Weekend reads: How one scientist polluted the literature; a dog earns an authorship; poisoning in the lab

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The week at Retraction Watch featured a retraction that took three years even after the university and corresponding author requested it; a story of misconduct in a paper about preservatives and obesity; and more about that image of Donald Trump in baboon poop. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Despite the commonly held belief in the power of peer-review and the ability of academic publishing to root out cases of misconduct and fraud, Oransky describes ‘the vaunted self-correction mechanism of science’ as one that is ‘held together by spit and bubble gum.'” An investigation by the Toronto Star into the work of Gideon Koren.
• A dog “earned a spot on the paper because she ‘attended all meetings, provided support and care work, [and] kept authors from taking themselves too seriously,’ Liboiron says.” How to assign authorship. (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Science)
• “[Y]ukai Yang, a 22-year-old chemistry major formerly at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, who is also from China, was accused of poisoning his roommate with thallium and possibly other chemicals.” (Rebecca Trager, Chemistry World)
• “But today the authors retracted their paper, noting that they had failed to account for a change in how the survey asked about weight loss efforts starting in 1999.” A retraction and replacement in JAMA. (Reuters Health)
• “A scientific journal has deleted an illustration of baboon feces adorned with a tiny image of U.S. President Donald Trump’s face — but a science reporter says they owe readers an explanation as to how it got there in the first place.” Our Ivan Oransky talks to the CBC’s As It Happens.
• “This article has been retracted by the editor in chief on grounds of fraudulent reporting .” Time for emojis in retraction notices? Another gem from the BMJ’s Christmas issue.
• A researcher turns the tables, preying on a predatory journal. (Caleb Lack, Center For Inquiry)
• “Train a network to classify papers (accept/reject). Then run the network on the paper describing the network, and it classifies the paper as a strong reject.” Chethan Pandarinath wonders about a new preprint.
• “Dr. Liao stated that the ‘paper was first submitted to the 4^th World Water Congress of the International Water Association, Marrakesh, Morocco, September 19–24,’ and that, ‘there was no response from IWA for a long time after the conference. Thus, [we] believed that IWA would not publish it. Then, [we] rewrote it and submitted it to Environmental Engineering Science.'” A detailed retraction notice in Environmental Engineering Science.
• “This systematic review of eight observational studies suggests that [professional medical writing support] PMWS increases the overall quality of reporting of clinical trials and may improve the timeliness of publication.” Lots of caveats, though, particularly the fact that researchers who pay for such support are by definition more interested in publishing their results than those who don’t. (bioRxiv)
• “Taylor & Francis has confirmed that the Chinese import agencies deemed six articles in the ASR objectionable,” the association’s executive committee said in a statement. “We asked the publisher to identify the articles in question, but T&F denied our request on the grounds that this information is commercially sensitive.” More censorship in China. (Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed)
• “A court in Germany has dismissed a high-profile case of alleged animal cruelty brought against neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis, less than three weeks before hearings were scheduled to begin.” (Alison Abbott, Nature)
• “The publication of the article was unsatisfied for other coauthors and members of the discipline who have spent years researching saliva research and mentioned in the article, without them being mentioned among the coauthors. Instead, coauthors appear in the article that I do not know, with which we have not collaborated and who have not contributed to writing this article.” (Romanian Journal of Oral Rehabilitation)
• “Concerns have also been raised that one of the reviewers was added to this article as an author after revision.” (Trials)
• The Everything Hertz podcast interviews “microbiologist Elisabeth Bik about about the detection of problematic images in scientific papers, the state of microbiome research, and making the jump from academia to industry.”
• “According to Google, my H-index is 48, which means that I have 48 papers that have at least 48 citations. I don’t like being reduced by a single number, but there are people on this planet who think of me in terms of a single number.” Rethinking metrics. (SwissInfo)
• A new set of guidelines “serve to outline the respective responsibilities of researchers, institutions, agencies, and publishers or editors in maintaining the integrity of the research record.” (Research Integrity and Peer Review)
• A look at one political science journal’s efforts to promote replication “documents not only the importance of requiring the transparent publication of replication materials but also the strong need for in-house review of these materials prior to publication.” (Nicholas Eubank, The Political Methodologist)
• “Sometimes a failure to replicate a study isn’t a failure at all,” writes Bethany Brookshire. (Science News)
• “The result casts doubt on the hypothesis that human longevity can be greatly extended beyond current limits.” (news release) See background here.
