Weekend reads: Article retracted because of “racial characterizations;” India’s high retraction rate; meet the fraud finder

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The week at Retraction Watch featured a judge’s ruling that a university could not revoke a PhD; an author who stole a manuscript during peer review; and corrections because a researcher threatened to sue for using his scale. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “After facing sharp criticism from readers, the journal Neurology has retracted an essay about a patient encounter that it acknowledged ‘contains racist characterizations.'” (Ivan Oransky, Medscape)
• “Papers by Indian scientists are retracted at about twice the rate of papers from the US, according to an analysis using data from Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks academic misconduct.” (Gayathri Vaidyanathan, Nature)
• Elisabeth Bik “has identified more than a thousand fraudulent images, and her work has led at least one journal to change the way it screens submissions.”
• “In addition to creating a delusion of development by inflating a publication bubble, Iran’s productionist approach to research is primarily responsible for the growth and entrenchment of various forms of misconduct that are spreading throughout the universities like wildfire.” (The Stanford Iran 2040 Project)
• “Now, a systematic effort to find out whether major journals are complying with their own pledge to ensure that outcomes are reported correctly has found many are falling down on the job—and both journals and authors are full of excuses.” (Jocelyn Kaiser, Science) Howard Bauchner, The editor in chief of JAMA, one of the journals analyzed, tells Retraction Watch: “I appreciate all efforts to improve the reporting of RCTs, including those of the COMPare project.” Read the studies here and here.
• “Arnav Agarwal and John P A Ioannidis consider what we can learn from the retraction and republication of an influential trial of Mediterranean diet.” (The BMJ)
• “Once a poorly rewarded scientific value, replication has seen a boom with studies in everything from psychology to dogs,” writes Stuart Buck. “More fields should follow suit.” (Arnold Ventures, which has funded our parent non-profit organization)
• “Darpa Wants to Solve Science’s Reproducibility Crisis With AI.” (Adam Rogers, WIRED)
• “A senior official in the European Commission has said that it has no plans to open an investigation in response to two complaints about perceived failings in the academic publishing market, and that competition law is not best placed to deal with the issue.” (Craig Nicholson, Research Information)
• A study we highlighted last month in Weekend Reads “suggests that making reviewers’ reports freely readable doesn’t compromise peer-review process.” (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Nature)
• “Charles University’s Ethics Commission found Professor Martin Kovar, a former vice rector of the University and well-known historian, guilty of plagiarism.” (Prague Daily Monitor)
• “[Jill] Abramson’s errors have attracted sharp criticism from her peers in the newspaper industry. But Abramson is not only a journalist — she is also a [Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences] FAS lecturer who teaches journalism classes.” (Molly McCafferty, The Harvard Crimson)
• “There is no rule to say that science cannot be entertaining,” writes Eric Buenz. “Editors want their journal to be pleasurable and enlightening reading.” (Nature)
• “Urgent measures are required to address the failures in ethical oversight of biomedical research in China,” write Chang-Qing Gao, Mei-Mei Wang, Yun-Bo Liu. (The BMJ)
• “Evidence reviews are considered high on the levels of evidence pyramid, but they require just as much skepticism and critical examination as any other study,” writes Tara Haelle. (Covering Health blog)
• Authors didn’t notice “faults with the paper within the six months the manuscript was in review, revision, and production.”
• A UK doctor who conducted clinical trials for drug companies loses his license for enrolling ineligible patients and other dishonesty in his research.
• PLOS ONE has “seen a progressive increase in the volume and breadth of publication integrity concerns raised to our attention.” Here’s a chart showing the journal’s growth in retractions — to 52 in 2018.
• “Who owns your journal and its content (including citations)?” ask Lettie Conrad and Pippa Smart.
• “Notwithstanding all the rumors provoked by this scandal in the physics community, the retracted papers remained cited even several years after they were removed from the body of literature.” A look back at the Jan Hendrik Schön case.
• “Clinicians should remain sceptical until peer reviewed findings are published in full,” argue Michael Fralick and Chana Sacks. (The BMJ, sub req’d)
• “Although some amount of irreproducibility of any scientific investigation is probably inevitable the strategy proposed here is expected to increase experimental and computational rigor in reporting results, together with transparency, and to greatly facilitate paper reproducibility.” (Scientific Data)
• “A tenured neuroscience professor…faces disciplinary action…after the University found ‘grave misconduct’ in his lab.” (Minnesota Daily)
• “As long as scientists believe that they need a p-value of 0.05 or less to publish their results, they will seek to produce such values.” (Christie Aschwanden, author of the new book Good To Go, on Quora)
• “When presented with an entire book devoted to plagiarism, I wondered what I would learn and how serious the transgressions of plagiarism were in academic scholarship.” Then Sheldon Krimsky read M.V. Dougherty’s Correcting the scholarly record for research integrity: In the aftermath of plagiarism. (Accountability in Research, sub req’d)
• “In an attempt to reduce the incidence of referring to retracted papers, it would be wise for the editorial board to include a notice in the ‘guidelines for authors’ section; the authors would be advised to carefully investigate their manuscript-related references for retraction. A more advanced step would be the creation of online software that alerts authors, as well as the editors, about retracted publications.” (Veterinary Anaesthesia and Anagelsia) We’re happy to help.
• Findings of a new paper “raise concerns about female authors not receiving proper credit for publications and suggest a need for journals to request clarity on the method used to decide author order among those who contributed equally.” (Nichole Broderick, Arturo Casadevall, eLife) We highlighted the preprint version in early 2018.
• “To what extent has English become the dominant language of scientific communication?” A new paper tries to find out. (Daniel Stockemer, Michael J. Wigginton, Research Policy, sub req’d)
• “Does scientist immigration harm US science?” According to a new study, “we do not find evidence that foreign-trained scientists harm US science by crowding out better-connected domestically-trained scientists.” (Ajay Agrawal, John McHale, Alexander Oettl, Research Policy, sub req’d)
• Did a Chinese actor — and postdoc — plagiarize? (Xu Keyue, Global Times)
• “A scathing letter to the editor appeared three months later in the journal.” A look at the scientific research behind a pricy genetic test for psychiatric disorders from Myriad. (Bill Alpert, Barron’s)

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