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This week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of happiness, an apology from a journal, and bad news for a lab with a high “level of disorganization.” Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “Half his board, he explained unhappily, had told him that unless he pulled the article, they would all resign and ‘harass the journal’ he had founded 25 years earlier ‘until it died.’ Faced with the loss of his own scientific legacy, he had capitulated.” An article on a controversial topic disappears. without a trace. (Theodore Hill, Quillette)
- “I am requesting a silent retraction of this paper…You may wish to consult with your legal advisors, but unless I get a retraction I will hand it over to my lawyer…” (Newsroom)
- All 10 senior editors of the journal Nutrients resigned last month, alleging that the publisher, MDPI, “pressured them to accept manuscripts of mediocre quality and importance.” (Jop de Vrieze, Science)
- “Peer review is no substitute for fact-checking.” The likely mistaken history of the vibrator. (The Atlantic)
- Arturo Casadevall and Ferric Fang have “a seven-point approach to reengineering the scientific literature so that it is better able to prevent and correct its failures.” (Journal of Clinical Investigation)
- Starting in 2020, European science funders will require grantees to publish in open access journals. (Martin Enserink, Science)
- Taylor & Francis has divested from its journal Prometheus, following a dispute. (Rachael Pells, Times Higher Education)
- “Repressive Experiences ‘Rare but Real’ in China Studies,” reports Elizabeth Redden. (Inside Higher Ed)
- Two of three authors “had not agreed to be listed in this article’s byline, and…the article had been submitted…without their explicit approval.”
- “A former data registry director and assistant psychiatry professor at the University of Utah has been awarded damages in a whistleblower protection case…” (Ben Lockhart, KSL)
- “Corruption, the Lack of Academic Integrity and Other Ethical Issues in Higher Education: What Can Be Done Within the Bologna Process?” Is that anything like salami slicing? (Elena Denisova-Schmidt, European Higher Education Area: The Impact of Past and Future Policies)
- “In fact, Nature Communications lost several reliable reviewers in chemistry when the referees were told their unsigned reviews would be made public if the author opted for it.” (Nature)
- “Can a researcher who (or whose byline) is not well-established, lose credit for an original idea?” (Praveen Chaddha, The Wire)
- “I think what everyone has to understand is that unhealthy discussion leads to unsuccessful funding applications, with referees pointing out that there is a controversy in the matter.” Katarina Zimmer digs into the Smart Flares controversy. (The Scientist)
- “Billed as a documentary, Paywall would be more accurately described as an advocacy film.” Richard Poynder reviews the recently released movie about scholarly publishing for Nature.
- Brian McNaughton wanted a raise. So he made up an offer letter from another university. And then he “reached a plea deal this week that will allow his case to be dismissed in a year if he remains law abiding and completes 100 hours of community service.” (Jack Stripling and Megan Zahneis, The Chronicle of Higher Education)
- Can anyone parse this notice? “This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors-in-Chief of the Journal of the Affective Disorders, as the choice of data analyzed was found to be inaccurate after updated data was provided by the authors, and this had a significant impact on the original article data and conclusions.”
- “An article in a BMJ journal that criticised a Cochrane review on human papillomavirus vaccine made allegations that were not warranted and gave an inaccurate and sensationalised report of the review’s findings, say Cochrane’s two top editors.” It’s one group of Cochrane editors vs. another group of Cochrane editors. (Nigel Hawkes, The BMJ)
- The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) isending its print edition.
- A group in China has earned a second retraction. Here’s the first.
- If you’ve never heard of the Schön scandal, Douglas Natelson thinks that’s wrong.
- “Data thug” James Heathers has confessions to make. (Two Psychologists Four Beers podcast)
- “In any case, we don’t talk enough about failure, so here’s mine.” (Eiko Fried)
- “That’s right, we made a dreadful mistake in processing a paper for minimizing such mistakes. Boy, do I feel like a fraud.” (Jeff Rouder)
- “Plagiarism has had a comfortable place in Thailand for as long as I can remember, in music, literature, design, education and even politics.” (Surasak Glahan, Bangkok Post)
- “This evidence points to serious, systematic and large-scale fabrication of research results. It has come to our attention that in the meantime, three of these manuscripts were submitted to other journals (two of those submissions simultaneously with our journal!) and were published between March and June of this year. We have contacted and informed the respective journals of our concerns.” Jana Christopher describes how FEBS Letters uncovered likely image manipulation.
- “What and who are medical journals for?” asks Richard Smith.
