 studies at once from a single journal, and the story of how a 7-year-old came to publish a paper. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Why is so much research dodgy? Alex Jones and Andrew Kemp blame the UK’s Research Excellence Framework. (The Guardian)
• “Here is what we should do: stop submitting papers to journals.” We need to slow down the submission process, says Timothée Poisot. (The Scientist)
• “Far more prevalent […] are research practices that fall into an ethical ‘grey zone’ between overt misconduct and scholarly best practice.” These questionable research practices are being used by more and more scientists. (Nick Butler, Helen Delaney & Sverre Spoelstra, Times Higher Education)
• Autocomplete, auto-accept: Another sting results in an accepted paper, this one written by iOS autocomplete. (Elle Hunt, The Guardian)
• A popular Twitter feed ridicules studies. It’s another reminder that you can forget about getting politics out of science, say our co-founders in STAT.
• Lawyers representing PubPeer in a lawsuit by Fazlul Sarkar against some of the site’s commenters argue that a university investigation uncovering misconduct in Sarkar’s lab should be recognized in court. (Bob Grant, The Scientist)
• A company claims its algorithm can identify papers likely to be highly cited better than editors, but Phil Davis is wary. (The Scholarly Kitchen)
• “Unpublished trials are a cancer at the core of evidence based medicine,” says Ben Goldacre. (Aftenposten)
• “Patients and clinicians have been waiting a long time for clinical trial data.” And they should be getting it, thanks to the European Medicines Agency’s push to publish it. (Alison Abbott, Nature)
• “We are grateful to Sean for catching our error and bringing it to our attention!” If only all critiques were handled this way. (Daniel Klein, Econ Journal Watch)
• I have to admit that I have advised editors to lean toward rejection over required revisions for a number of reasons.” Should you “revise and resubmit?” asks Angela Cochran. (The Scholarly Kitchen)
• “Under-cited influential publications” are “like ‘wake-up switches’ for significant follow-up research,” argue Xiaojun Hu and Ronald Rousseau. (Journal of Informetrics, sub req’d)
• “Controlling for field and impact factor, the odds that an open access journal is referenced on the English Wikipedia are 47% higher compared to paywall journals.” (Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology)
• In one sample, 23% of those scientists who pledged during a recent boycott not to publish in Elsevier journals did so. (Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics)
• “The metrics we use in academia are perverse to the behaviours we want to incentivise,” according to researcher Jennifer Martin. (Liam Walsh, The Courier-Mail, sub req’d)
• “The costs of open access papers should not be the responsibility of individual researchers,” argues Jonas Ludvigsson. (Acta Paediatrica)
• The U.S. Office of Research Integrity has given out ten research grants, including projects on identifying data fabrication and image manipulation. (release)
• Jeffrey Beall recommends “against using PubMed as a list of quality journals for the purposes of finding a journal to publish in, evaluating academic performance, awarding grants and degrees, and assessing job candidates.” Here’s why.
• Here’s how to increase your chances of publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. (Hugh McLaughlin, LSE Impact Blog)
• “The growth of social media, increasing portability of information, and the expanding body of quality [open access] literature forces the inevitability of open science,” write Christopher Bayne and Michael Hsieh. (European Urology)
• What are the dirty little secrets of scholarly publishing? (Ann Michael, The Scholarly Kitchen)
• “I think that people don’t realize what they’re about to lose. They’re about to lose a high-quality library.” The University of Ottawa moves to cut subscriptions to thousands of journals. (Stu Mills, CBC News)
• “I’m sick and tired of spending time trying to make sense of meta-analyses of psychological interventions that should have been dismissed out of hand.” Psychology’s reproducibility problem  stems, in part, from its meta-analysis problem, argues James Coyne. (PLOS Blogs)
• “We have too often been reluctant to voice our protest, for fear of incurring the institute’s displeasure (and losing whatever opportunities we still have for funding).” Neuroscience is getting too much funding, at the expense of clinical research, says John C. Markowitz. (New York Times)
• Online databases pose a new sort of problem when it comes to citing them appropriately. (Peter Buneman, Susan Davidson & James Frew, Communications of the ACM)
• “I believe results reporting has received too little attention given its enormous importance for evaluating the significance and effect of research results.” (James Piccirillo, JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery)
• What was it like to get a PhD in the 1840s? asks Melinda Baldwin.
• The Swedish documentary about Paolo Macchiarini that made many people take a second look at his work will be aired on the BBC this week.
• “Even high-powered replications, by themselves, will not help to assess the robustness of the psychological literature, because the original studies are so imprecise that one cannot call them into question with a new set of results.” (Richard D. Morey and Daniël Lakens, Medium)
• Dissernet, a Russian group exposing dissertation fraud, focuses on Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinksy’s history dissertation. (phys.org)
• With Nature’s Scientific Reports overtaking PLOS ONE as the largest open-access mega-journal, Stephen Pinfield asks, are these journals the future or a dead end? (Times Higher Education)
• “How many IRB members does it take to screw in a light bulb?” (Anonymous)
• A new paper examines the effect of having a a journal editor as one of your reviewers. (Disclosure: Two of our staff were reviewers on this article in F1000Research)
• Peter Gölitz argues more preprints results in less substantive papers in greater numbers. (Angewandte Chemie)

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