The week at Retraction Watch featured the resignation of a researcher found to have fudged data in a study of Crossfit, and allegations of bullying by a scientist who wouldn’t let a trainee publish a paper. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “The weirdest thing about science’s citation problem is that technology has done so little to arrest it.” Dan Engber looks at the fallout from a short blurb on opioid addiction. (Slate)
- “Scientist screwed up? Send ’em to rehab.” Mallory Pickett profiles a program for researchers who’ve strayed. (WIRED)
- “The title alone of the scientific paper could have suggested one of two things — either the author deserved a Nobel prize in science, or something very odd was going on.” The tale of a strange new journal, by Graham Readfearn. (DeSmog Blog)
- “Researchers tend to prefer their own publications to those by others.” A new study looks at whether citation counts correlate with expert opinion on impact. (Journal of Informetrics; sub req’d)
- “Empty rhetoric over data sharing slows science,” says Nature.
- This week, BMC Psychology “published the first article to undergo the full results-free review process.” (Anna Clark) Background on this initiative here.
- Open peer review: The Wellcome Trust’s Robert Kiley explains Wellcome Open Research’s model.
- A journal cleans up its image archives. (Kerry Grens, The Scientist)
- In philosophy journals, “the percentage of female authors was extremely low, in the range of 14–16%.” (Philosophical Studies, sub req’d)
- Who’s downloading what from Sci-Hub? Bastian Greshake “found that articles are being downloaded from all over the world, more recently published papers are among the most requested, and there is a marked overrepresentation of requested articles from journals publishing on chemistry.” (LSE Impact Blog)
- “Finance academics have started to take replication studies seriously.” (The Replication Network)
- What happened when faculty were offered a new responsible conduct of research workshop? (Michael Kalichman, Dena Plemmons, Science and Engineering Ethics, sub req’d)
- Why have psychology journals slowed their publication of book reviews? (James Hartley, Yuh-Shan Ho, Scientometrics, sub req’d)
- “I think predatory publishers pose the biggest threat to science since the Inquisition.” A paper by Jeffrey Beall. (Biochemia Medica) (Read this Twitter thread for some criticism of this paper, and of us for sharing it.)
- “Can editors protect peer review from bad reviewers?” ask the authors of a new preprint.
- “How Rampant is Fabrication in Medical Literature?” asks Perry Wilson, with an in-depth critique of John Carlisle’s latest analysis of potential statistical anomalies in clinical trials. (MedPage Today)
- The goals of academia and of publishers are in direct competition with one another, says Corina Logan. (F1000 Blog)
- A biologist who was spared jail time in Colombia for sharing a thesis online will face an appeal. (Karisma.org) Read the background here.
- Three years into a study on premature infants, the researchers discovered the study relied on faulty oxygen meters. Even so, they continued the study. (Dan Vergano, Buzzfeed)
- “Articles with statistically significant results were cited 1.6 times more often than articles with non-significant results,” according to a new paper. (Journal of Clinical Epidemiology)
- “When the label “white male” is attached to a research grant application, do peer reviewers give it a better score?” (Jeffrey Mervis, Science)
- A chemist fighting to keep her PhD from the University of Texas, Austin, won an appeal that will allow her case to move forward. In a decision dated earlier this week, the case will be kicked back to a lower court.
- The World Health Organization’s cancer agency declared that a key ingredient in Monsanto’s RoundUp pesticide was probably cancerous, but they didn’t have access to data that suggested it isn’t because it was unpublished. (Kate Kelland, Reuters) And it’s not clear why the scientist who collected the data didn’t publish. (Kiera Butler, Mother Jones)
- An ex-professor claims he was fired by University of Missouri-Kansas City in retaliation for exposing that the university had boosted its business school’s ranking. (Mike Hendricks, Kansas City Star)
- PLOS ONE’s key approach to promoting reproducible research is emphasizing stringent reporting guidelines. (Jenna Wilson, PLOS Blog)
- Papr is an app inspired by Tinder, but instead of swiping on people, you can swipe to rate preprints. (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Science)
- A cancer researcher who has spent much of the last three years in court wins against a case against her former employer, who spun off her lab and liquidated it, incinerating her samples in the process. (Priyanka Dayal McCluskey, Boston Globe)
- More than 11,000 preprints have already been shared on bioRxiv,prompting researchers to question how to license them. (Lindsay McKenzie, Nature)
- “Before dispensing with peer review in favour of open science, responsible scientists need to do everything they can to improve this centuries-old system.” (Flaminio Squazzoni, Francisco Grimaldo & Ana Marušić, Nature)
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