Weekend reads: Frustrated scientists; most brutal rejection ever?; public shaming in science

The week at Retraction Watch featured 58 retractions in one fell swoop, and a look at what you should do if you find out a paper you’ve cited has been retracted. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Scientists are frustrated by career issues: That’s the high-level conclusion of a Nature survey and The Scientist’s annual salary survey, both out this week.
• “I guess, however, that it is best to come right out and say that I feel that the best thing the authors could do is collect all copies of this technical report and burn them, before anyone reads them.” From the vault, a researcher shares the most brutal rejection letter he ever received. (via Melinda Baldwin, Twitter)
• “If you don’t wish your work to be discussed, don’t publish it.” Public shaming isn’t science’s real problem, our co-founders argue in STAT.
• Please don’t publish your reviews to make science more transparent, says Stephen Heard. It doesn’t solve a serious problem and it will disincentivize reviewers to review well. (Scientist Sees Squirrel)
• Two papers that appear to include the same image for results involving two different compounds are making the rounds on Twitter. Derek Lowe offers his take. (In The Pipeline)
• A court grants PubPeer’s motion to have the results of a misconduct investigation into the work of Fazlul Sarkar, who is suing some of the site’s commenters, considered. Read more here and here, in The Economist.
• How do “the underlying dynamics of large interdisciplinary teams contribute to the problem” of guest and honorary authorship? (Accountability in Research; sub req’d)
• “We find that the increase of the fraction of papers authored by females is slowest in the most prestigious journals such as Science and Nature.” (arXiv)
• PLOS announced that its CEO is departing for personal and professional reasons. (Twitter)
• How to improve the quantitative predictions in psychological studies: ideas from Eric-Jan Wagenmakers. (Fabian Dablander, JEPS Bulletin)
• “An impressive team of researchers is engaging in an impressive task: Replicate 21 social science experiments published in Nature and Science in 2010-2015.” (Uri Simonsohn, Data Colada)
• “In 400 consecutively submitted manuscripts, 17% of submissions contained unacceptable levels of plagiarized material.“ (BioMed Central)
• Open data is meeting “a defining test,” writes Paul Basken. (Chronicle of Higher Education, sub req’d)
• A new paper shows that despite more women graduating in mathematics, they publish less than their male peers and leave academia more often. (PLOS ONE)
• Now you can see who’s not sharing their trial results thanks to TrialsTracker. (Ed Silverman, STAT; an F1000Research paper with details is here).
• “Sadly, the peer review system now punishes researchers with innovative projects that may be risky, but could be highly successful.” Criticism of Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council. (Gaetan Burgio, The Conversation)
• “In answer to popular demand, then, I have collected here what we could call the ‘Barba-group Reproducibility Syllabus.‘” (Lorena A Barba, Medium)
• “We scientists are random. Every time we publish a paper, we have the same chance of publishing our biggest hit as we do with any other paper.” (Philip Ball, Nature)
• How global is engineering education research, really? (European Journal of Engineering Education, sub req’d)
• The Times of London has apologized to five scientists for falsely claiming that their research was funded by tobacco companies. (Jasper Jackson, The Guardian)
• “Publish or perish thwarts young researchers’ urge to innovate.” (David Nicholas, ResearchResearch)
• “Five days after the release of the sequence data, we had designed and released strain-specific diagnostic primer sequences, and within a week, two dozen reports had been filed on an open-source wiki.” Scientific progress can occur more rapidly with help from social media. (Ben Andrew Henry, The Scientist)
• English is the language of science, and scientists who are non-native English speakers face a disadvantage when it comes to publishing. (Greta Shum and Tamara Pico, Scientific American)
• The Whole Tale project will “deliver an environment that enables researchers to create a complete narrative of the research process including exposure of the data-to-publication lifecycle, and 2) systematically and persistently link research publications to their associated digital scholarly objects such as the data, code, and workflows.” (arXiv)