Weekend reads: 20th anniversary of a fraud; uses and misuses of doubt; how common is scooping?

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The week at Retraction Watch featured the story of how two highly cited papers turned out to be wrong; a big prize for a researcher who has been dogged by allegations; and a mass resignation at a journal. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “20 years ago, research fraud catalyzed the anti-vaccination movement,” writes Julia Belluz. “Let’s not repeat history.” (Vox)
• “The same tools used to discredit disingenuous expressions of doubt can be used against those who express  well-supported doubt.” Our Ivan Oransky is one of three co-authors who explore doubt in science. (American Scientist)
• “We need to know the prevalence of scooping using data archived on publication. Without knowing the prevalence, we don’t know whether we need to adjust policies and practices to reduce the risk, or to put more effort into assuaging the fears of early career scientists.” (Richard Telford’s Blog)
• “How to write a world-class paper:” Advice from six experts. (Virginia Gewin, Nature)
• “Is it time to nationalise academic publishers?” (David Matthews, Times Higher Education)
• “That was just the beginning of the problems.” A drugmaker in India halts some production after a visit from the FDA that uncovered data falsification. (Eric Palmer, FiercePharma)
• “Do Academic Journals Favor Researchers from Their Own Institutions?” ask Yaniv Reingewertz and Carmela Lutmar. (Harvard Business Review)
• Charles Day comes in praise of preprints. (Physics Today)
• “Tennessee Technological University president Philip B. Oldham sent a letter to EPA administrator Scott Pruitt on Monday asking him to ignore the results of a study produced by his own university.” (Zoya Teirstein, Grist)
• A retraction because of…two left feet? (The Journal of Foot and Ankle Surgery)
• “One small step towards improving the system would be for academics to start charging publishers for their peer reviews.” Time for academics to take a stand, say Adriane MacDonald and Nicole Eva. (University Affairs)
• Geologist David Marchant has lost an appeal filed with Boston University, which terminated him after finding that he had sexually harassed a graduate student. (Meredith Wadman, Science)
• The U.S. FBI says a robotics expert defrauded Michigan State University and IEEE to the tune of $400,000. (John Agar, mLive)
• An architectural journal editor’s contract wasn’t renewed. The board has resigned in protest. The publisher wants to talk about it, but the board doesn’t want to play ball unless the editor can stay on. (BRI Community)
• “This paper describes the first 2 years of our institution’s experience attempting to move beyond the single standalone training method to an ‘integrated training method…’” (Mark Hooper et al., Research Integrity and Peer Review)
• “It is, to put it very mildly indeed, deeply regrettable that such clearly unjustified conclusions have become part of the scientific literature, and have already been quoted uncritically by journalists.” (David Spiegelhalter, Journal of Public Health)
• U.S.-based scientific societies are grappling with the idea of classifying sexual misconduct as research misconduct. (Rebecca Trager, Chemistry World)
• We’ve reported that WHO has a bone to pick with fracture risk tool. Now, it has taken its protest to the pages of NEJM. (Gollogly et al.)
• “The “Hit and run” paper. @bhaibeka explains his concept, and why it’s bad for science, in this slide. (Michael Hoffman, Twitter)
• “We have now developed two new versions of the reporting summary: one for the behavioural and social sciences, launching this week, and one for ecology, evolution and environment (EEE) research, to follow later this month.” (Editorial, Nature)
• A rebuttal from a quintessential cookbook makes a paper by Brian Wansink, saying the book inflated serving sizes over time, collapse faster than a bad soufflé. (The Joy of Cooking, Twitter thread)
• “This pilot study gives clear evidence that researchers make requests of their biostatistical consultants that are not only rated as severe violations, but further that these requests occur quite frequently.” (Min Wang et al., BMJ Open)
• “There are indications that review length is getting shorter: in 2016 the average word length on Publons was 457 words and in 2017 we saw a 23% drop to 342.” (Publons)
• Top figures in science, led by Marcia McNutt, “recommend that journals adopt common and transparent standards for authorship.” (PNAS)
• In January we reported on major misconduct by a physicist in Iran. In a recent letter, the Physics Society of Iran told us it “strongly condemns this misconduct and believes the majority of [the] Iranian physics community is free from such digressions.” (Mohammad Ejtehadi)
• Like many, we tweeted out a preprint that reported men exceeded their allotted speaking time at conferences more often than women did. A closer look at the data raises questions about whether those results were overstated. (Tomas van Dijk, de Volkskrant, in Dutch)

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