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The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a paper on red wine, tea, and cancer; a look at why researchers make up co-authors’ names, and how PLOS ONE has become a “major retraction engine.” Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “Researchers at the Agriculture Department laughed in disbelief last summer when they received a memo about a new requirement: Their finalized, peer-reviewed scientific publications must be labeled ‘preliminary.'” (Ben Guarino. Washington Post)
- “[We] will look back on the past 60 years…and marvel at how much time and money has been wasted on flawed research.” (Dorothy Bishop, Nature)
- A UCSD researcher is on leave after an “investigation exposed how the doctor put medical research subjects in harm’s way for years.” (Brad Racino, Jill Castellano, inewsource)
- “I don’t think it is great to cover single studies every week.” Our Ivan Oransky talks to the ORION Open Science podcast. (The episode was recorded last year.)
- “Is a coveted U.S. lab job worth being separated from his family?” (Eric Boodman, STAT)
- “Brazilian researcher Olavo Amaral is going a step further and launching a reproducibility initiative that, for the first time, aims to assess performance at the level of his whole country…” (The Naked Scientists)
- “U.S. universities reassess collaborations with foreign scientists in wake of NIH letters,” Jeffrey Mervis reports. (Science)
- “A prominent pediatrician and medical researcher in the Philippines has been indicted over the failed—and many say premature—introduction of Dengvaxia, a vaccine against dengue that was yanked from the Philippine market in 2017 because of safety issues.” (Fatima Arkin, Science)
- “Women at the Salk Institute say they faced a culture of marginalization and hostility,” reports Mallory Pickett. “The numbers from other elite scientific institutions suggest they’re not alone.” (New York Times Magazine)
- “Should we introduce a dislike button for academic articles?” ask Agnieszka Geras, Grzegorz Siudem and Marek Gagolewski. (sub req’d)
- How should authorship definitions change given growing international collaborations in the natural sciences? (Science and Engineering Ethics)
- “Spurious findings in pathology contribute inefficiency to the scientific literature and detrimentally influence patient care.” (Laboratory Investigation)
- Another study of the Mediterranean diet has been retracted and replaced, this one from The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology.
- In a time of “alternative truths,” “Do Medical Journals Have a Role in Addressing Medical Information?” ask Armstrong and Naylor in JAMA.
- “Libraries and funding agencies are finally flexing their muscles against journal paywalls. Authors should follow suit.” (Marcus Banks, Undark)
- “My name shouldn’t be on this list as I haven’t been part of this journal for many years and will have my name removed.” The University of Toronto tells Peter Heimlich it will correct the record about its professors and OMICS.
- Could “preprint servers as self-organising peer review platforms could be the future of scholarly publication?” Wang LingFeng, of Guilin University, says they’re worth considering. (LSE Impact Blog)
- Kolon Life Science, a biotech company in South Korea, is hoping that its license to sell its drug Invossa-K won’t be pulled now that it announced that the drug contained a different cell line than they thought it contained. (Lee Hye-seon, Korea Biomedical Review)
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In my view, the only real problem with reproducibility is the lack of appreciation that low statistical power increases risk of false positive results, not just false negatives. But I also think that some people who do understand that and are shouting about irreproducibility may have standards that are too high. Many don’t want results with less than 90% or 95% post-test probability to be published, but I think the cost of missing a positive effect (which could be patient lives or advancement of society in the long run) is greater in many cases than reporting one that doesn’t pan out when someone else tries to reproduce it. So in my view, probabilities more like 70-80% would be acceptable in many cases. But then we also have to keep in mind that the power and p value that can be used to calculate probabilities depend on the specific statistical test used, and picking the right test gets complicated.
While specialists may indeed be aware that low statistical power increases risk of false positive results, what about the journalists that cover these sensational discoveries?
Responsible journalists should note the probabilities reported by responsible scientists (and not report a story without some note about probabilities). So often what one hears in the press is very differently pitched from the original paper.
Journalists should also never, ever simply take the word of a university press officer, whose job it is to hype results.
Better media reporting seems to be an unattainable dream, but maybe authors and research ethics groups could ask institutions to quit putting out sensationalized press releases. I understand the desire to make the public see an institution’s value, but making the public dumber about science in the pursuit of that end is counter-productive in the long-run.
Ridicule might be one way to push back on the media relations people who are responsible for sensationalizing studies. They would likely tone down their phasing to avoid being added to a Wall of Shame or some such public list.
touching story about salk…I still can’t believe this has happened.
Regarding the dislike button, yes it is high time we should have one. – i don’t use “like” button on any social media apps as they don’t have “dislike” button…Simple.