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The week at Retraction Watch featured a collaboration with Undark looking at how scientists who commit fraud slip through the cracks, the story of a former cancer researcher who used her own blood 98 times instead of collecting that of study participants, and the puzzle of what took more than five years for papers by the world’s most prolific scientific fraudster to be retracted. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “Almost 40% of peer-reviewed dietary research turns out to be wrong.” (Patrick Clinton, The New Food Economy)
- “There’s reasonable evidence that trying to get something published in the snooty, high-impact-factor journals may correlate with making something more wrong than if you hadn’t.” (Adam Rogers, WIRED)
- A researcher fired last month for misconduct will retrain at the Crick. (David Cyranoski, Nature)
- “All of these studies shared a statistical analysis method unique to sports science. And that method is severely flawed.” (Christie Aschwanden and Mai Nguyen, FiveThirtyEight)
- “In my entire career I have never read any article that would have changed someone’s life had I read it a couple of weeks earlier.” The problem with “How a major medical meeting uses embargoes to shape the news, and what the consequences may be.” (Michael Joyce, Health News Review)
- This report on a plagiarism case is worth it for the alliteration in the headline alone. (Bryan Wheelock, JD Supra)
- How to avoid publishing ethics issues, with five questions. (Amy Kullas, mBiosphere)
- “If the publishers of scientific journals everywhere enforced a universal code of ethics — if you violate the code, you cannot publish your scientific work — systematic bullies and harassers would be eliminated from their fields.” (Ethan Siegel, Forbes)
- “Fara is very clear that telling a narrative about the past is part of changing the present situation.” Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche reviews a book about women scientists and suffrage during the First World War. (LSE Impact Blog)
- Pakistan’s Virtual University has rejected plagiarism allegations levied at a candidate for higher education chair. (Arsalan Haider, Daily Times)
- The Wire “has stumbled upon a goldmine of plagiarised content on the website of premier right-wing think tank India Foundation.”
- The U.S. NIH has halted a $100 million industry-funded study of alcohol. (Lewis Perdue, Wine Industry Insight)
- The U.S. FDA has opened up bidding on a multi-million dollar grant previously given to Duke, following favoritism concerns. (Sarah Karlin-Smith, via Dan Diamond, POLITICO)
- So why was the Springer Nature initial public offering withdrawn? Roger Schonfeld links to others’ thoughts and speculates. (The Scholarly Kitchen)
- Playing a game of “What If:” “The dearth of peer-reviewed research validating the Theranos technology should have been a huge red flag.” (Kevin Hrusovsky, STAT)
- “[A]d hominem attacks may have the same degree of impact as attacks on the empirical basis of the science claims, and…allegations of conflict of interest may be just as influential as allegations of outright fraud.” (PLOS ONE)
- When you criticize research, does it matter what tone you use?Andrew Gelman and Darren Dahly weigh in.
- “People value the minutiae of research beyond writing and data reduction: researchers in the humanities value it less than those in pure and applied sciences; individuals from Far East Asia and Middle East and Northern Africa value these activities more than anglophones and northern Europeans.” A new survey of attitudes about authorship. (bioRxiv)
- “The [U.S.] EPA is calling for more transparency in science,” says Dan Engber. “Yes, it’s hypocritical and ill-considered—but let’s be crystal clear about the potential benefits.” (Slate)
- The American Geophysical Union has rescinded a major award following a “conduct-related complaint” about the winner. (Sara Reardon, Nature)
- “Five years on, we’ve had no retractions or serious issues with publications from our institute,” writes Catherine Winchester, “and I feel that my and my colleagues’ efforts have improved practice much more than would just putting a policy on a webpage.” (Nature, which has a package on building a “healthy lab.”)
- “We need to understand what service we as publishers and societies may provide to researchers to ensure that the role of reviewer is lauded, encouraged and respected as perhaps the most valuable part of the publishing ecosystem.” (Robert Harington, The Scholarly Kitchen, in a post whose cover image was replaced because it was “inappropriate.”)
- Cornell University did not deny a professor accused of sexual misconduct tenure in bad faith, an appeals court has ruled. (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed) Background here.
- A recent case “reveals critical flaws in the current practice of medical publishing.” (Ole Petter Ottersen, Karolinska blog)
- On the Science Disrupt podcast, our Ivan Oransky talks “about how retractions fit into the publishing ecosystem and whether they could be used as a tool to correct the poor incentives structure in academia.”
- “The senior editor of an academic book widely considered the ‘bible of pathology’, has alleged that an Indian author hasplagiarised some 40 images in his own work.” (Shimona Kanwari, Times of India)
- “We consulted the original peer-reviewers of the results paper showing them the updated COI and they stated they would not have accepted the manuscript would they have known about these extensive COIs.” More here, in continuing fallout from a case at the University of Queensland. (JMIR Research Protocols, JMIR Public Health and Surveillance)
- A leading politician in Finland is once again being investigated for plagiarism in her PhD thesis. But should there be a statute of limitations? (Karvalli Crete, Iltalehti; in Finnish)
- About those most-cited articles on Wikipedia: Georgia Guglielmi and Richard van Noorden crunch the numbers. (Nature)
- The open-access model “is a return to the origins of journal publishing,” says Gavin Moodie. (Nature Index)
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