Weekend reads: Why rhetoric and self-censorship is bad for science; an author threatens to sue his critics; why whistleblowing is critical

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The week at Retraction Watch featured the departure of a professor in Glasgow amidst three retraction; the mysterious removal of a 26-year-old paper, and a four-page correction for a six-page paper. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Rhetoric and self-censorship isn’t good for science, even if the topic is vaccine research, argues Melinda Wenner Moyer. (New York Times)
• Following concerns raised in a new article, a group is urgently re-analyzing their findings on the safety of the HPV vaccine. (Nigel Hawkes, The BMJ, sub req’d)
• A researcher who published a paper that claimed to have found a genetic test for aging and Alzheimer’s disease threatened to sue his critics. (Nigel Hawkes, The BMJ, sub req’d)
• Whistleblowing is a requirement for research integrity, says Chris Graf. (Wiley Blog)
• A journal now has questions about whether the author of a paper on “rape culture” in dog parks that went viral misrepresented herself. (Toni Airaksinen, Campus Reform)
• “Does animal-based research constitute ‘silent fraud?‘” asks Andrew Menache. (The Ecologist)
• A three-plus page correction in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
• “Who wants to hear some scientific intrigue?” Brian Skinner describes how he found “something funny” in new superconductivity findings. (Twitter)
• “But do please realise that [Australia’s] so-called ‘productivity boom’ is likely to be largely caused by a better capturing of Australia’s publications in the Web of Science, a situation it shares with virtually every other country in the world.” (Anne-Wil Harzing, Harzing.com)
• “As I read articles about misconduct in research, I see parallels to the numerous data integrity citations given to pharmaceutical and clinical research firms by regulators around the world.” (Mark Newton, Research Information)
• “She’s the world’s top empathy researcher. But colleagues say she bullied and intimidated them,” reports Kai Kupferschmidt.
• “India cracks down on plagiarism at universities,” reports Shekhar Chandra. “But some researchers say new rules don’t go far enough.” (Nature)
• “Scientists have welcomed an official announcement by the European Research Council that it will accept preprints as evidence of academics’ previous work when applying for grants.” (David Matthews, Times Higher Education)
• Blast from the past: A materials scientist in Japan (and former university president) who had six papers retracted from 2011 to 2013 (and one subject to an expression of concern) has just had another one retracted.
• “The principal of Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen is to leave after a row over business interests.” (BBC)
• “I want to see whether the wisdom of crowds does a better job than conventional grant review at supporting research, says Johan Bollen.” (Nature) See our 2016 interview with Bollen here.
• “We operate within an international knowledge production system where, if we are to uncritically play by all ‘international’ rules of the game and our locally self-alienating publication ranking politics, we shall continue publishing for the dump and to be irrelevant to our communities.” (Jimmy Spire Ssentongo, The Observer Uganda)
• “Can automated tools reliably rate research reproducibility?” asks Dalmeet Singh Chawla. (Nature)
• “The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California, and two of three female scientists who sued it for gender discrimination last summer announced today they have reached settlements in a lawsuit that was set to go to trial in December.” (Meredith Wadman, Science)
• “Want your study to make the headlines? You can get help with that.” (Roberta Kwok, Nature)
• BethAnn McLaughlin “talks about her experiences with trying to change how the scientific community copes with sexual assault and harassment.” (The Scientist)
• “How Open Commenting on Preprints Can Increase Scientific Transparency: An Interview With the Directors of PsyArxiv, SocArxiv, and Marxiv.” (Rusty Speidel, Center for Open Science blog)
• “As robust efforts fail to reproduce findings of influential zebra finch studies from the 1980s, scientists discuss ways to reduce bias in such research.” (Yao-Hua Law, The Scientist)
• “The poisonous mix of competition, corruption and poor resources has the potential to create an environment where misconduct becomes the norm, rather than the exception.” (Tracey Bretag, BMC Research in progress blog)
• “Resist calls for replicability in the humanities,” say Sarah de Rijcke and Bart Penders. Why? Because Quality criteria are crucially different,”  they argue. (Nature)
• Phlogiston lives: Another week, another sting of a predatory operation, this time one that organizes chemistry conferences, by Emma Stoye (Chemistry World)
• “It then became apparent that the entire data set was unreliable and needed to be re–analysed which is what has motivated the retraction of this article.” An Excel error sinks a paper. (Hormones and Behavior)
• “The American Psychological Association endorses the move toward more open science.” (Arthur C. Evans Jr., The New York Times)
• What a mess: The embargo on last week’s announcement of the Fields Medal — often considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics — didn’t add up for a lot of journalists. (Embargo Watch)
• A “trivial but fatal sign error” dooms a paper. (Physical Review B)
• False accusations can happen. Can the damage be undone? (Elizabeth Cohen, CNN)
• “Beauty and charm” couldn’t save these two papers from being retracted. (Chinese Physics C, The European Physical Journal A)
• “How accessible is psychology data?” asks Neuroskeptic. (Discover) Tom Hardwicke, one of the authors of a paper that took a look, provides his take.
• There’s a lot going on in this retraction notice from an alternative medicine journal. (Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine)
• “[A]n unsuccessful replication attempt says almost nothing about validity and is only in rare cases indicative of research misconduct,” says Lex Bouter. (Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, sub req’d)
• Results of a newly published study “provide a further step toward building the necessary evidence base to inform editorial interventions towards improving reporting quality.” (Alejandra Clark, Gina Alvino, PLOS Blogs)
• A dental researcher is up to 17 retractions (and one correction). You might say he’s had a lot of papers…pulled. Background here.
• A paper in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology about the Mediterranean diet has earned an expression of concern. Background here.
• Stephen Colbert has issued a rare retraction. (Yahoo News)
• Journalism with an impact: A famed Houston surgeon has updated conflict of interest disclosures in NEJM after reporting by Charles Ornstein and Mike Hixenbaugh. (ProPublica)
• A cartoon guide to honesty in data presentation. (Kyle Allen)
• Bruno and Bob go to a predatory conference. (Bruno Saragiotto, The Ice Cream Blog)
• Is it time to boycott journal rankings? asks Alberto Baccini. (Institute for New Economic Thinking blog) Background here.

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