Weekend reads: Sexual harassment = scientific misconduct, says one society; favorite plagiarism excuses

The week at Retraction Watch featured an expression of concern in Science just days after a paper was published, mass editorial board resignations over a paper defending colonialism, and two papers retracted for publisher errors. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• The American Geophysical Union will now consider sexual harassment to be scientific misconduct. (Earth and Space Science News)
• “A rogue British secretary did it.” The National Science Foundation’s Inspector General shares her favorite plagiarism excuses. (University of New Hampshire blog)
• Alex White describes his “brief, delirious dance with the devil of scientific dishonesty.” (Cooper Square Review)
• “What does transparency in peer review mean to you?” Elizabeth Moylan reports on a panel that followed the Peer Review Congress. (BMC blogs)
• “Is predatory scientific publishing ‘becoming an organized industry?’” asks Steven Corneliussen. (Physics Today)
• “Most physicians and other healthcare professionals are unaware of the pervasiveness of poor quality clinical evidence,” say John Ioannidis and colleagues. (European Journal of Clinical Investigation)
• A revised list of approved journals from India’s University Grants Commission still contains more than 100 possible predatory journals. (Srinivasan Ramani, R. Prasad, The Hindu)
• “We did not recognize how destructive the overall Editorial was and the effects that it could have.” Nature editor Philip Campbell on a recent staff editorial that went horribly wrong.
• “Is asking for retraction of a piece that was rejected by peers censorship, a violation of academic freedom, an instance of political correctness run amok?” Barbara Fister says that’s the wrong question. (Inside Higher Ed)
• “Do we still value the dissertation?” asks Leonard Cassuto. (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
• Daniel Lakens takes issue with a recent proposal to lower the p-value threshold for statistical significance. (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Nature)
• This is an odd press release retraction notice. And this is an odd retraction of an episode of a children’s cartoon.
• “The peer review system has flaws,” says Brenda Wingfield. “But it’s still a barrier to bad science.” (The Conversation)
• “[T]he newly created World Conferences on Research Integrity Foundation plans to establish a registry for research on research integrity,” report Tony Mayer, Lex Bouter, and Nick Steneck. (Science)
• “[I]f we take the integrity of scholarly publication seriously, there are non-trivial non-hypothetical grounds for retraction of work in philosophy on moral grounds…” (Eric Schliesser, Digressions & Impressions)
• “[In] the long term it’s bad for science if researchers are not willing to have public, respectful debates.” Too-positive peer reviews for a recent paper in Science? (Steph Yin, New York Times)
• Researchers in South Africa who have published in predatory journals have cost the government millions in subsidizing the publication of their papers. (Sarah Wild, Quartz)
• A man who studies trauma victims became one himself after he was shot by a researcher he fired for scientific misconduct. (Andrew Joseph, STAT) As we’ve reported earlier, the attempted murder earned the shooter 28 years in prison.
• A publishing industry group is expressing concerns about ResearchGate’s article-sharing practices. (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Science)
• “[This] means not only that academia can be hacked, but that it already has been.” (Portia Roelofs & Max Gallien, LSE Impact blog)
• How many papers are retracted in India every year? Some are already digging into our retraction database to find trends. (Manupriya, IndiaBioscience)
• “Here then is a plea for us to spend more time giving public thanks to those who help us improve our work. It won’t take long to read – not nearly as long as it took the reviewer to read your work (for free).” (Maxine David, LSE Impact blog)
• BMJ editor Theo Bloom argues that increasing transparency, rather than anonymity, will decrease bias in the peer review process. (The BMJ Opinion)
• A backlash forced a review of a paper on using AI to determine sexual orientation. But now the journal plans to publish. (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed)
• The Naval Postgraduate School tells former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke to revise his thesis or have his degree rescinded. (Los Angeles Times)
• Congratulations to Irene Hames, who has won Publons’ inaugural Sentinel Award for devoting much of her career to working on publication ethics. We were honored to be finalists.
• The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences lifts an embargo after the author’s own university broke it with a press release. (Embargo Watch)
• Self-citation is inevitable for researchers building upon their previous work, but it also can be abused to gain grants and promotion. Would a self-citation index help? (Phil Davis, Scholarly Kitchen)
• “Our findings demonstrate the urgent need for improvement of scientific peer review.” (Scientometrics)
• “However, usually, once that paper is in print (or online) it is assumed that an author’s troubles are over. This has not been my experience.” (Elizabeth Gadd, LSE Impact blog)
• A media watchdog group forces The Daily Mail, a British tabloid, to admit that a story on alleged manipulation of climate change data was inaccurate and misleading. (New York Times)
• Badly done meta-analyses “can be misleading and can also be exploited by economic interests seeking to counteract unflattering scientific findings about commercial products.” (JAMA)
• After being bullied for her love of insects, an 8-year-old publishes a paper as a co-author in the Annals of Entomological Society of America. (Science) She’s the latest in a long line of publishing prodigies, as our co-founder Ivan Oransky explained when a 14-year-old published in 2014. (MedPage Today)
• Typos in academic papers are inevitable but they are not all equal, as the Academia Obscura blog reveals.

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.