The week at Retraction Watch featured a call to make peer reviews public, lots of news about Cornell food researcher Brian Wansink, and a request by the U.S. NIH that the researchers it funds don’t publish in bad journals. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- A new journal is devoted to “unpacking” photos of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Louise Matsakis, Motherboard)
- “Harrington sees public scholarship as an essential part of her work as an academic. But Danish immigration authorities are calling it something else: a crime.” (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed)
- “Something odd jumped out at them: the numbers in the paper looked strangely regular.” Cathleen O’Grady recounts how two stats gurus, whose names should be familiar to Retraction Watch readers, found problems in a psychologist’s splashy work on gender. (ArsTechnica)
- Hilda Bastian considers whether retractions due to “honest error” need to be re-branded.” (Absolutely Maybe)
- The Francophone researcher’s dilemma: “If you don’t publish in English, you lose the bulk of your potential readership.” (Jean-François Venne, University Affairs)
- Survey says: Young researchers think that some questionable research practices “are moderately to highly prevalent what they attributed primarily to academic incentive structures.” (Social Psychology)
- “The first thing you feel when a trial fails is a sense of shame. You’ve let your patients down.” Siddhartha Mukherjee gets personal about failure. (The New York Times Magazine)
- Dorothy Bishop presents case studies and thought experiments related to addressing mistakes responsibly. (SlideShare)
- On Monday, Dec. 4, our co-founder Ivan Oransky will give testimony on research integrity to a UK Parliament committee, alongside others.
- Cornell’s Brian Wansink notches another retraction. (Stephanie Lee, BuzzFeed)
- Even more Wansink: Lee reports that Cornell University has launched an “internal investigation.”
- Leonard Freedman talks about how to teach young scientists about experimental design. (Katarina Zimmer, The Scientist)
- Does spin in news stories about medical studies make a difference? Retraction Watch co-founder Ivan Oransky is co-author of a protocol for an randomized controlled trial that’s designed to find out. (BMJ Open)
- Spot on: Statcheck, a computer program that finds statistical errors in psychology papers, is really accurate, according to a new preprint. (Dalmeet Chawla, Science).
- “The problem is not our maths, but ourselves.” Five experts weigh in on how to fix statistics in science.” (Comment, Nature).
- Our co-founder Ivan Oransky joins Elizabeth Seiver on the PLOScast podcast to talk about the value of tracking retractions.
- “Do disputes over scientific validity belong in the courtroom? “Our co-founders weigh in on the Mark Jacobson lawsuit — and others. (The Verge)
- Professor and journal editor Jens Nielsen says “the traditional library subscription model will eventually disappear.” (OUPblog)
- In the red: PLOS lost $1.7 million in 2016, according to financial disclosures. (Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen)
- Starting next year, expressions of concern will be an article type on Medline. Read some background on why that’s important.
- “Reducing bias is an underlying obligation of every scientific investigation.” (David Mellor, Laboratory News)
- “By providing a decentralized platform with self-regulating data, blockchain could solve thorny problems concerning such issues as research reproducibility and authorship credit,” according to a new report. (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Physics Today)
- The U.S. “National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will empanel an ad hoc committee of experts who will assess research and data reproducibility and replicability issues, with a focus on topics that cross disciplines. “ (NASEM)
- A new finding “offers some evidence to suggest that a particular piece of work might be accepted under single-blind review if the authors are famous or come from top institutions, but rejected otherwise.” (Andrew Tomkins, William Heavlin, Google Research)
- “At the very least, the debate over medical preprints is one worth having.” (David Maslove, JAMA)
- “Papers authored by academic and corporate partners are more widely discussed online,” according to a new study. (Smriti Mallapaty, Nature Index)
- Alleged data manipulation in a UK forensics lab may affect more than 10,000 cases, Maria Burke reports. (Chemistry World)
- “Two-thirds of the 364 self-selecting respondents to the survey, from a wide range of countries and levels of seniority, report having felt slighted by a senior academic over an authorship credit, for instance,” writes Holly Else in Times Higher Education. “And one-third say that they had been offered an authorship credit when they did not deserve it – although only 16 per cent admit to accepting this type of offer.”
- “How realistic is a cost-neutral transition from subscriptions to open access?” asks Björn Brembs.
- “One of the most alarming documents to come out of my lawsuit is a chain of e-mails in which an FDA reviewer suggests that Sarepta or eteplirsen researchers might be manipulating and misrepresenting scientific images,” writes Charles Seife about what he found when he tried to get the FDA to release documents about a drug approval. (Scientific American)
- “Journal-based research assessments marginalise regions like Latin America and the issues most relevant to them,” write Diego Chavarro and Ismael Ràfols. (LSE Impact Blog)
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].