Weekend reads: Retractions at Nature and NEJM; editor resigns after paper with “racist characterizations;” CRISPR babies ethics paper retracted

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The week at Retraction Watch featured a new record for most retractions by a journal; the story of what was missing from a retraction; and authors who blamed language barriers for why they forged their co-authors’ emails. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “A new strategy to overcome one of the main obstacles in the treatment of brain cancer — access to the tumor” seemed to have real promise. Now two papers describing the approach, in Nature and NEJM, have been retracted.
• A Neurology editor resigns following the swift retraction last week of an article because it contained “racist characterizations.”
• In December, Art Caplan told us a paper on the ethics of CRISPR by the Chinese scientist who claims to have tried the procedure in humans should be retracted. Now it has been. (Julianna LeMieux, GEN)
• “I’ve been reading some recent author comments and it led me to explore the issue of ‘rogue peer reviewers’. What does that phrase even mean?” (Lou Peck, Research Information)
• “The rules have always been simple,” he says. “When you do experimental medicine, you must publish—and you must publish what actually happens.” David Dobbs takes a look at the science behind transplants. (WIRED)
• “There seems to be a real problem with academic editors, especially those at the journals of certain publishers, being reluctant, unwilling, or unable to take action on even the simplest problems without the approval of the publisher, whose evaluation of the situation may be based as much on the need to save face as to correct the scientific record.” (Nick Brown and Stuart Ritchie)
• “I hope that 2019 is a landmark year for data sharing—a year when investigators and researchers who run clinical trials create data-sharing plans and make them public.” (Rebecca Li, STAT News)
• A correction to previously published 5-year trial outcomes in Circulation could make for more uncertainty about the advantages of certain kinds of cardiac stents. (Steve Stiles, Medscape)
• In which WASP becomes an acronym for writing a scientific paper. (Early Human Development, sub req’d)
• “Some of our best reviewers are early-career professionals, including fellows, and some of our worst reviewers are big-name people. You can’t tell how someone will do based on the thickness of their curriculum vitae.” (Medscape)
• “A Kenyan man more than 12,000 kilometres away from Toronto claims he has written hundreds of essays and assignments that have been submitted by Canadian university students over the last year.” (Tammie Sutherland and news staff, 680 News)
• “India’s annual multi-million-euro outlay on scientific publishing is a bad deal for the country, says Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan, principal scientific adviser to the government.” (Eanny Kelly, ScienceBusiness)
• A correction by Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson has been upgraded to a retraction. Background here.
• “We cannot know how many of the 1.6 million or so papers now added every year to the Web of Science database are flawed as a consequence, but we can agree that our focus has to shift from quantity to quality if we are to safeguard against shoddy work.” (Alan Finkel, Nature)
• “Diabetes Takes New Steps to Increase Transparency and Reproducibility.” (Martin Myers, Diabetes)
• “We go on to identify common failures in scientific review that compromise the quality and reliability of agency determinations and then describe the attributes of independent scientific reviews that enable the agencies to discharge their statutory duties while seeking to conserve threatened and endangered species and the ecosystems on which they depend.” (Dennis Murphy, Paul Weiland, BioScience)
• “At this pivotal moment for the field of regenerative cardiovascular medicine, it is timely to bring a clear and frank retrospective analysis of the ontogeny of this biomedical tragedy.” Kenneth Chien et al on the Anversa debacle.
• “Patients may have been placed at risk of serious harm because of flawed advice to administer highly concentrated oxygen after surgery, leading anaesthetists have said.” (Guardian) An author of papers that informed the guidelines has had five papers retracted.
• “There’s not really a culture of strong criticism of bad science that happens through peer review.” Scientific sleuth James Heathers speaks to NPR.
• “Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management has decided to expel Zhai Tianlin from its postdoctoral stations  over plagiarism claims, according to a statement released by the university on Saturday.” (The Global Times)
• “Is the Political Slant of Psychology Research Related to Scientific Replicability?” (PsyArXiv)
• “After careful review, the editors at Medscape have decided to retract this commentary. We understand how this commentary could promote stigma and marginalization.”
• A former researcher at Toronto Sick Kids who had a paper retracted last week for misconduct has just lost his license to practice medicine in Ontario. (Toronto Star)
• “Retractions of urologic literature, similar to retractions of other biomedical literature, have been rising over the last decade.” (BJU International)
• “What kind of global trouble is academic misconduct?” Huang Kun of Xinhua takes a look at retractions in China and around the world, drawing on our database of more than 18,000 retractions.
• “Machine-learning techniques used by thousands of scientists to analyse data are producing results that are misleading and often completely wrong.” (Pallab Ghosh, BBC)
• “eLife’s departing editor [Randy Sheckman] talks about the seismic changes he sees coming — and why some journals will lose out.” (Holly Else, Nature)
• “Nature yanks article that was actually advertisement on controversial stem cells,” reports Paul Knoepfler. (The Niche)

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