The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a paper on homeopathy whose authors had been arrested; news about 30 retractions for an engineer in South Korea; and a story about how two stem cell researchers who left Harvard under a cloud are being recommended for roles at Italy’s NIH. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- Is science really facing a reproducibility crisis, and do we need it to? Daniele Fanelli says: Maybe not. (PNAS)
- This is quite a correction for the misspelling of one author’s name by a single letter. (Twitter)
- Is this “one of the greatest corrections of all time?” (Ben Casselman, Twitter)
- An “Archaeologist ‘Discovered’ His Own Fakes at [a] 9,000-Year-Old Settlement.” (Owen Jarus, Live Science)
- “Institutional research misconduct reports need more credibility,” our co-founders, along with C.K. Gunsalus, argue in JAMA.
- An editor says “a letter containing a bullet was delivered to his office last week from, he suspects, a disgruntled author whose article he rejected.” (Msindisi Fengu, City Press)
- Professors at public universities shouldn’t be subject to public records laws, argues Claudia Polsky, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley in a new preprint.
- “Because those whose work is prominently cited to certify that science is broken [Ioannidis, Oransky, Begley, and Nosek among them…] are spearheading efforts to solve identified problems, their work is evidence of the resilience of science.” (Kathleen Hall Jamieson, PNAS)
- Looming deadlines for the UK Research Excellence Framework — on which funding allocations are based — “lead to a rush in publication of lower quality research,” according to a recent study. (LSE Impact Blog)
- “Should Non-Peer Reviewed Material Be Included in Article References?” asks David Crotty. (Scholarly Kitchen)
- “The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) encourages submission of proposals that target reproducibility and replicability efforts in data-intensive domains…” (NSF)
- It’s not just journals: “When wire services make mistakes, misinformation spreads quickly,” notes Salem Solomon. (Poynter)
- “At the end of January, the Romanian Ministry of National Education ordered universities to introduce compulsory academic ethics and integrity courses for postgraduates for the next academic year – although they will remain optional for undergraduates.” (David Matthews, Times Higher Education)
- “Statistical errors may taint as many as half of mouse studies,” reports Bahar Ghalipour. (Spectrum)
- How’s this for meta: A preprint we covered two years ago, claiming that published papers differed little from their preprint versions (and therefore that peer review added little value), has been published. And it didn’t change much from its preprint, notes Tim Vines. (Scholarly Kitchen)
- “Importantly, there are also numerous parallels with a previous script by Lucas et al. (1980) that editors may wish to review for possible plagiarism.” What if “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” was peer-reviewed? asks Victoria Costello.
- Why was a prominent neuroscientist fired from Columbia University? Current and former students and fellows want to know, and Columbia’s not saying anything. (Sharon Begley and Andrew Joseph, STAT)
- Delightful: There was (or perhaps still is?) an organization committed to the idea that knowledge is, indeed, tentative. (Science, 1974)
- A secretive publisher “appears to be unique in its aggressive marketing tactics, high prices, and unsupported claims about reaching into the highest echelons of European policy.” (Jop de Vrieze, Science)
- The ongoing debate: Should peer reviews be signed, or not? (Dan Samorodnitsky, Massive)
- “A deluge of papers in a scientific field does not lead to quick turnover of central ideas, but rather to the ossification of canon.” (Johan Chu, James A. Evans, SocArXiv)
- A new study looks at retractions in surgery journals. (Surgery) Of course, two Retraction Watch staffers were co-authors on a similar study in December.
- Is the Medical Council of India’s cure for predatory publishing worse than the disease? asks Rema Nagarajani. (Times of India) Meanwhile, R. Prasad argues that the University Grants Commission has legitimized predatory journals. (The Hindu)
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