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.

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