Weekend reads: Self-citation farms; an editor refuses to retract; publishing enters politics

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a request: Our co-founder Ivan Oransky celebrated a birthday this past week, and he’d like nothing more than a gift to Retraction Watch to support our work. Here’s your chance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured a massive correction for a paper used to support the ban on Caster Semenya competing; a book retraction that took eleven months; and a husband and wife team about to lose their jobs for research misconduct. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “I think that self-citation farms are far more common than we believe,” says John Ioannidis.
• Despite a publisher’s recommendation, a journal editor “refused to retract…papers…which declared no cancer concerns with [Monsanto’s] the company’s herbicides, saying a retraction could impact last summer’s first-ever Roundup trial and harm the authors’ reputations.”
• A South Korean politician faces questions about how his daughter was able to publish a paper as a high school student.
• If only journal retractions were this simple.
• “Scientific reform is partly about politics.”
• “Do peer-reviewed journals go through a summer slump just like we do?”
• A key paper published by scientists at uBiome — including by sleuth Elisabeth Bik, who objected to its publication — was deeply flawed, and the company knew it.
• A comparison of misconduct findings at the U.S. NIH and NSF reveals some differences that may have to do with different approachs to such investigations, reports a new study.
• “The journal’s editorial staff introduced a number of textual and typographical changes to the earlier version of the published article text.” A correction, and a response from an author.
• “Anaesthesiology research needs to drastically improve indicators of reproducibility and transparency.”
• “The rise of the ‘registered report’ …offers lessons for the current debate surrounding p-values and significance.”
• The new editor of eLife “has wasted no time in laying out his visions for the future of eLife and for peer review more generally.”
• “We urge psychology societies to avoid conveying the impression of hidden nepotism by openly publishing their policies on personal COIs.”
• “Determining the causes of scientific misconduct in China is complicated.”
• “Alan Cooper…has been suspended following a probe into the ‘culture’ of the [ancient DNA] centre [he leads] and amid allegations of bullying from his co-workers.”
• “Holden Thorp, a chemist who held top leadership positions at two major U.S. research universities,” will be the new editor in chief of Science, the AAAS announced.
• Can data fabrication be detected using statistical tools?
• “[E]conomists reveal themselves to be as fallible as the rest of us.”
• “The blinded review process, paired with our snide internet culture, encourages boorish and unethical behaviour.”
• In Canada, since 2011, “133 federally funded researchers were disciplined for integrity breaches,” reports Vjosa Isai in The Globe and Mail.
• A former top Novartis scientist denied wrongdoing in the company’s data manipulation scandal, and the FDA says it was lucky the fakery was caught.
• “Redefining standards in image data reporting: A new policy at PLOS ONE and PLOS Biology requires raw blot and gel image data.”
• “This article, which was based on a survey by an underwear company, has been removed.” And a…smelly take from Lewis Perdue.

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