Weekend reads: Brazen plagiarism; why animal studies don’t hold up in humans; motherhood citation penalty

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The week at Retraction Watch featured the delisting of more than a dozen journals from one publisher, all at once; an odd correction in a journal unrelated to where the original work was published; and a look at whether we’ll one day be able to screen for image duplication the way we do for plagiarism. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “One of their authors had become the victim of a brazen case of plagiarism that left all of us – author, editor and us – speechless.” (Andrea Hacker, A Hacker’s View)
• “The new study helps explain why so many results in animal studies don’t hold up in human trials.” A new study of investigator brochures suggests animal data are quite flimsy. (Emma Yasinski, Science)
• “The scientific paper is obsolete,” writes James Somers. (The Atlantic)
• “Female academics ‘face motherhood citation penalty, but male researchers with small children get a boost,” David Matthews reports based on a new study of academics in Italy. (Times Higher Education)
• “Our results in academic neurology can be viewed as either disappointing or encouraging, depending on whether they reflect persistent barriers to women trying to achieve similar goals as men, or whether they reflect a system that supports women with different goals altogether.” (JAMA Neurology)
• “[I]nstitutions right now are sufficiently risk-averse and publicity-aware,” says C.K. Gunsalus. “If they can avoid releasing [investigation reports], they do.” Our follow-up story in Science about a recent Ohio State University misconduct finding.
• “It is hard to speak up when you are alone in a white-dominated space. We hope that other people of color in our industry read this post and understand that they are not alone.” Testimonies from the scholarly publishing industry. (The Scholarly Kitchen)
• “In the criminal justice television show system, plagiarism based offenses are considered especially heinous. On Tumblr, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious appropriations are members of an elite squad known as the Procedural Victims Unit. These are their stories.” (FiveThirtyEight)
• “Despite the advantages of preprints and the endorsement of journals and funders in the context of outbreaks, less than 5% of Ebola and Zika journal articles were posted as preprints prior to publication in journals.” (PLOS Medicine)
• “Former Oxford University scholar and one of the country’s finest academics, Professor Arthur Mutambara, is accused of defrauding the Global Fund of US$191 000 after his Mutambara Science and Technology Foundation submitted a heavily plagiarised consultancy assignment.” (Wongai Zhangazha, Zimbabwe Independent)
• “The studies chemistry researchers perceive to be the most important in their field are not always the ones that get cited the most, according to a new survey.” (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Chemistry World)
• “You are speaking to the wrong person. I do not know when I did my M.Phil and Ph.D.” A faculty member is accused of plagiarism. (Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta, The Wire)
• “So a question to any readers is, do you think this merits a published correction?” Craig Jones has a question. (The Grumpy Geophysicist)
• “The proportion of multi-authored papers in the social sciences has risen steadily over recent decades.” Lukas Kuld and John O’Hagan explain why. (LSE Impact Blog)
• “The cancer answer that wasn’t.” On the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory “Base Pairs” podcast, our Ivan Oransky explains how reproducibility is like Grandma’s meatballs.
• Why did an NIH institute director scream at scientists after they gave a presentation on research the agency had funded on the association between alcohol marketing and underage drinking? (Sharon Begley, STAT)
• “It is found that, on average, papers with an institutional e-mail address receive more citations than other ones.” (Scientometrics)
• “Is recycling Methods text from an old paper, to use in a new paper that applies the same techniques, efficient writing – or self-plagiarism?” asks Stephen B. Heard. (Scientist Sees Squirrel)
• Pakistan’s “Higher Education Commission (HEC) Executive Director Dr Arshad Ali has apparently refused to accept the findings of the software that detects plagiarism, as more than 20 additional research papers have allegedly been found out to be copied.” (Riazul Haq, The Express Tribune)
• Is peer review bad for your mental health? asks Helen Kara.
• In a new initiative in the BMJ, Ben Goldacre and colleagues will post about a new unreported trial each week.
• “After discovering a pattern of fraudulent papers from China, an Australian oncologist aims to expand oversight and keep the retractions coming.” John Powers writes in Undark about Jennifer Byrne. (Here’s a story we wrote about her in January 2017.)

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