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The week at Retraction Watch featured the withdrawal of a paper linking Jon Stewart to Trump’s election win; the retraction of a study of vitamin D and autism; and another edition of Forensics Friday, in which you can test your sleuthing skills. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “There are many companies in the industry that are falsifying their data. Straight out fraud.” Katherine Eban’s new book, Bottle of Lies, is out.
- “University of California San Diego officials stonewalled attempts to notify women in an HIV research study that their confidential data was breached more than seven months ago.” (inewsource)
- “A $330 Thermometer Claimed To Be 99.4% Accurate In Preventing Pregnancy. But The Study It Was Based On Just Got Retracted.”
- A researcher pointed out how skewed the animals studied in an animal behavior journal were. Then the backlash started. (This American Life)
- “In the intervening years, high-profile forensics scandals and a rising tally of exonerations have made it hard for even the most stubborn forensic experts to ignore the problem of junk science.” (The Intercept)
- “Using a new method, we have calculated that approximately 18% of all authors’ contact email addresses in MEDLINE are invalid.” (bioRxiv)
- “[C]orrecting the published literature appropriately is a time-consuming process, and by screening images before final acceptance, we anticipated that we could drastically reduce the number of post-publication corrections, withdrawals, and retractions.” (Chad McCormick, Kaoru Sakabe, JBC)
- “Cash for publication is discriminatory, unscientific, and dangerous,” says Andrew Bamji. (BMJ)
- “The journal has found that the investigation done by PU did not provide a ‘clear indication of the provenance of the data‘.” (Vishakha Chaman, Times of India)
- “This economics journal only publishes results that are no big deal.” (Kelsey Piper, Vox)
- “Three officials from Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) will face trial for allegedly overlooking environmental safety regulations at the institute’s Gran Sasso underground laboratories,” Nicola Nosengo reports. (Nature)
- “We sought to relate ideals of fairness and openness in journal indicators to the practical realities of those who generate and use them.” A report of a workshop. (F1000)
- A school has “fired its own head for what was described as egregious fabrication of materials used in a book about Weimar Germany.”
- “As a result, we have confirmed that there has been fraudulent activity (theft) in our research activities as follows, and we will report and announce it here.” (Soka University)
- “Does the use of p-values cause dichotomous thinking?”
- “Effective immediately, the Office of Research Compliance will be renamed the Office of Research Integrity and Compliance.” (Illinois Tech Today)
- “Peer review is not problem solving,” and 24 other ways to increase the chances that your paper will be published. Courtesy of Laura Moss in Inside Higher Education.
- “Women are listed as authors of just 30% of academic research from British universities.” (The Guardian)
- “Recognizing the benefits, we move from merely supporting the use of preprint servers to promoting it.” (Nature)
- “In part, our research confirms what many publishers already know: academics rarely comment on articles.”
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