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The week at Retraction Watch featured an exclusive about a Russian company that claims to have brokered more than 10,000 authorships; a cancer researcher who lost a libel suit against the New York Times; and a criminologist who wrote a 27-page article about why he wants his own paper retracted. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- A “study linking vaping to heart attacks” has been “muddied amid [a] spat between two tobacco researchers.” (USA Today)
- “The F-word, or how to fight fires in the research literature.” Scientific sleuth Jennifer Byrne grapples with fraud, falsification, and fabrication.
- “A star Hunter College psychology professor and sex and drug researcher is accused of snorting cocaine at school events and throwing annual bashes that grew from low-key pizza parties into binge-drinking and go-go-boy bacchanals, according to sources and official documents.”
- “Specifically, we found that Delaware’s accounting records did not support $166,335.79 of costs charged to the NSF EPSCoR award. Delaware has since repaid the $166,335.79.”
- “A researcher with ties to China was recently escorted out of the National Microbiology Lab (NML) in Winnipeg amid an RCMP investigation into what’s being described as a possible ‘policy breach.'”
- Why are there more and more retractions? Our Ivan Oransky speaks to Swiss radio (RTS). A text version.
- A high profile scientific journal is investigating how it came to publish a study suggesting that global warming is down to natural solar cycles.
- “But are we getting accurate information?” “Fixing health care’s replication crisis is important for researchers and patients,” argues Sanjay Basu in STAT.
- “The current incentive structure of the scientific enterprise,” Sorger said, “is not designed to encourage reproducible science.”
- A look at retractions by a co-author of Yoshitaka Fujii, the world’s most prolific fraudster.
- “Manipulation within a photo should always result in a retraction,”Elisabeth Bik tells The Hindu.
- “How Should Professors Cite Their Transgender Colleagues’ Work Produced Under Past Identities? Academe Is Trying to Figure It Out.” (Chronicle of Higher Education)
- Why Pandelis Perakakis says researchers should “think twice before submitting a preprint to bioRxiv.”
- A professor found to have stolen grant funds has lost an appeal of a breach of contract suit.
- “Is Cardiology Overly Enamored of New Unproven Therapies?” asks John Mandrola.
- In India, “A draft policy on academic ethics has proposed to hand out ‘stringent punishment’ to those indulging in ‘large-scale’ plagiarism and data fraud.”
- “100 rules for publishing in top journals,” courtesy of Niamh Brennan. (Gemma Conroy, Nature)
- Robert Marks explains why it’s so hard to reform peer review.
- “[P]erhaps as an exercise, what would happen if we outlawed peer review?”
- “Can Anything Really Stop the Science Spin Snowball?” asks Hilda Bastian.
- “A rise in premature publications among politically engaged researchers may be linked to Trump’s election, study says.”
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