Weekend reads: Kim Kardashian loses an authorship; legal threats follow misconduct allegations; faked job offer leads to prosecution

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a Nature paper over the objections of the first author — who hired a lawyer; a call for a new research misconduct body in the UK; and a look at why retractions take so long. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• It is our duty to report that Kim Kardashian has been removed as an author of a recent paper. Before. After. Background.
• Complaints about alleged research misconduct at University College, London have led to legal threats at the University of Liverpool. (Nigel Hawkes, The BMJ)
• A “Professor Made Up a Job Offer From Another University. Now He Faces a Criminal Charge.” (Megan Zahneis, Chronicle of Higher Education) Is there a better way? asks Audrey Wiliams June.
• “[E]xperts warned us that if a university consistently receives no allegations from year to year then that should actually be more of a cause for concern than those that conduct lots of investigations.” UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee chair Norman Lamb explains why he wants a new watchdog group. Background here.
• “The publisher of Science last month ended a pilot partnership that allowed open-access (OA) publishing for researchers funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.” (Richard van Noorden, Nature)
• Science meets AC/DC on PubPeer: “We did not investigate other songs besides ‘Thunderstruck’ but it might be possible to optimise the particle tumbling with other songs or frequencies. However, it is difficult to imagine having a song that rocks as much as ‘Thunderstruck'”.
• A new article is “a good example of researchers revisiting their own work and openly changing their minds.” (Neuroskeptic, Discover)
• On July 8, 2015, a group of authors left a comment on PubMed Commons about “several important issues that vitiate confidence” in a paper in BMC Public Health. On August 14, 2015, the authors responded. Two years later, they finally corrected the paper.
• “A professor of Chaudhary Charan Singh University (CCSU) has been found guilty of plagiarizing another professor’s thesis.” (The Times of India)
• Our Ivan Oransky traces his interest in scientific publishing back to his time at his college newspaper, and talks about where Retraction Watch is going. (Anthea Lacchia, I, Science)
• “Peer Review and Implicit Bias: Is Double-blind Peer Review Better?” asks Chris Mebane. (IEAM Blog)
• Stuart Buck, of the Arnold Foundation, was going to write a response to a piece in PNAS about reproducibility. He wrote this Twitter thread instead.
• The Czech justice minister has resigned following allegations of plagiarism. (AP)
• A Spring Nature journal has published a paper that includes sharp criticism of Nature editors. (sub req’d)
• “There’s a reason retractions are so rare in journalism — and for the health and vibrancy of the craft, they need to stay that way. (Jesse Singal, New York Magazine)
• “While a handful of journals occasionally pay their referees a small honorarium in return for their service, this is by no means the norm. It is also not a viable solution.” (Madhusudhan Raman, The Wire)
• “While only 7% of authors were women, 43% of [acknowledged programmers] were women.” In population genetics,acknowledgements tell a very different story of who did the work than authorship does. (bioRxiv)
• Should a study informing regulations on women athletes with high testosterone levels be retracted? (Jere Longman, New York Times) More from Roger Pielke, Jr.
• “The price you pay for doing science is being wrong sometimes and fessing up about it.” (Phil Plait, Syfy Wire)
• Capitalism: Ruining science? In academia, the “imperative manifests itself in visible ways: publish or perish, funding or famine.” (Meagan Day, Jacobin)
• “A Major Industry-Funded Alcohol Study Was Compromised. How Many Others Are Out There?” (Jeremy Samuel Faust, Undark)
• A professor who was suspended in 2014 after he called out a graduate student by name on his blog appears poised to get his job back. (Vimal Patel, Chronicle of Higher Education)
• Europe PMC is now indexing preprints. Here’s what you need to know.
• A study in which researchers examine students’ “academic fecundity.” (Scientometrics, sub req’d)
• “I’ve experienced three instances of suppression or sanitisation: two papers were eventually published in whole, but one other was sanitised, much to my enduring chagrin.” Adrian Barnett has a suggestion for how to fix that. (LSE Impact Blog)
• Which altmetrics provider should you use? That depends on which metrics you care about, according to a new study in Scientometrics. (sub req’d)
• “Contrary to common belief, randomised controlled trials inevitably produce biased results,” writes Alexander Krauss. (LSE Impact Blog)

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our growth, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, sign up for an email every time there’s a new post (look for the “follow” button at the lower right part of your screen), or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].