• A small study posted on bioRxiv finds that “double-blind review does not benefit female authors and may, in the long run, be detrimental.” On Twitter, not everyone is convinced the results will hold up.
• XKCD takes on scientific publishing.
• “The sheer enormity, diversity, and complexity of the academic research enterprise ensure that any overview of academic misconduct, misrepresentation and gaming (MMG), however long, may struggle to capture all the facets of the issue.” A special issue of Research Policy (sub req’d) is a start.
• A board that oversees the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) in Geneva, Switzerland, the global command center in the fight against the infectious disease, has resisted calls to immediately recommend the firing of the agency’s executive director in the wake of a report that found UNAIDS rife with harassment, bullying, and abuses of power. (Jon Cohen, Science)
• “Brewaucracy Ltd. would like to retract the statement made in error by one of its Directors that ‘Brewaucracy will never brew an IPA’.” Finally, a beer for Retraction Watch fans.
• “Factors around today’s science create a petri dish for misconduct to thrive.” (David Thompson and Alexander Clark, American Journal of Medicine)
• You might say the author of these now-retracted papers reprised a Song without ever naming the tune.
• The head of the Institute of World History at Charles University is stepping down in the wake of accusations of plagiarism, lodged by three doctoral students at the philosophical faculty.” (Brian Kenety, Radio Praha)
• “The couple had argued their convictions should be overturned because they had performed research and published the results in scientific journals, despite admitting their proposals for government funding were fake,” reports Crystal Owen. (Tampa Bay Business Journal)
• A former University of Alabama crystallographer H.M. Krishna Murthy, who earned a 10-year ban on Federal funding, is up to 10 retractions, the latest in Cell. The Totals can be found here. The Background on the case can be found here.
• “A study that disappeared into Medtronic’s archives for more than five years contained evidence of potentially deadly problems with the use of the company’s Infuse bone-growth product during neck surgery.” (Joe Carlson,Jim Spencer, Minneapolis Star-Tribune.)
• “The disappearance of her papers online earned her the nickname Professor 404 in Chinese social media, named after the 404 error messages that shows up when a web page can no longer be found.” (CGTN)
• “Swaminathan was taken aback by the ferocity of the dissent and what he views as personal attacks not grounded in evidence, he tells Science Insider. ‘In science, I express a view, you contradict me, I accept both,’ he says. ‘I don’t say: ‘You are bad, I’m good.’”” (Gayathri Vaidynathan, Science)
• “Most leading medical journals do not offer to authors reporting commercially funded research an open access licence that allows unrestricted sharing and adaptation of the published material.” (bioRxiv)
• “Dr. Baselga did not adhere to the high standards pertaining to conflict of interest disclosures that the A.A.C.R. expects of its leadership.” An editor resigns. (New York Times/ProPublica)
• “Scientists who travel to meetings are more likely to co-author papers than are those who stay at home.” (Paul Smaglik, Nature)
• More than half of over 1,000 social science journals “do not have an established authorship definition,” according to a new paper. (Scientometrics, sub req’d)
• “The separation of powers is as important in academic publishing as it is in government.” (Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen)
• “The increasing production of papers and a propensity to cite compatriots makes China likely to win the referencing race.” (Larivière, Gong, Sugimoto, Nature Index)
• “It’s not a replication crisis. It’s an innovation opportunity.” Jon Brock talks to Glenn Begley. (Medium)
• “The reproducibility crisis is driven, in part, by invalid statistical analyses that are from data-driven hypotheses—the opposite of how things are traditionally done.” (Kai Zhang, Pacific Standard)
• Here’s how one editor chooses peer reviewers. (Stephen B. Heard, Scientist Sees Squirrel)

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