The week at Retraction Watch featured the launch of an award for doing the right thing, and a hijacked journal getting its name back. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “This is a witch hunt. There has simply been an explosive amount of misinformation circulating online about what is and isn’t in Tuvel’s article.” (Jesse Singal, New York Magazine) The philosophers who tried to get the article retracted, says José Luis Bermúdez, “have done the real damage in this situation.” (Inside Higher Ed)
- Just as with those papers, we tortured something out of one and the same dataset and had a copyeditor repackage the intro so that it looks sort of newish.” Overly honest academic caveats, from Alison Edwards. (Academia Obscura)
- “I wish it had never happened; I wish we had caught that error; we appreciate the fact that they called it out.” A group of researchers correct their paper after others uncover a major statistical flaw. (Jessica Wright, Spectrum)
- “Steady, strong growth is expected for open-access journals,” writes David Kramer. (Physics Today)
- Tim Noakes, a high-profile nutrition researcher, has been found not guilty of professional misconduct for giving breastfeeding advice on Twitter. (The Diabetes Times)
- “Why can writing a paper be such a pain?” asks Jari Saramäki.
- There was something wrong with Bianca Wylie’s baby’s eye. Here’s how open access journals helped her. (Healthcare in America)
- “We do not need new journals for negative results,” says Zen Faulkes. (NeuroDojo blog)
- “The best time to fix the system, we tell ourselves, is after we have gained influence. If a PhD student shouts in frustration, are things going to change, or will she or he just be marginalized as a rabble-rouser?” (John Tregoning, Nature)
- Chinese researchers say now is the time for academic assessment reform after Springer retracted 107 papers for fabricated peer review. (Li Yan, Ecns) See our coverage of the 107 retractions here.
- “Can citations even be the right sort of measure for quality? If that is the big question, the answer must simply be ‘no’.You cannot conflate impact and influence with quality.” (Jan Velterop, SciELO in Perspective)
- “But this rise in coauthorship also exposes a vulnerability inherent to scientific research—that collaborations are fundamentally based on trust.” (Catherine Offord, The Scientist)
- Caught in an ongoing “spat in the literature,” Ben Britton asks,can we do peer review better? (Medium) And Britton outlines the details of the spat on Twitter.
- The scandal currently engulfing the SickKids lab is only the latest problem for the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, as questions are raised about why the hospital kept a researcher on staff who was authoring “poison pen letters.” (Rachel Mendleson, The Star)
- “The results suggest that teachers are inclined to think of plagiarism as part of a learning process rather an issue of morality, which may have consequences for how they understand the role of text matching.” (Journal of Academic Ethics)
- Researcher Alfredo Fusco has been under investigation for five years, has had ten papers retracted, and another ten corrected, but he denies that he manipulated images (Alison Abbott, Nature). See our coverage of Fusco’s retractions here.
- “Reproducible practices are the future for early career researchers,” says Dorothy Bishop.(Bishop Blog)
- Evading authorship on retraction notices obscures more than who wrote a particular notice — it obscures the truth of the retraction process, argues Guangwei Hu. (Publications)
- “If someone offers your name as a peer reviewer, as an editor, I should look into it and make sure it is your email address.” Our co-founder Ivan Oransky on fake peer review. (Echo Huang, Quartz)
- A new paper discusses how the field of cognitive neuroscience has embraced reproducibility and transparency. (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences)
- New initiatives to prevent scientific misconduct overlooked an important cause, according to a Nature editorial: the mental health of the research groups.
- “Transparency is a—or perhaps even the—key element in open scholarship.” That extends to peer review, says Alice Meadows (The Scholarly Kitchen).
- As the U.S. National Institutes of Health announces a new plan to limit grants for individual researchers, proponents say it will help early career researchers, while detractors say it will limit collaboration. (Sara Reardon, Nature)
- Why open research? Erin McKiernan, who pledged to only publish in open-access journals, answers. (Victoria Costello, PLOS Blogs)
- “Given that data is the foundation of evidence-based health and medical research, it is paradoxical that there is only one evidence-based incentive to promote data sharing.” (Research Integrity and Peer Review)
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Here’s an amusing correction for those who follow US politics.
Correction: Republican bloodsuckers who sentenced poor to die didn’t drink Bud Light
http://www.avclub.com/article/correction-republican-bloodsuckers-who-sentenced-p-254871
Tuvel’s article should have been a revise&resubmit at best. The attacks on her critics are basically attempts to stifle anything like real debate about real people, as opposed to empty theorizing with white supremacist heteronormative presumptions.
The Jewish paragraph alone should have gotten it sent back. Ahistorical, uninformed, dehumanizing junk theory.
The editor and the president of the board of Hypatia have come out against the attacks on Tuvel (the first item), including siding against their board of associate editors.
http://www.chronicle.com/article/A-Journal-Article-Provoked-a/240021
A good rule of thumb is that, if you are writing/publishing an academic thesis on marginalized groups, you might get some input from them. I have a number of friends who are black or transgender, and none of them is happy about this article. If they retract it, it should be with a clear statement that they were wrong to publish it in the first place without having it vetted by members of the marginalized groups being discussed.
First, since the peer review was double-blinded, it’s possible that they did get input from a marginalized group, and we just don’t know it.
Second, while that is a good rule of thumb, since members of a marginalized group might be more likely to see certain flaws that wouldn’t be as obvious to those outside the group, ultimately the paper stands or falls on the quality of its arguments. Members of the marginalized groups in question still need to put up solid counterarguments, and shouldn’t be allowed to veto an academic paper simply because they are offended by its conclusions.