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The week at Retraction Watch featured us wondering why it takes a publisher a year and a half to correct the record; an expression of concern for a paper on race and intelligence; and a great deal of concern about work by a deceased researcher. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “A significant minority of tenured faculty spend their lives undermining others when they could be working for progressive change, argues Douglas Dowland.”
- “Within a few years, two papers on video-game violence from one Ohio State University lab were retracted.” Ian Bogost looks at the evidence.
- Novartis “was aware of ‘data manipulation’ involving its Zolgensma gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy before it was approved…but did not inform the…[FDA] until later.”
- “We just couldn’t quite grasp the depth of Ranbaxy’s data falsification,” said George Nakayama, CEO of Astra Zeneca since 2010. (Bloomberg)
- “And here, dear Reader, is where I made a fatal mistake.” Dorothy Bishop on correcting one’s own errors.
- “The NSCA made the corrections only after CrossFit reported the error, despite Davis’ affiliations being publicly available.”
- “Between about a quarter and half of Americans consider misconduct a ‘very big’ or ‘moderately big’ problem, with the public generally skeptical that those engaged in misconduct routinely face serious consequences.”
- Last year, amidst the “Sokal Square” hoax, Quillette editor Claire Lehmann tweeted: “The fact that untrained outsiders can get hoax papers published should tell you something: they’re not real disciplines. This week: “The writer…said he wanted to turn the Sokal Squared hoax back on Quillette,” writes Will Sommer of a retraction from the magazine.
- “It seems important for scientists (and others who care about it) to tell the story of science, while not trying to hide its flaws.”
- Sage Publishing, a nonprofit with revenues of $300-$400 million per year, has decided to stop supporting Pacific Standard, a magazine which will now be forced to close. More from The Daily Beast.
- “Elsevier threatens others for linking to Sci-Hub but does so itself.”
- Could something similar to our partnership with Zotero on our retraction database “one day be used to flag ethically problematic work?”
- “Dartmouth College agreed to pay $14 million (£12 million) to settle a lawsuit by nine women who alleged they were raped, sexually assaulted and harassed by three of their professors.”
- “The head physician at one of Germany’s leading research institutes has been fired after years of negative headlines and allegations of wrongdoing.”
- “Is the Threat of ‘Fake Science’ Real?” asks Alden Fletcher.
- “Citing ‘nerd tunnel vision,’ biologist George Church apologizes for contacts with Jeffrey Epstein.” (Sharon Begley, STAT) (Epstein committed suicide last night.)
- A U.S. lab that “handles high-level disease-causing material…is on hold indefinitely” because it “failed to meet biosafety standards.”
- “More than half of clinical trial abstracts published in top psychiatry and psychology journals exaggerate the significance of study findings,” says a new study.
- “We should have explicitly stated in the abstract, as we did within the body of the paper, that there were no between group differences in BMI z‐score.”
- “If we are concerned that misconduct will compromise confidence in science, we must oppose measures that insulate its investigation from scrutiny.”
- “With the goal of building world-class sci-tech periodicals, China’s academic journals are likely to undergo severe reform and renovation while they enter a new era of development where opportunities and challenges coexist.”
- “Does Truthful Advertising Ever Pass ‘The Smell Test’ in a Peer-Reviewed Journal?”
- “Why you should join a journal’s editorial board.” (Susan D’Agostino, Nature)
- “High Monetary Rewards and High Academic Article Outputs: Are China’s Research Publications Policy Driven?”
- Kindai University has dismissed law professor Yusuke Nishiuchi after discovering that he had plagiarized ten of his books.
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