Weekend reads: A gold star in astronomy; leading journals underrepresent women in photos; how papers can mislead

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The week at Retraction Watch featured the story of a journal that took 13 months to reject a paper, then published a plagiarized version days later; a look at whether institutions gaslight whistleblowers; and news that a medical school had put a researcher found to have committed misconduct in charge of a grant. Oh — and it was our eighth birthday. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• A star may not be quite as bright, but an astronomer deserves a gold star for retracting his findings within 24 hours of posting them, and thanking those that helped him find the error.
• A study “asked whether the top scientific journals, Nature and Science, represented men and women equally as authors, subjects, and objects in photographs. Overwhelmingly, women were underrepresented in these magazines, an effect that was apparent even in advertisements and stock photographs.” (FACETS Journal)
• “A scientific paper can mislead,” says Andrew Gelman. “People can read a paper, or see later popularizations of the work, and think that ‘science shows’ something that science didn’t show.”
• Sometimes, maybe it’s not such a welcome development when a U.S. president cites your paper. (Maxine Joselow, E&E News)
• “Don’t let your h index define your science … but you can be proud of it nonetheless,” says Andrew Hendry. (Eco-Evo Evo-Eco)
• “India has vowed to end the “menace of predatory journals” after an investigation by a group of international media organizations discovered that many publishers of such journals are based in Hyderabad.” (Michael Allen, Physics World)
• “These Professors Don’t Work for a Predatory Publisher. It Keeps Claiming They Do.” (Emma Pettit, Chronicle of Higher Education)
• “Far be it from me to suggest that the whole edifice of medical journal publication is overdue to crumble in the face of open publication on pre-print servers, allowing real time discussion of full data sets, and creating a path to recognition that does not depend upon the whims of editors bound to the medical-industrial complex.” Richard Lehman has written his last weekly journal roundup for The BMJ. He’ll be missed.
• Elsevier is acquiring Aries Systems, a maker of editorial content management systems used by many journals. (press release)
• “Our other work  failed to inform ongoing policy discussions and the efforts of other researchers for several months as we waited on eventual publication.” Rohan Khera contrasts the pre-preprint era with the preprint era. (The BMJ)
• “‘[P]redatory publishing’ never really became a big thing, when seen in relation to the total outcome of scholarly communication,” says Lambert Heller. (LSE Impact Blog)
• Why Czech politicians are obsessed with titles — and why it leads to plagiarism. Daniela Lazarová talks to the “former president of the Accreditation Commission, Vladimíra Dvořáková, about plagiarism and its roots.” (Radio Praha)
• Journal editor Bernd Pulverer provides two examples of “why machines cannot easily replace humans for image integrity screening.” After all, “duplicating soil would be truly potty.”
• Here’s a letter that illustrates “one of many aspects of the ‘hydra-headed monster’ of the predatory publishing ‘industry.'” (Roger Watson, Nursing Open, sub req’d)
• Is this a bug that could have been predicted? “Portugal’s Met Office retracts hottest day prediction, blames extreme weather for mistake.” (Alice Cuddy, EuroNews)
• Publishing’s little white lies, or “the nuances of these levels of ‘fixing?‘” (Phaedra Cross, The Scholarly Kitchen)
• There has been some movement on the Retraction Watch leaderboard. Another researcher has joined the over-40 club, and it now takes 38 retractions to get into the top 10.
• A book chapter on the role of men and women in the history of Western cardiology notes — based on our leaderboard — it would seem that “men are relatively more often involved in cases where fraud has been detected, with only one woman in the top 30 list.” (Sex-Specific Analysis of Cardiovascular Function, sub req’d)
• Oxford University Press, you may have replaced one error with another. What does this mean?
• “Is an ulterior motive alone enough to issue a retraction?” Benjamin Mazer on a study of cell phones and brain tumors. (Science-Based Medicine)
• Amidst fraud and failed replications, “There Is More to Behavioral Economics Than Biases and Fallacies,” says Koen Smets. (Behavioral Scientist)
• Sylvia Asa and Shereen Ezzat, a husband-wife team, have earned their fourth retraction. (Molecular and Cellular Biology) Read the report of the investigation into their work here.
• Science Signaling has retracted a paper after an investigation that “found that it was more likely than not that data were falsified.” The paper had been subject to an expression of concern a year ago and has been cited four times since then.
• “Changes to the peer review process as used elsewhere in the world (more open review) may not be suitable in a smaller scientific environment…” A survey of editors in Croatia. (Radovan Vrana, Learned Publishing, sub req’d)
• A former professor at Columbia was awarded $1.25 million in a suit she brought against her former mentor for retaliation. (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed)
• Suzanne Farley is the new Research Integrity Director at Springer Nature. (press release)
• Helen Brooks, an editor at The Lancet, explains what she’s learned being seconded to Cell Press. (CrossTalk)
• “We therefore believe that the current debate over the reliability of traditional news outlets and other sources of information is a fitting context in which to assess [the Journal of Tropical Pediatrics’] own editorial processes to determine whether they are strong enough to satisfy the journal’s high scientific standards.” (Journal of Tropical Pediatrics, sub req’d)
• “Given the benefits for authors, students, and the broader research community, proliferation of preprint journal clubs will have a profound impact on scientific communication and training.” (Laboratory News)
• Psychology’s new normal: Badges? (Stephen Lindsay, Center For Open Science blog)
• “What is the value of the peer‐reviewing system?” asks Jeff Offutt. (Journal of Software: Testing, Verification and Reliability)
• “Do funding applications where peer reviewers disagree have higher citations?” asks a preprint in F1000 Research.
• “The Delhi High Court today said it was ‘unfortunate’ that the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) was ‘overlooking’ issues of plagiarism, especially by one its faculty members.” (PTI)
• “It would be perfect if it weren’t so unfortunate: a writer with sticky fingers published a story about shoplifting—and got caught stealing.” (Rich Juzwiak, Jezebel)
• “An ambitious project that set out nearly 5 years ago to replicate experiments from 50 high-impact cancer biology papers, but gradually shrank that number, now expects to complete just 18 studies.” (Jocelyn Kaiser, Science)

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