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The week at Retraction Watch featured eight retractions at once for a biochemist in Spain; a researcher who lost her medical license for her misconduct; and news of an upcoming retraction in a food journal. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- A Rice University scientist was far more involved in the “CRISPR babies” in China experiment than previously thought, reports Jane Qui. (STAT) Also: A Nobelist knew of the CRISPR’d babies experiment long before it became public. (AP)
- In a new report, Clarivate Analytics — the company behind the Impact Factor — draws “attention to the information that is lost when data about researchers and their institutions are squeezed into a simplified metric or league table.”
- “Peer-review is a game — with a dollop of talent and an abundance of chance.” (Milton Packer, MedPage Today)
- A “newish ‘quarterly review of science’ sometimes muddies the waters between science and political ideology. It is funded by Peter Thiel.” (Adam Becker, Undark) And: “There have been efforts to create false or misleading ‘journals’ in order to promote questionable research or even conspiracy theories in the past, says Ivan Oransky…” (Michael Coren, Quartz)
- “The 177-word correction comes after a Star investigation that exposed flaws in medical publishing, including the inability and unwillingness of journals and research institutions to correct and preserve the integrity of the scientific record.” (Michele Henry, Rachel Mendleson, The Toronto Star)
- “The implications of an intellectual conflict of interest can be profound,” writes Maurie Markman. (OncLive)
- “Plan U would establish preprint servers as the de facto means for disseminating all scientific research, as has long been the case in fields covered by arXiv.”
- Don’t call studies “underpowered,” says Richard Morey. (Medium)
- “How to write effectively for international journals.” (Simon Wang, Yongyan Li, Nature)
- “An animal rights group has sued UC Davis and the University of California to try and force the campus to release video footage and photographs of monkey experiments the group says must be made public under state law.” (Nanette Asimov, San Francisco Chronicle)
- “A former professor for USC’s School of Dentistry is suing his ex-employer, alleging he was fired in 2017 in retaliation for complaining that most of his freshman students’ grades were altered by a supervisor without his consent.” (City News Service, via NBC Los Angeles)
- “Should plagiarism be a bar to presidency?” asks Ararat Osipian. (Times Higher Education)
- “Evaluating research and researchers by the journal impact factor: Is it better than coin flipping?” (Ricardo Brito, Alonso Rodríguez-Navarro, Journal of Informetrics)
- “[P]apers submitted at weekends are less successful than papers submitted during the week,” according to a look at the literature by James Hartley. (LSE Impact Blog)
- Could a lottery for research funding “reduce the rate of false discoveries?” A new paper in OSF Preprints says yes, with caveats.
- “More than 50 scientists defend the validity of López Otín’s work after the withdrawal of eight of his articles.” (C.G. Lucio, L. Tardon, El Mundo) Background about these eight retractions here.
- “Chris Graf asks: what happens to research quality when we change the peer review and the research publishing model?” (Research Information)
- Yale University “has hired a former U.S. attorney to investigate sexual misconduct complaints against a former psychiatry professor at the Yale School of Medicine,” Eugene Redmond, reports Ed Stannard. (New Haven Register)
- An IRB “disciplines an academic prankster. But is it constitutional?” (Charlotte Allen, Wall Street Journal)
- “We found that most unicorns published very little in the peer-reviewed literature.” Eli Cahan, Ioana Cristea, and John Ioannidis argue that peer review can catch the next Theranos. (STAT)
- The relationship between open access and pharmaceutical companies is…complicated. (Richard Smith, The BMJ blog) (Smith is a member of the board of directors of a our parent non-profit organization.)
- The Korean studies program at Columbia is facing scrutiny after plagiarism charges against Charles Armstrong, one of its faculty. (Khadija Hussain, Columbia Spectator)
- A new documentary shows “the high cost of experimentation without ethics.” (Washington Post)
- Should a journal have published a 2010 paper on ESP by Cornell’s Daryl Bem? Andrew Gelman muses.
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Re He Jiankui and Michael Deem, the latter told the press he owns a “small stake” in two genetics companied founded by He. Were the “CRISPR babies” just about claiming to be first to do gene editing in humans by someone blind to the ethical issues that are the real reason it had not been done before by any number of competent scientists? Or was it about He becoming internationally famous for a world-first “accomplishment”, thereby making it easier for him to get investors to put money in his companies?
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/rice-university-professor-helped-generate-crisprd-babies–65148/amp
“But, Oransky said, Inference doesn’t fit neatly into the same category as the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. Inference doesn’t claim to be peer-reviewed, and purports to be non-ideological. Rather, its editors grant writer plenty of leeway to publish their views…” It needs to be reminded that in the middle of the 20th century Science magazine was also not peer-reviewed, and in 1936 it published a one-page article of one Hans Selye, which effectively launched his career as the “father of stress”. In 1961, Science proudly published Selye’s animal model of “calciphylaxis” on its cover, picturing a rat shedding its calcified skin after a compound “stress” Selye subjected it to. How, in this case, is Science different from “misleading “journals” [created] in order to promote questionable research”?
The 1936 paper was in Nature, not Science. The 1961 issue of Science in which Selye published a paper called “Cutaneous Molt Induced by Calciphylaxis in the Rat” (December 8, 1961) does not appear to have any cover that shows a rat shedding its skin, but I admit the resolution is so poor that I could be mistaken.
Because they improve since then.
Believe me, “stress” is not the only Science’s successful injection of non-existent scientific entities into the collective mind of the general public “since then”. However, it is extremely difficult to reverse the effect of their past actions.
“I only have one example from 50 years ago, so I will vaguely allude to more and suggest that a mistake from decades ago can never be fixed.”
It is a good example. It has never been fixed. Isn’t “stress” a household word? While we are talking, can you tell what breed was Selye’s rat? What breed was Pavlov’s dog? Now go to Science and try to find which mouse strain was used in one of those papers that made the lines in the general press.