- The Pasteur Institute has cleared Karolinska Institutet rector Ole Petter Ottersen of misconduct allegations regarding a 1999 paper in the Journal of Neuroscience. (Karolinska release)
- What does this mean, OMICS? An article “accepted for publication…considering the statements provided in the article as personal opinion of the author which was found not having any or biasness towards anything.” Is it even the right article? (Journal of Arthritis)
- “Drug companies routinely tweak their clinical trial designs in ways that seem designed to obtain opportune results. Very often, the FDA doesn’t mind.” (Dan Robitzski, Ashley Lyles & Cici Zhang, Undark)
- “Our results show that [questionable research practice] use is not particularly widespread among students according to their own reports, with less than 20% indicating having engaged in more than one.” (PLOS ONE)
- “It’s a sign of how bad things have got that researchers think it’s acceptable to write this in a Nature journal: ‘we continuously increased the number of animals until statistical significance was reached to support our conclusions.'” (Adrian Barnett)
- “‘A large grain of salt’: Why journalists should avoid reporting on most food studies.” (Kelly Crowe, CBC)
- “The correspondence allegedly reveals that the CEO of the Food and Grocery Council used an intermediary PR company to produce blog posts that denigrated a senior academic psychiatrist advocating for alcohol policy consistent with World Health Organization recommendations.” (Jennie Connor, Kypros Kypri, Drug and Alcohol Review, sub req’d)
- A look at citation sentiment — whether citations to retracted papers are positive or negative — that draws on our retraction database. (by David Ciudad, presented by Daniel Ecer)
Theodore Hill’s article is very interesting. The more the academic left does this kind of thing to papers like the case for colonialism and the transgender one, the more censorship ammunition they give to the right. Someone needs to tell these people about the Streisand effect because I wouldn’t have read any of these papers without their complaints.
The way the journal made Hill’s article disappear is scandalous, but on the other hand accepting it to be published in the first place is beyond strange. The article (or at least the version on arxiv) is not at all like mathematical research articles that the journal normally carries.
It’s a lose-lose situation once the work has been published. Ignore valid, widespread criticisms and stand behind substandard research? Ignore one’s own rights to free speech to continue promoting research despite reputational consequences of remaining associated with it? Or do something about it and get accused of playing politics by “censorship” concern trolls? What’s one to do? Someone needs to remind them that “free speech” doesn’t entitle anyone to their desired platform. None of these incidents make a cogent argument to establish that any research is being silenced — indeed, it’s all still out there where we can read it.
Regarding the Nature article about publishing peer-review reports: As research methods become increasingly specialized, there is a decreasing fraction of readers who can fully evaluate the results of any paper in their sub-field. Peer-review reports are sometimes very useful in helping readers evaluate a paper, especially limitations that the authors do not highlight.
Also, I don’t understand the objections to publication of (anonymous) peer-review reports. To me, they seem overblown.
The paper didn’t go down the “memory hole”. It was rejected by a journal, albeit in an unusual way. Maybe the journal should have handled things differently, but let’s not exaggerate it into an Orwellian dystopia. I for one don’t go crying censorship every time I get a desk rejection or bad reviews.
“Published and disappeared” and “rejected” are not the same thing.
I’ve had papers rejected too. I don’t have the expertise to evaluate whether this paper should have gotten up or not. I just wish that it had been rejected or published in a normal way.
With PNAS ending its printed edition as of January 2019, one can conclude that this esteemed Journal, hypothetically, will no longer be immune from the peculiar events described under the top bullet point of the list above.
Benson Farb, one of the editors of the New York Journal of Mathematics has his problems with Hill’s article
https://www.math.uchicago.edu/~farb/statement
“At the request of several editors, the editor-in-chief pulled the paper temporarily on 11/9/17 so that the entire editorial board could discuss these concerns. A crucial component of such a discussion are the reports by experts judging the novelty and quality of the mathematics in Hill’s paper. The editor who handled the paper was asked to share these reports with the entire board. My doubts about the paper – and the process – grew when repeated requests for the reports went unanswered. Nearly 3 months passed until the two reports were finally shared with the entire board on 2/7/18. The reports themselves were not from experts on the topic of the paper. They did not address our concerns about the substantive merit of the paper.
After these reports were shared, the entire board discussed what do. For many of us, there was no compelling evidence that Hill’s paper was appropriate for NYJM. Further, the evidence that the paper had undergone rigorous scrutiny before being accepted was scant. In light of this, the board voted (by a 2-to-1 ratio) to rescind the paper. ”
This is prime Retraction Watch stuff. It also echos of a number of such cases where editors have jackhorned nonsense into reputable journals.