Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
The week at Retraction Watch featured a retraction for a prominent psychologist at Cornell, more than a dozen retractions for a former cardiac stem cell lab at Harvard, and a planned correction for a paper about academic career lifespans that earned a lot of news coverage. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
-
- “It was not known when Wang’s alleged misconduct occurred or what type of grants were involved, but school officials said the falsification involved passing off mouse cells as human cells and submitting results from experiments that were never performed.” A tenured faculty member is fired. (Dawn Rhodes, Chicago Tribune)
- “Illinois Regulators Are Investigating a Psychiatrist Whose Research With Children Was Marred by Misconduct,” reports Jodi Cohen of ProPublica. More on the case here.
- Should a journal publish the CRISPR babies paper? Find out what the editors of Science and JAMA say in STAT.
- “How do you publish the work of a scientific villain?” asks Megan Molteni in WIRED about the CRISPR babies paper.
- Lawyers for a Rice University professor say he wasn’t involved in the CRISPR baby experiments.
- An oft-criticized journal has republished a study first published in another journal, and then retracted in 2014, claiming to show that black children are at increased risk of autism following vaccination.
- “Was a Scientist Jailed After Discovering a Deadly Virus Delivered Through Vaccines?” (Alex Kasprak, Snopes)
- Derek Pyne, “who was suspended from Thompson Rivers University after speaking out against the publication of research in journals that are not peer reviewed will be resuming his job next month.” (The Canadian Press, via The Province)
- The chair of the U.S. EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee allowed an oil “lobbying group to proofread and copy edit his findings before they were published, according to his own acknowledgements.” (Scott Waldman, E&E News via Science)
- “Finally, the author concluded by saying they would pay me $1100 US dollars to thank me for ultimately accepting the papers.” A bribe for a journal editor. (Committee on Publication Ethics)
- “While it may seem amusing and clever to entrap colleagues in a hoax, the repercussions may have chronic and unintended consequences. Outright fraud may result in short term gain but will almost inevitably, quite simply, lead to the destruction of one’s career, along with the potential for exposure to criminal charges.” Thoughts on writing hoax papers, from Victor Grech. (Early Human Development, sub req’d)
- “Some scientists in Italy are up in arms over a donation from the organization that oversees the nation’s professional biology qualification to an advocacy group that opposes the country’s policy of mandatory childhood vaccination.” (Giorgia Guglielmi, Nature)
- The South Korea science ministry “alleges that KAIST leader Shin Sung-Chul made illegal payments to a California lab, but many scientists see a political purge.” (Mark Zastrow, Nature)
- Some are cheering the inclusion of professors from Greece on a list of highly cited scientists, but they should think again, says John Ioannidis. (Kathimerini, in Greek)
- “An investigation conducted by the Research Integrity Office of INSERM confirmed that some original images from these experiments are no longer available, and the laboratory computer was unsecure at the time of the original study.” An expression of concern in PLOS ONE.
- “Given that every attempt to make analyses and unpublished data public has failed, we have just uploaded all contents on Zenodo.” (BMJ Evidence-Based ‘Medicine)
- “Paradoxically, salvation of the research enterprise may lie in doing less research and in imbuing much of what’s published with the uncertainty it well deserves.” (Anish Koka, The Accad & Koka Report)
- “I accept that [Brian] Wansink may have been guilty of shoehorning data into preconceived patterns – and in the process may have mixed up some of the figures too. But if the latter is unforgivable, the former is surely research as normal.” Hmmm. (Times Higher Education)
- “[I]ndividual self-corrections—as opposed to unilateral correction attempts from other researchers—naturally come with a lower risk of hostile social interactions, and might be less stressful for all involved.” (PsyArXiv)
- How to stop salami slicing. (Jaroslaw Wawer, Accountability in Research, sub req’d)
- “Researchers in China who commit scientific misconduct could soon be prevented from getting a bank loan, running a company or applying for a public-service job.” (David Cyranoski, Nature)
- “Independent bodies – not universities – should investigate suspicions of scientific misconduct, says Matthias Egger.” (Horizons)
- “In recent years, there has been an uptick in [False Claims Act] suits brought against major academic research organizations related to false experimental data that was incorporated into grant requests and progress reports.” (Amanda Enyeart & Drew Elizabeth McCormick) Read about one such case here.
- How to spin negative trials: A “comprehensive approach to summarising, or even generating, cheery key opinion leader remarks in the face of disappointing results.” (The BMJ)
- Flawed proxies of quality: A “citation refuting a report is counted the same way as one supporting it.” (Josh Nicholson, STAT)
- “A former chemistry PhD candidate at Queen’s University in Canada who confessed to poisoning a colleague has beensentenced to seven years in prison.” (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Chemical & Engineering News)
- In cardiology, “women continue to be not well represented as first authors, senior authors, and in the number of publications.” (Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes)
- A retraction because “the paper was published without the correct paperwork and permissions from the Ministry of Health in Eritrea.” (Infection, Genetics and Evolution)
- “I know of colleagues, some with whom I have co-authored papers, who average one scientific peer-reviewed article per week, per week…” (Arjen Wals)
- “A predatory journal that was dumb enough to let me be on their editorial board now wants me as editor in chief,” says reporter Tom Spears.
- Cell Systems is now publishing peer reviews. Editor Quincey Justman explains why, and how.
- “In the case of Clarivate’s concern, it should have either suppressed journals or issued a public statement that it had undertaken an exhaustive investigation and could not find any cause for concern.” (Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen)
- “In a letter on Tuesday, [UCLA] campus officials asked faculty members to consider declining to review articles for Elsevier journals until negotiations ‘are clearly moving in a productive direction.'” (Lindsay Ellis, Chronicle of Higher Education)
- A professor settles a retaliation lawsuit with the University of Kentucky and will be able to return to campus. (Linda Blackford, Lexington Herald-Leader)
- “Yes, it is getting harder to publish in prestigious journals if you haven’t already,” according to a new study (Viviane Caller, Science)
- Can arts and crafts improve reproducibility? (Roger Kneebone, Claudia Schlegel and Alan Spivey, Nature)
- A new study says that “scientists are leaving academic work at unprecedented rate.” (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed) But the study may have lacked appropriate credit.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].