Weekend reads: Prominent doctors who don’t disclose conflicts, and the journals that enable them; a “nudge” study faces scrutiny

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The week at Retraction Watch featured two new names on our leaderboard, vindication for The Joy of Cooking, and a retraction for an antibiotic switcheroo. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Prominent Doctors Aren’t Disclosing Their Industry Ties in Medical Journal Studies,” write Charles Ornstein and Katie Thomas. “And Journals Are Doing Little to Enforce Their Rules.” (ProPublica/New York Times) As we wrote in STAT in September, “It seems clear, then, that it is time to take this responsibility away from journals, or at least add another layer.”
• This week, Psychological Science subjected a May 2018 paper on the “nudge effect” to a correction and an expression of concern. On Data Colada, Leif Nelson, Uri Simonsohn, and Frank Yu “spell out the data irregularities we uncovered that eventually led to the two postings from the journal today. We are not convinced that those postings are sufficient.” One of the authors responds.
• “Promotion factory?” Following reporting by the radio program Argos, Tilburg University is looking into how one retired professor supervised 77 external PhD theses over six years. (Universities Utrecht)
• The German Research Foundation has sanctioned two researchers, one for plagiarism and one for failing to spot data manipulation. One will lose a fellowship.
• Linkoping University says one of its former researchers “can be held accountable for misconduct in at least three scientific articles” and can be “criticised also for misuse of titles and affiliations, and for giving misleading information about his role and activities in several contexts.”
• “The Netherlands will radically shake up how academics are assessed and promoted, including a shift away from relying on citations and journal impact factors.” (David Matthews, Times Higher Education)
• Society and non-profit journals are worth preserving, says David Crotty. (The Scholarly Kitchen)
• “A modern day do-over of a mid-20th century pupillometry experiment raises the question: What should we make of a failed replication?” (Jop de Vrieze, Undark)
• “In [the University of California’s] battle with the world’s largest scientific publisher, the future of information is at stake,” writes Michael Hiltzik. (Los Angeles Times)
• A host of journal articles about a new class of drugs “indicates one of two possibilities: either we are at the brink of a revolution in medicine or that something went wrong with research published in numerous academic journals.” (BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine)
• Walter Willett “thinks [John] Ioannidis needs to go away, basically,” writes Tara Haelle. (Covering Health blog)
• “Industry is more alarmed about reproducibility than academia.” (Nature)
• The way Peter Gotzsche has been treated by the Cochrane governing board means they should all resign, says John Ioannidis.
• “Psychology’s Replication Crisis Has Made The Field Better,” writes Christie Aschwanden.
• “[O]ffshore investments can have impacts that diminish or negate the high-minded social experiments, education, and research backed by science funders,” reports Charles Piller. (Science)
• “It seems to us that transparent review is currently the best compromise, and we hope that, when it is well established, it will foster a more open environment where reviewers will feel more comfortable in revealing their identities.” (Genome Biology)
• How do institutions respond to scientific misconduct? A look at four cases. (Science and Public Policy)
• Tips from seven academics on how to do a good peer review. (Times Higher Education)
• A number of funders have signed a letter committing to implementation of ORCID.
• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy now has an entry on reproducibility.
• “Though many Indian journals have a good editorial and peer-review process, they still do not see themselves as ‘international’.” (Shubashree Desikan)
• “A prominent London geneticist has been cleared of research misconduct after a long-running investigation found evidence of deliberate wrongdoings by his laboratory group at UCL.” (Rachael Pells, Times Higher Education)
• A sentence that includes “joints, pipes, bongs, and blunts” may be F. Perry Wilson’s “favorite sentence ever to appear in a medical journal.” (Medscape)
• “Twenty-one (30%) of the potential predatory pathology journals had misleading titles mimicking those of legitimate journals.” (bioRxiv)
• “To Read More Papers, or to Read Papers Better? A Crucial Point for the Reproducibility Crisis.” (BioEssays)
• “NFL-funded research into the relationship of football and brain trauma is fundamentally conflicted.” (Kathleen Bachynski, Los Angeles Times)
• “Starting conversations around academic integrity takes effort, but it is worth the effort to help students avoid allegations of misconduct, and develop good practices early on, which is essential,” writes David Syncox. (University Affairs)
• “If registered reports ensure that clinical neuroscience research is more rigorous and reproducible, then we owe it to ourselves, the greater scientific enterprise and the public to adopt the practice.” (Lucinda Uddin, Spectrum)
• “Women are not well represented any of the databases, and remain underrepresented as authors in any position in aquaculture journals.” (bioRxiv)
• “Let’s require that any researcher making a claim in a study accompany it with their estimate of the chance that the claim is true — I call this a confidence index.” (Steven Goodman, Nature)
• “Does the paper contain any information likely to be of value to the enemy?” Here’s what peer review looked like in wartime, courtesy of the Royal Society of the UK.
• “The nature of peer review remains the author’s choice, and peer review is better than no peer review.” (Kenneth Frumkin, Emergency Medicine News)
• “The president of LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis, Tenn., has been accused of plagiarizing a famous pastor during her convocation speech to new freshmen in October.” (Emma Whitford, Inside Higher Ed)
• “The current low rate of preprint submissions in life sciences and [early career researchers’] concerns regarding preprinting needs to be addressed.” (PeerJ)

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