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The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a paper that claimed that scientists were suppressing evidence about the risks of cell phones; the retraction of a study by the daughter of an embattled South Korean politician; and 22 retractions for a materials scientist that might be the tip of the iceberg. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- Elsevier is investigating hundreds of researchers for allegedly manipulating citations.
- Richard Peto “resubmitted the paper with all the subgroups the referee had asked for, but with a sly addition. He also subdivided the results by astrological sign.”
- “For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake.”
- “It seems sometimes that we’re moving to a situation where science will be done by bots, leaving the human brain out of the process altogether. This would, to my mind, be a mistake.” Dorothy Bishop responds to the replication crisis.
- “The proportion of women who were first, last, and corresponding authors increased from 5.1%, 8.9%, and 2.5%, respectively, in 1967 to 37.0%, 22.2%, and 25.9% in 2017, respectively.” A look at authorship in anesthesiology research.
- Peer review “is a young person’s game.”
- “GG is a bit frustrated having now asked 10 scientists to review a paper.” Take GG’s poll.
- The vice president of the Karolinska Institutet has resigned amid misconduct allegations.
- “I found that approximately 0.023% of ecology and evolution studies are described by their authors as replications.”
- “Retracting your own paper can lead to a spike in citations.”
- A former Virginia Tech scientist was sentenced to probation for grant fraud.
- “Experts question China’s bid to create world-class journals.”
- “Six tips to achieve a highly cited article.”
- “[T]he science journal Frontiers in Physiology is requiring scientists from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) to correct a recently-published study on a controversial fish farm virus because they did not disclose the research was funded by the salmon farm industry.”
- India’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research “Says It’s Probing Scientific Misconduct Allegations, Drafting New Guidelines.”
- “Why data integrity is important for the success of clinical trials.
- “The ultimate value of science remains hidden and it’s the search – not the sale – that is important. Let’s keep it that way.”
- “Amid increasing attention to scientific research integrity in China, the country has adopted a new set of standards to more clearly define misconduct in publishing journal articles.”
- A profile of a new office of research at Duke, which recently settled a lawsuit alleging research misconduct for $112.5 million.
- “Journals are evolving into information platforms.”
- “Chair of the Spanish Senate…Manuel Cruz Rodríguez is suspected of plagiarism in…his philosophical thesis.”
- “U.S. prosecutors have charged a Chinese professor with fraud for allegedly taking technology from a California company to benefit Huawei,” Reuters reports.
- A look at adoption of preprints in the life sciences.
- “Boris Ivetić, 36, was arrested when protesting to end alleged corruption at the University of Zagreb’s natural sciences faculty, where he is a PhD student.” He has been released.
- “Scientists communicating science while working as scientists can fill the informing and popularizing void, but cannot take on the watchdog role since they cannot be expected to provide a critical independent outsider approach of journalists.”
- “These investigations fail to address several important issues raised in the allegations. In particular,some discrepancies among the main Figures in Paper 2 remain unexplained, and the claimed absence of underestimation of lifetime doses is illogical.” Background on this case, which involves radiation exposure from Fukushima.
- “What is replication?”
- “This is the kind of corruption that occurs when corporations and industry lobbying groups pay academics for expert testimony before Congress.”
- “What’s next for Registered Reports?”
- “Plans to require UK universities to provide ‘mandatory’ training in research ethics have been dropped in response to concerns that the plan was too prescriptive and bureaucratic.”
- “From 2013 to 2018, PLOS ONE’s output fell by 44%. Another megajournal, Scientific Reports, surpassed PLOS ONE in size in 2017 but saw its article count drop by 30% the next year, according to data in publisher Elsevier’s Scopus database.”
- Change the racing officials in this story to university officials, and scopolamine to research fraud: Bad incentives lead to coverups no matter what the endeavor.
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Re reviewers manipulating citation counts: A number of editors like to send submitted papers to people already in the list of cited papers. I sure hope this number is subtracted before the whistle blows!
Seriously! It’s a major confounder!
They could use it as a red flag to investigate further, and go back to the peer reviews to check whether suggestions were made to cite several papers.
I myself, as reviewer of a paper, once asked the Editor to check up on the other reviewer, as the six papers (strongly) recommended to be cited were all from the same group and several of those rather irrelevant to the topic. The six proposed papers were formatted in a way that did not allow the Editor to see they were from the same group. I just happened to know some of those papers, and knew they were from the same group.