The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a paper linked to vaccines, and what happens when a journal retracts 107 papers at once. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- Cambridge University Press pulls hundreds of papers from one of its journals on topics the Chinese government deemed politically sensitive. (Holly Else, Times Higher Education)
- “Journals have become tools in corporate battles.” Corporations are funding more heavily for favorable results in a new phase of corporate research. (Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen)
- Oliver Rosten used the acknowledgements section of a recent paper to blame the postdoctoral system for playing a part in his friend’s suicide. (Andrew Grant, Physics Today)
- The National Science Foundation puts pressure on universities to uphold a policy attempting to reduce misconduct, despite a report that suggests the policy has flaws. (Jeffrey Mervis, Science)
- A new preprint proposes an alternative to replication studies that relies on citation analysis of researchers, journals, and institutions. (bioRxiv)
- Who’s in charge of research integrity at U.S. universities? The U.S. Office of Research Integrity tried to find out. (ORI blog)
- “Science publishes many papers describing major breakthroughs, but these extraordinary claims must be supported by extraordinary evidence.” (Dominique Roche, Science)
- There’s a new preprint server in town: ChemRxiv. (Rebecca Trager, Chemistry World)
- “The career effects of scandal: Evidence from scientific retractions.” (Research Policy) Earlier, we covered the paper as preprint.
- A researcher claims that a Breitbart article about Starbucks’ push to hire refugees misused his data to promote fear. (Kate Morrissey, San Diego Union-Tribune)
- “The most we get from the data is a discrepancy on the amount of clear-cut issues in moral discourse and in personal taste discourse, but that is not relevantly related with retraction…” A philosopher’s take on retractions. (Diogo Santos, Phenomenology and Mind)
- A study breathes new life into the discredited idea of behavioral priming, but Neuroskeptic cautions that it is different from the original theory in many ways. (Discover)
- “TranspariMED, an organisation campaigning for more transparency in medical research, said that it had found the outcomes of only 206 (5.8 per cent) of the 3,540 clinical trials conducted by researchers at 16 top institutions on the main European and American clinical trial registries – EudraCT and Clinicaltrials.gov – where they were originally registered.” (John Elmes, Times Higher Education)
- Are new reporting guidelines effective? Results are mixed. (Psychonomic Society blog)
- James Heckman, Nobel Prize winner, gives a clear example ofthe “what does not kill my statistical significance makes it stronger” fallacy. (Andrew Gelman)
- “We urge the scientific community to collaborate on defining measurable criteria for what a predatory journal is…and to launch a platform that would allow the scientific community to differentiate legitimate journals from predatory ones, a platform that will be immune to the pressure exerted from such publishers.” (The Scientist)
- More than 180 researchers and public figures sign a declaration of support for the director of Egypt’s Library of Alexandria after he was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison. (Erik Stokstad, Science)
- “Scholarly communication is up for grabs. […] What’s unclear – what’s really up for grabs – is whether the new ecology will be non-profit or venture-funded.” (Jefferson Pooley, LSE Impact blog)
- Attempting to reproduce earlier studies can be about exciting as watching grass grow — particularly for the 14 labs that literally grew grass to replicate a study. (Ewen Callaway, Nature)
- Looking to publish your insignificant results? There’s a finance journal for you. (FinanzArchiv)
- “[W]hat merits a correction? And what merits making a stink when there is no correction?” That’s what the Grumpy Geophysicist wants to know.
Like Retraction Watch? Consider making a tax-deductible contribution to support our growth. You can also follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, sign up on our homepage for an email every time there’s a new post, or subscribe to our daily digest. Click here to review our Comments Policy. For a sneak peek at what we’re working on, click here.
“Oliver Rosten used the acknowledgements section of a recent paper to blame the postdoctoral system for playing a part in his friend’s suicide. (Andrew Grant, Physics Today)”
I fully understand and appreciate the editors of the other two Journals who wouldn’t allow publication of the article along with the dedication. This would open the door to all sorts of (perhaps well-intended) social or political commentary, distracting from an unbiased communication of research findings. Many journals allow for commentary/opinion-type submissions, which would have been the more appropriate venue. Of course, all this being said, this dedication is powerful precisely because it appears in a context where one least expects it.
A small qualification to “Looking to publish your insignificant results? There’s a finance journal for you. (FinanzArchiv)”. The journal in question is actually a “public finance” journal. Public finance is actually an old name for what is more commonly called “public economics” today. The old name is very misleading as it has has little to do with “finance” which deals with topics like investments and money management. It is largely to avoid this confusion that newer journals use public economics but the journal in question was founded in 1884, long before the current term.