Weekend reads: A call for 400 retractions of papers on organ donors; “citation mania;” AAAS reassessing award for work on herbicide

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The week at Retraction Watch featured the tale of the reviewer who told authors to cite him if they wanted their paper accepted; a case of a paper stolen during peer review; and questions about whether retraction notices should credit readers by name. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• A paper “has called for the mass retraction of more than 400 scientific papers on organ transplantation, amid fears the organs were obtained unethically from Chinese prisoners.”
• “The growth in citations has also exposed some positive and negative implications in scientific research.” ACS Energy Letters editor Prashant Kamat reflects on “citation mania.”
• “The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is cancelling plans to honour two Sri Lankan researchers who attempted to link a kidney disease epidemic in Sri Lanka to the glyphosate herbicide.” (Sunday Times in Sri Lanka)
• “The letter reveals that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, recently asked federal investigators to review 12 allegations of rule violations, mostly involving researchers at U.S. universities who allegedly failed to disclose foreign affiliations on their grant proposals.” (David Malakoff, Science)
• The University of Bristol, at the request of the UK Health Research Authority, “is investigating a number of studies conducted by Professor Esther Crawley” on chronic fatigue syndrome. (David Tuller, the Virology Blog)
• A former university provost who sued her alma mater “after an adversary accused her of plagiarism — has settled…for nearly $700,000.” (Chicago Sun-Times)
• How much difference is there, really, between horse urine and horse plasma? Well… (Archives of Pharmacal Research)
• “Officials at Stanford University have opened an investigation into what several high-profile faculty members knew about a Chinese effort to create gene-edited babies led by a onetime researcher at the California school, He Jiankui.” (Antonio Regalado, Technology Review)
• Forging an author’s name — not so rare: “Retraction Watch, an online publication that tracks academic misconduct, has documented more than 300 cases in the last decade.” (Todd Ackerman, Houston Chronicle)
• Free University Berlin has decided to strip German politician Frank Steffel of his PhD, following plagiarism allegations.
• “I’ve been doing oral histories with scientists to uncover the moments when they began to realize that the discrepancies they were seeing were part of a larger problem,” says Radcliffe scholar Nicole C. Nelson, who “probes key moments in [the] reproducibility crisis.”
• Journals crack down on undisclosed conflicts of interest: “It is now insufficient simply to add the missing competing interests to the article.” (Diane Kelsall, CMAJ)
• “India is protesting the way the U.S. Department of Homeland Security created a fake university in suburban Detroit in an effort to identify undocumented immigrants who might seek to enroll.” (Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed)
• How about “a ‘traffic light’ retraction system to help remove the stigma of honest mistakes?” (Everything Hertz podcast)
• “Karnatak University has constituted a four-member committee to inquire into the charges of harassment and plagiarism” against one of its professors. (Times of India)
• “Fighting fake science: Barriers and solutions.” Join our Ivan Oransky and others for a webinar on February 26.
• Elisabeth Bik, an eagle-eyed image sleuth, finds duplication everywhere, including some unexpected places.
• “We need to talk about systematic fraud,” says Jennifer Byrne, a scientist in Australia who has helped develop software to detect such issues. (Nature)
• An Indian government proposal to pay researchers “to have their studies published and ideas patented,” says Sudhakar Srivastava, is “a welcome step.” (The Wire)
• “‘You might want to look at this’. That’s how it all started.” David Nunan tells the story behind a 2013 retraction of a paper on salt and heart failure. (CEBM)
• “Can machines determine the credibility of research claims? The Center for Open Science joins a new DARPA program to find out.”
• Two journals say they will note allegations of sexual abuse by an author. (Stephanie Lee, BuzzFeed)
• Rules for who can compete as a female athlete are based on a flawed scientific foundation,” and a paper behind them should be retracted, says a new study.
• John Dingell, who served in the U.S. Congress for nearly 60 years, and was known in scientific circles for his aggressive pursuit of the David Baltimore case, has died. He was 92. (Emma Brown, Washington Post)
• “The life of a professional scientific journal editor is exciting, challenging, and intellectually stimulating, but it requires a thick skin.” (Nature Methods)
• “What is the single major threat to research integrity?” Experts weigh in. (Clinical Chemistry)
• Among 619 randomized controlled trials published in seven high-impact anesthesiology journals, only 24 (4%) had data sharing statements in the manuscript.” (Journal of Clinical Epidemiology)
• “Bitcoin for the biological literature: Scientific publishing is increasingly adopting the technology underlying cryptocurrencies.” (Douglas Heaven, Nature)
• “A substantial minority of physician-editors receive payments from industry within any given year, sometimes quite large.” (PLOS ONE) We interviewed the lead author of this paper when it was a preprint in 2017.
• “Can word patterns from grant abstracts predict National Science Foundation (NSF) funding?” (David Markowitz, Journal of Language and Social Psychology)
• “Studies led by two females, indeed, are 26 per cent more likely to report on both male and female models than those that are not.” (Daphne Prince-Ringuet, WIRED)
• “The Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative is a systematic, multi-center effort to repeat between 60 and 100 experiments: the project will focus on a set of common laboratory methods, repeating each experiment in three different laboratories.” (eLife)

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