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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Re “Despite a publisher’s recommendation, a journal editor…”, concerns about undisclosed conflicts of interest at this journal go back to 2012 https://www.the-scientist.com/opinion/opinion-problems-with-hidden-coi-38503 . Although the publisher has changed since then, the editor in chief remains the same.