Weekend reads: Jailed for publishing a paper; pushing back on vaping research; “sugar daddy science”

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The week at Retraction Watch featured lots of news involving Nature, including the retraction of a paper on ocean warming and the journal’s rescinding of a mentoring award. It also included a sterling example of the post hoc fallacy. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “A Turkish food engineer and human rights activist was sentenced yesterday to 15 months in jail after publishing the results of a study he and other scientists had done that linked toxic pollution to a high incidence of cancer in western Turkey.”
• A society considers banning research funded by e-cigarette makers from its conference podiums.
• The problem with “sugar daddy science.”
• “How many fish really appear in the photo collage above? The answer bears on whether a study about lionfish social behavior, published in Biology Letters in 2014, was fabricated—and whether Oona Lönnstedt, a marine biologist formerly at Uppsala University (UU) in Sweden who made up data in a 2016 Science paper, committed an earlier fraud.”
• A brain researcher is excluded from applying for grants for five years for scientific misconduct.
• “The eminent cancer researcher at the centre of an alleged scientific misconduct investigation at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute (KI) admits mistakes were made in published research articles, but says they don’t amount to misconduct.”
• “Novartis has responded to the FDA’s questions on the AveXis data manipulation scandal, blaming two ‘senior’ execs at AveXis who had helped found the company…”
• “China has launched a five-year action plan to establish world-leading sci-tech journals…”
• “If everyone worked together on this problem, we could eradicate it, one discipline at a time.” How to find statistical anomalies in papers.
• “If science had generations, mine would not be defined by war or Woodstock, but by reproducibility and open science.”
• “How researchers can improve the quality of systematic reviews.”
• Researchers who worked at the MIT Media Lab, under intense scrutiny because it accepted funding from Jeffrey Epstein, “say that one of its high-profile scientific projects was promoted with misleading claims.”
• A new journal aims to provide “a forum for experimental findings that disclose the small incremental steps vitally important to experimental research; experiments and findings which have so far remained hidden.”
• What does the new editor of NEJM think of preprints?
• According to a new bioRxiv preprint, “machine learning can be used to detect fraud in large-scale omic experiments.”
• “Which Publications Matter at Which Stages of Your Career?”
• “Knowing that research has gone through this process doesn’t tell you the results are right, just as a manufacturing standard doesn’t mean your washing machine will always work.”
• Could citizen science help cut down on research fraud?
• “Pay-to-participate trials are not categorically impermissible, although there is a high bar for their ethical conduct.”
• “Is there plagiarism in the most influential publications in the field of andrology?”
• “A former clinical research company employee may proceed with claims her employer fired her for reporting alleged research misconduct to the Food and Drug Administration, a federal court in Connecticut said.”
• A new study finds that “editorial handling and peer review lead to more self-acknowledgment of study limitations, but not to changes in linguistic nuance.”
• A call for Academia Sinica to release a report of a recent investigation.
• Criticizing misconceptions “may even contribute to the continued spreading of the myths,” according to a new study.
• “Are confidence intervals better termed ‘uncertainty intervals‘?”
• “Amy Koerber, professor and associate dean for administration & finance in Texas Tech University’s College of Media & Communication, is looking to develop a program that will educate people on open-access publishing and how to distinguish ‘predatory’ journals from credible ones.”
• “I mean, we could go back and have a conversation about scientists, whether it serves our careers well to get into high-profile journal like that … ” he added. “You can’t really have a nuanced conversation in those places.”
• “As citations to articles in fraudulent journals increasingly appear in article manuscripts, vexing reviewers and editors alike, the scholarly communications community needs to develop an automated shared service to assess works cited efficiently and ensure that authors are not inadvertently polluting the scholarly record.” As a comment on the post notes, our partnership with Zotero automatically alerts users to when papers in their databases have been retracted.
• Thanks to increasing use of Google Scholar, “There seems to be a narrowing of our collective view of the literature.”
• A study finds that “a significant proportion of author affiliations are unverifiable.”
• “We have developed the Hong Kong Principles (HKP) as part of the 6th World Conference on Research Integrity with a specifc focus on the need to drive research improvement through ensuring that researchers are explicitly recognized and rewarded (i.e., their careers are advanced) for behavior that leads to trustworthy research.”
• “Kenyatta University (KU) on Tuesday, September 24 revoked a PhD degree that had been awarded to one of its lectures in 2018 after it emerged that he had plagiarised a thesis belonging to a Nigerian don.”
• “Donald A.B. Lindberg, who died on Aug. 17 at age 85, is a primary reason we have access to PubMed, MedlinePlus.gov, Clinicaltrials.gov, GenBank, a host of other biomedical databases, andthe Internet.“

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