The week at Retraction Watch featured a story of unintended consequences and a broken relationship, and a retraction for a paper that had just about everything wrong with it. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “Who is the ‘Journal Grand Master?’” An argument for using a journal ranking system based on sports rankings. (Robert Lehmann, Klaus Wohlrabe, Journal of Informetrics, sub req’d)
- “Most important factors associated with high online media attention were the presence of a press release and the journal impact factor,” not robust study design. (Research Integrity and Peer Review)
- Check out a rough draft of the song “Replication Crisis” — a sabbatical side project. (Open Science Framework)
- “The real problem is reproducibility.” Our co-founder Ivan Oransky chats with Perry Wilson, aka Methods Man, MD. (MedPage Today)
- “Many apparent replication failures may thus reflect faulty judgment based on significance thresholds rather than a crisis of unreplicable research.” A new version of a preprint explores the p-value’s role in the replication crisis. (PeerJ Preprints)
- “Can cancer researchers accurately judge whether preclinical reports will reproduce?” Meh, says a new study. (PLOS Biology)
- Who cites themselves the most? (Nick Deschacht, LSE Impact Blog)
- The American Chemical Society files a lawsuit against Sci-Hub, after Elsevier already filed and won a similar lawsuit. (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Chemistry World)
- Headline-grabbing cases of scientific misconduct are few and far between compared to the countless scientists who conduct “sloppy science.” (Anthea Lacchia, Nature Index)
- The Lincoln Law has been around since the U.S. Civil War, and today it’s being used to punish scientific fraud, as in a case brought against Duke University. (Our co-founders, STAT)
- Using initials in published papers devalues women in science and robs them of well-qualified role models, writes Nicola Gaston. (Chemistry World)
- An interview with Lucinda Chambers — former British Vogue fashion director — about the state of the industry is pulled less than a day after it’s published. (Elizabeth Paton, New York Times)
- “Too often we assume that researchers with more grant money, awards, publications and citations must be better than the rest.” (Simine Vazire, Nature)
- “Sadly, too many study sections are sewage, despite how much they may be composed of fine wine.” (The Mole, Journal of Cell Science)
- A new preprint criticizes a recent Nature Methods paper that claimed CRISPR editing could have unintended side effects. (bioRxiv) And it’s not the only criticism; see our coverage here.
- Facing unpredictable results from the legal system, Indian food bloggers have taken to social media to combat rampant plagiarism. (Chanpreet Khurana, Scroll)
- In Romania, a country rocked by corruption, the new prime minister is largely unknown — and lost his PhD for plagiarism in the past. (Palko Karasz, New York Times)
- “Research was conducted with such an eye to the advancement of the research unit or the researchers’ careers that its whole purpose was compromised.” (Academics Anonymous, The Guardian)
- A magazine piece about a student offered a full ride to Harvard is retracted after the student admits she forged the acceptance letter. (Bridge)
- Introducing a prize for young researchers dedicated to good scientific writing. (Cambridge Core)
- Principals across the U.S. are apparently plagiarizing their welcome letters, an investigation finds. (David Winter, ABC FOX Montana)
- “The unquestioning acceptance of peer review as final validation in the field of medicine emphasises not only the responsibility held by medical journals to ensure peer review is done well but also the need to raise awareness amongst the medical community of the limitations of the current peer review process.” (Research Integrity and Peer Review)
- The British Journal of Surgery tried an open online peer review system. They found that it “is feasible in this setting, but it attracts few reviews, of lower quality than conventional peer reviews.” (PLOS ONE)
- Should scientists who use artificial intelligence include their computers as co-authors on their papers? (John Bohannon, Science)
- A creationist geologist has won the right to collect samples from the Grand Canyon following a lawsuit. (Amanda Reilly, E&E News, via Science)
- “A plea bargain may be in the works” for some researchers “arrested last year for allegedly defrauding the federal government of more than $8 million.” (Shanon Quinn, Moscow-Pullman Daily News, via Spokesman-Review)
- “In an unprecedented court case in Paris, an eminent French lung specialist has been fined €50,000 (US$57,000) and given a six-month suspended prison sentence because he did not disclose his ties to the oil industry during a Senate air-pollution inquiry.” (Barbara Casassus, Nature)
- Andrew Gelman offers a look at his unpublished papers.
- “A group of junior researchers at Cambridge have established a campaign against the damaging pressure to produce ‘sexier’ results.” (Varsity Online) See background here.
- “Chinese researchers issued 71,000 scientific papers that were the results of international collaboration in 2015, climbing to the third in the world, according to a report.” (Xinhua)
- An author has withdrawn his memoir from print and admitted that he made up most of the claims in it, including being infected with a “rare brain virus.” (Anne Jungen and Emily Pyrek, La Crosse Tribune)
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