Weekend reads: How junior scientists are mistreated; how to fix nutritional science; a journal does nothing after Monsanto ghostwriting claims

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The week at Retraction Watch featured a finding of plagiarism by a star health care policy researcher; a paper that contradicted itself; and the story of a researcher found to have committed misconduct on grants who is now publishing findings based on those grants. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• A case of misconduct at Dartmouth College, involving a prominent health care policy researcher, plagiarism, and the NEJM, highlights how junior scientists can be mistreated, write our co-founders in STAT.
• “The nutritional epidemiology community includes superb scientists. The best of them should take ownership of this reform process. They can further lead by example (eg, by correcting their own articles that have misleading claims).” (John Ioannidis, JAMA)
• The editor of Critical Reviews in Toxicology, a Taylor & Francis journal, said last year that the journal and publisher would be taking appropriate action in response to concerns about ghostwriting by Monsanto. So far, nothing, report Carey Gillam and Nathan Donley. (Environmental Health News)
• “The scandal isn’t what’s retracted,” says Andrew Gelman, “it’s what’s not retracted.” A look at a paper about mortality in sexual minorities.
• “Peer-review is another place where unkind, unethical and even abusive behaviours can manifest.” (Nature Plants)
• “It’s no surprise that, if scientists are given nearly uniformly positive media coverage, that they will start making bigger and bigger claims.” Andrew Gelman on “the competing narratives of scientific revolution.”
• A “Federal Rule Change Has Some Scholars Worried They’ll Be Priced Out of Their Own Research,” reports Joshua Hatch. (Chronicle of Higher Education)
• Chris Chambers and Pete Etchells take “a final look at the journey psychology has made toward becoming a robust and mature science” as The Guardian prepares to close the Science Blog Network.
• “Most papers still don’t address clinical questions, and the quality of the literature hasn’t really improved despite all the metrics, bells, and whistles that have been added, partly through journal requirements.” Richard Lehman reflects on two decades of reviewing what’s published in journals for BMJ readers. (Alison Tonks, The BMJ)
• “Online technologies make it easy to share precise experimental protocols—and doing so is essential to modern science.” (Lenny Teytelman, Nature)
• “Make research-paper databases multilingual,” says Daniel Prieto. (Nature)
• “NIH is investigating researchers who might have failed to disclose contributions from foreign governments,” reports Lev Facher. (STAT)
• “Is the pay-to-publish movement a good thing?” asks psychiatrist Carl Bell. (Clinical Psychiatry News)
• Did a whistleblower make up deaths at a psychiatric hospital? “Makgoba described the psychiatrist’s statements as damaging and false‚ adding that they amount to scientific fraud and scientific misconduct.” (Naledi Shange, Business Day)
• “We honestly didn’t think at the time that there would be all that much to write about.” Boy, were we wrong. Our co-founders talk to Kerry Banks of University Affairs about eight years of Retraction Watch.
• “In each case, the journal reports were based on the performance of a single trained dog.” Helen Branswell reports on what happened when studies made a comparison. (STAT)
• PLOS is shutting down PLOS Currents, “an experimental platform for rapid communication of non-standard publications.
• “The European Medicines Agency has scaled back its landmark clinical trial data policies, the drug regulator has announced.” (Peter Doshi, The BMJ)
• “Vitamin D, the Sunshine Supplement, Has Shadowy Money Behind It,” reports Liz Szabo for Kaiser Health News and the New York Times.
• “We found that many urologists on guideline panels receive money from industry and that a significant portion did not disclose all payments received.” (European Urology)
• “However, beyond the shocking scandals and newsworthy retractions, how bad is the problem [of plagiarism] for most journals?” (Pippa Smart, The Wiley Network)
• Weeks after a government official called a book on GDPR “authoritative,” it has been taken out of circulation because parts of it are wrong or plagiarized. (Private Eye, via Chris Stokel-Walker)
• “To keep authorship fair, journals in all fields should list authors based on their contribution rather than in alphabetical order.” (Gemma Conroy, Nature Index)
• At Nature, “referees have the right to view the data and code that underlie a work if it would help in the evaluation, even if these have not been provided.” Yet few do.
• “An article published Wednesday on The Intellectual — a public account on social app WeChat that focuses on science and the humanities — identified several papers purportedly written by high school students across the country that it says had already been published in academic journals.” (Cai Yiwen, Sixth Tone)
• “Nearly two-thirds of the 100 physicians who rake in the most money from 10 device manufacturers failed to disclose a conflict of interest in their academic writing in 2016, according to a study published Wednesday in JAMA Surgery.” (Rachel Bluth, Kaiser Health News)
• “Asia Argento may be famous, but she was not protected by tenure.” (Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic)
• Double-blind peer review is “linked to less successful editorial outcomes,” according to a new paper. (Barbara McGillivray and Elisa De Ranieri, Research Integrity and Peer Review)
• As a recent report by a UK House of Commons committee argues, “universities and publishers fixing errors and investigating misconduct should be celebrated and not seen as a badge of shame.” (Matt Hodgkinson, Hindawi blog)
• A study finds that “bot accounts play a major role in the science communication landscape on Twitter.” (Fereshteh Didegah, Niels Mejlgaard, and Mads P. Sorensen, Journal of Informetrics, sub req’d)
• “A simple software toolset can help to ease the pain of reproducing computational analyses,” reports Jeffrey Perkel. (Nature)

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