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The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a highly cited paper on the effects of discrimination on gay lives; a look at the possibility of scientific error checkers; and a study of deficiencies in institutional misconduct investigations. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
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- “Peer review is not a magic wand, it’s not a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. It’s a filter.” How a “Fake Sex Doctor…Conned the Media Into Publicizing His Bizarre Research on Suicide, Butt-Fisting, and Bestiality.” (Jennings Brown, Gizmodo)
- A pharmacy professor “stole a student’s research and sold it secretly to a pharmaceutical company, defrauding the university of millions of dollars, the University of Missouri alleges in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.” (Mike Hendricks, Mara Rose Williams, Kansas City Star)
- “It is suggested that this research programme has led to one of the worst scientific scandals of all time. A call is made for a long overdue formal inquiry.” (Anthony J. Pelosi, Journal of Health Psychology)
- German institutions are investigating allegations of data manipulation in a study by German clinical psychologist Hans Ulrich Wittchen used to create staffing policies for psychiatric hospitals. (Marc Scheloske, Spektrum)
- “[W]e have been unable to convince ourselves that the benefits of preprint servers in clinical orthopaedic research outweigh the potential harm to patients and scientific integrity,” say four journal editors.
- “We believe that a ‘publish first, curate second’ approach with the following features would be a strong alternative: authors decide when and what to publish; peer review reports are published, either anonymously or with attribution; and curation occurs after publication, incorporating community feedback and expert judgment to select articles for target audiences and to evaluate whether scientific work has stood the test of time. (Bodo Stern, Erin O’Shea, PLOS Biology)
- “Three government institutions in China…may have funded the ‘CRISPR babies’ study,” Jane Qiu reports at STAT.
- “It is the responsibility of authors and editors to work with institutional and journal press offices and ensure that caveats are clear and exaggerated claims are minimized.” (Molecular Autism)
- What goes on a CV? “In particular, we find that receiving an education from a top 20 ranked university reduces the need to self-symbolize even when the scholars work for a non-top 20 university after earning the doctorate.” (Scientometrics)
- “The UK government and the Health Research Authority, the agency responsible for the governance of clinical trials, are developing a strategy to enhance transparency around such research.” (Research Information)
- A former Virginia Tech professor has been found guilty of federal grant fraud. (Jeff Sturgeon, Roanoke Times)
- In a study, “liver samples were taken from sick veterans without their permission, for a study that provided no benefit to the patients.” (inewsource)
- “Bill Jenkins, a government epidemiologist who tried to expose the unethical Tuskegee syphilis study in the 1960s and devoted the rest of his career to fighting racism in health care, died on Feb. 17 in Charleston, S.C.” (Katherine Seelye, New York Times)
- “Can the similarity index predict the causes of retractions in high-impact anesthesia journals?” (Mohamed El-Tahan, Saudi Journal of Anesthesia)
- How to fight fake science: Our Ivan Oransky joins an AAAS webinar.
- In China, “Any misconduct will be dealt with seriously, and academic papers, theses and dissertations will be shared with other institutions to add more scrutiny,” the Ministry of Education said. (ECNS.cn)
- “The medical community cannot afford to lose ground on decades’ worth of attempts to bring accountability and evidence-based practice to the bedside only to replace these efforts once again with empirical interventions based on assumptions that have limited scientific support.” (JAMA)
- “Can self-regulation deliver an ethical commercial literature?” (Alaistair Matheson, Accountability in Research)
- “Big pharma is embracing open-access publishing like never before.”
- “Although impact factor is one way of quantifying journal “quality[,]” [o]thers could be helpful: A retraction factor (retractions in a given year for research articles divided by number of research articles published in the year), an erratum and corrections factor (errata + corrections in a given year for research articles divided by number of research articles published in the year), and finally a peer-review factor.” (Nancy Gough, BioSerendipity)
- When is self-plagiarism — which we usually refer to as duplication — acceptable? Mark Israel offers 5 points to consider. (LSE Impact Blog)
- A priest apologizes for plagiarism and resigns from the board of a college.
- Open peer review (OPR) is moving into the mainstream, but it is often poorly understood and surveys of researcher attitudes show important barriers to implementation.” Guidelines for open peer review. (Tony Ross-Hellauer, Edit Görögh, Research Integrity and Peer Review)
- “Paradoxically, a stipulation that should enhance the importance of surgical research may, in fact, contribute to a pressure that is one of the causes of research misconduct.” (James Huntley, Cureus)
- “It is also found that papers are more likely accepted if they are submitted during a few specific months—these depending on the journal. The probability of having a rejected paper also appears to be seasonally biased.” (Scientometrics)
- “Six out-of 10 [randomized controlled trials] RCTs published in top endocrine journals are at moderate/high-risk of bias.” (PLOS ONE)
- “There must be community consensus and alignment around the necessity for scientific integrity standards and their content.” Principles for scientific integrity. (Science Engineering and Ethics)
- “Nearly half the female scientists who responded to an Australian survey on sexual misconduct at work have experienced sexual harassment.” (Bianca Nogrady, Nature)
- “The National Institutes of Health on Thursday apologized for its past failures to recognize and address the culture of sexual harassment that has impacted scientists for generations.” (Lev Facher and Megan Thielking, STAT)
- Recursive irony? A New England Journal of Medicine correction of “The Devil Is in the Details” shows why the devil is in the details.
- This press release about “Cell editors” is actually about a paper in a Nature Publishing Group journal.
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