The week at Retraction Watch featured a praiseworthy retraction by a Nobel laureate, a finding of research misconduct in a much-watched case involving fish and microplastics, and death threats against a journalist reporting on a politician’s plagiarism. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- Scientific peer review is “an ineffective and unworthy institution,” say Les Hatton and Gregory Warr. (Times Higher Education)
- “The trouble with big science is essentially that it is a profiteering enterprise.” (Jim Kozubek, Los Angeles Review of Books)
- “At no time did I pressure Beall to discontinue his work, or threaten his employment because of his work.” Jeffrey Beall’s boss at the University of Colorado, Denver weighs in on the closure of Beall’s list, and scientific publishing in general. (Shea Swauger, College & Research Libraries News) We tried to follow-up for a Q&A, but he declined.
- Why do researchers add co-authors or co-collaborators who contribute nothing? Why do journal editors add unnecessary citations? A study by Eric Fong and Allen Wilhite finds “widespread misattribution.” (PLOS ONE)
- A federal judge in Argentina has charged geoscientist Ricardo Villalba with “abusing his authority and violating his duty as a civil servant.” (Jeff Tollefson & Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, Nature)
- What’s the landscape for retractions in surgery journals? Two Retraction Watch team members are co-authors of a new paper in the American Journal of Surgery taking a look.
- Watch our Ivan Oransky testify (remotely) on research integrity to the UK Parliament Science and Technology Committee, alongside C.K. Gunsalus.
- “In its current form, their analysis should not be used as evidence for the effects of power posing, but perhaps a future revision might be informative.” The folks at Data Colada examine the evidence for a a controversial claim.
- “The Good Pharma Scorecard finds some big pharmaceutical companies are meeting legal standards for disclosing results—but many studies still go unreported.” (Diana Kwon, The Scientist)
- In a lawsuit, a former postdoc accuses UCSF professor and “anti-tobacco crusader” Stanton Glantz of sexual harassment. There’s also an authorship dispute. (Stephanie M. Lee, BuzzFeed News)
- “You don’t have to be able to conduct your own regression analysis to be able to look for problems.” A guide to spotting shady statistics. (Rachel Zamzow, The Open Notebook)
- Journals with their own Twitter handles see more activity for their papers on the platform — and more citations, too — according to an analysis by José Luis Ortega. (LSE Impact Blog)
- “The Indian government’s attempts to stamp out predatory publishing are misguided,” says T.V. Padma. (Nature Index)
- “I use statistical methods to examine how strong the evidence actually is.” A “quantitative review” of a book about priming research touches on replications, publication bias and other issues. (Replication Index)
- A new book “serves as a look at how fraud, and the response to it, has changed over the years.” (Nick Roll, Inside Higher Ed)
- “Working to detect image manipulation in the world of science is a long-term battle.” (Martino Jerian, Laboratory News)
- Stemming the influence of predatory journals requires a “coordinated response.” (Nature Human Behavior)
- Purdue University’s Camp DASH “was supposed to be a gold-standard study of diet-mitigated hypertension in adolescents. Instead, it became a venue for chaos.” (Amy Gastelum, Undark)
- Tech giants like Google and Microsoft are about to make it a lot easier to break journal paywalls, says Adam Rogers. (Wired)
- “Sometimes groups seek to intimidate and threaten scientists, scaring them off promising work.” (Aaron Carroll, The Upshot/New York Times)
- Recently de-listed from PubMed, “The journal Oncotarget is the 3rd most used publication outlet at KI the last year!” (Blog, Karolinska Institutet University Library)
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