Weekend reads: Fishy research on fishes; was “Sokal Squared” misconduct?; the misuse of metrics

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The week at Retraction Watch featured a criminology professor who has had four papers retracted for plagiarism; a paper on fake news retracted for an error; and plagiarism in abstracts submitted to…a research integrity conference. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• • “A collage of 50 lionfish was supposed to dampen questions over concerns around the academic rigour of former star James Cook University research student Oona Lonnstedt. Instead, the colourful photograph has prompted only more questions.” (Graham Lloyd, The Australian, sub req’d) Background here.
  • “A controversial science paper that the US government asked — over a year ago — be retracted has now, indeed, been retracted,” reports John Fiorillo (IntraFish). The paper is not yet marked as retracted. Background here.
  • Did an author of the “Sokal squared” hoax papers commit misconduct? (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed) Worth a revisit: How German authorities handled another hoax paper. And more from Jesse Singal in New York Magazine.
  • Pakistan’s requirements for salaries, appointments, and promotions have “contributed to the proliferation of fake journals, plagiarism and citation rackets,” says Anjum Altaf. (Emaan Majed and Bilal Anwar, The Wire)
  • “Researchers in Indonesia are up in arms about a metric introduced in 2017 by the nation’s government to measure productivity and performance of academic researchers and institutions—and that is now being used to decide which researchers should receive funding for research and scholarships.” (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, C&EN)
  • “Earlier this month, the Belgian university announced it would downplay competitive, bureaucratically determined metrics of publications and citations used to determine funding decisions.” (Financial Times, sub req’d)
  • “At the highest level, this is a story about science working the way it should over time,” says our Ivan Oransky of a retraction of a study about “fake news” from Nature Human Behaviour. (Jordan Pearson, Motherboard)
  • “‘I believe there is very broad support among the faculty for the multiple steps that CSHL is taking in response to Watson’s horrific comments,’ CSHL biologist Justin Kinney, who has been a vocal critic of those comments, told STAT.” (Sharon Begley)
  • “It is indeed surprising for me that nobody noticed this simple error for three centuries since publication in 1726.” Toshio Kuroki examines the physiology of Gulliver’s Travels. (The Journal of Physiological Sciences)
  • “A former Lehigh University student accused of trying to poison his roommate was ordered jailed without bail on Friday after authorities alleged he sought to flee to his native China by orchestrating his own deportation.” (Riley Yates, Allentown Morning Call)
  • “A translation scholar has cancelled plans for her book to be published after she refused the Hong Kong publisher’s request to edit politically sensitive contents.” (Kris Cheng, Hong Kong Free Press)
  • “Chicago State has agreed to pay $650,000 in damages and attorneys fees to professors Robert Bionaz and Phillip Beverly, concluding yet another costly litigation involving the Far South Side institution in recent years. The professors alleged that the university violated their free speech rights in repeatedly attempting to shut down their blog, CSU Faculty Voice, which they billed as ‘the faculty’s uncensored voice.'” (Dawn Rhodes, Chicago Tribune)
  • “Prof Finnis, who teaches as emeritus professor of law and legal philosophy at University College, responded to the petition by claiming there was ‘not a ‘phobic’ sentence’ in all of his published works.” (Aidan Lonergan, The Irish Times)
  • “The peer review activities of academics in UK universities should be measured by the research excellence framework if the practice is to be taken seriously by scholars and managers, according to a senior academic.” (Rachael Pells, Times Higher Education)
  • “Certainly, the model needs to evolve in order for publishers to persuade researchers that mega-journals add significant value to the scholarly communications ecosystem.” (Jenny Fry and Simon Wakeling, LSE Impact Blog)
  • “[T]rials were more likely to be positive if an author had received honoraria or consulting fees from the sponsoring drug company.” A report on a new study from Janis C. Kelly. (Medscape)
  • “Is self-plagiarism (recycling text from your own prior work) a problem?” A poll. (Brahmajee Nallamothu)
  • “While open access to peer-reviewed publications is important for achieving open science, this is just one part of the solution; data and study materials that underpin findings also need to be as open as possible.” (Marcus Munafò and Neil Jacobs, Times Higher Education)
  • “Due to improper and wrong conclusions caused by incomplete and imperfect studies, it has been decided to retract this paper and resubmit the work after thorough scientific analysis.” A retraction from Optics and Laser Engineering.
  • “When the authors contacted the journal to correct Fig 7B, they also notified the journal of an additional duplication affecting Fig 2B and 8B.” An expression of concern in PLOS ONE.
  • “[C]hinese graduate students or visitors have taken intellectual property from American laboratories and given it to Chinese scientists.” (Robert Pear, New York Times)
  • Female sources quoted by the Science news team increased from 20% to more than 30% during 2018, says editor in chief Jeremy Berg. (Science)
  • “The most concerning result in the trial so far is that late-career last researchers appear to be more successful than their early- and mid-career colleagues in passing the initial evaluation into peer review.”Early results of a peer review experiment at eLife.
  • “A UW-Oshkosh professor recently sued her university and the UW System Board of Regents to prevent them from releasing to the Wisconsin State Journal records relating to an investigation of alleged plagiarism by the professor.” (Kelly Meyerhofer, Wisconsin State Journal)
  • Four months after resigning from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center because of failure to disclose conflicts of interest, Jose Baselga has landed at Astra Zeneca. (Noor Zainab Hussain, Arathy S Nair, Reuters)
  • “Magazines such as Nature and Science…are a different offering altogether; you pick them up for entertainment purposes in your downtime.” (Times Higher Education)
  • “Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned the Chinese government’s censorship of academic journals that the British publishing house Taylor & Francis provides to Chinese libraries.” (Ekklesia)
  • “Regardless of whether men are more likely than women to engage in authorship malpractices and [fake peer review], it seems that, alike to researchers guilty of fraud, extreme perpetrators are mostly men.” (Horacio Rivera, Journal of Korean Medical Science)
  • “President Akufo-Addo’s disgraceful plagiarism on January 7th 2017, set the tone for plagiarism in this country. Since then, almost every project of the erstwhile Mahama regime is either plagiarized or left to rot. The Kumasi International Airport has been plagiarized; the Tema Motorway Expansion Project has been plagiarized; the Accra Digital Centre Project has been plagiarized among others.” (Dauda Assibid, Modern Ghana)
  • The former head of Taiwan’s foremost research institution has been cleared of accepting shares as a bribe for helping a Taiwanese biopharmaceutical firm. (Andrew Silver, Nature)
  • “Indian scientists have criticized two speakers at a major conference for making bizarre, unscientific claims, including that ancient Hindus invented stem-cell science.” (T.V. Padma, Nature)
  • “Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) said on Thursday that it was considering adopting measures to require the disclosure of serious offenses committed by people in the academic sector as part of government efforts to wipe out wrongdoings in academia.” (Focus Taiwan)
  • “Sixty four senior academic staffs of Kyambogo University have been dropped from the list of research grants beneficiaries over plagiarism.” (Daily Monitor)
  • “Learning to handle failure is just part of scientific life, writes Eileen Parkes.” (Nature)

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