Weekend reads: Scientist loses job after 30 retractions; breast cancer researcher committed misconduct; “two crashes” at Duke

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• an author irked about “science by tweet” after his paper is flagged;
• an author irked by Elsevier’s decision to retract nine of his papers for fake peer review;
• a researcher who is no longer in his job following a misconduct finding;
• the retraction of a paper questioning the link between HIV and AIDS years after criticism.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• A researcher whose 30 retractions we’ve covered has lost his job, ABC News in Australia reports. More here from The Age.
• “A university commission announced this week it had found evidence of ‘extensive and severe scientific misconduct’ by Christof Sohn, director of the women’s clinic at Heidelberg University Hospital in Germany and the lead researcher behind a highly publicized but questionable blood test designed to detect breast cancer.”
• A blog post from Duke University’s recently appointed vice president for research — who says Duke has had “two crashes in a short period of time” — suggests that not all faculty have learned lessons from the Potts-Kant case.
• A Purdue University professor pleaded guilty to defrauding the U.S. NSF of $1.3 million.
• “Colleagues have called him out for what they view as preening for the press (his lab has its own public relations staff) and for publishing flashy but flawed science.”
• Do retraction rates reflect rates of misconduct in science? “It’s like looking at murder conviction rates as a proxy for the number of murders; we know there are far more murders than convictions.”
• South Korea found “12 cases of misconduct…in which professors’ children or other underage relatives are listed as co-authors…despite having no role in the research.”
• An Oxford professor committed misconduct when she “failed to acknowledge the work of Chinese collaborators in her award-winning book,” according to an investigation.
• China publishes “new standards defining plagiarism, fabrication, falsification and other violations of research integrity” to strengthen a fight against misconduct.
• “Complaints about journal editors’ decisions ignore the root cause of the research assessment problem: career structure, says Richard Sever.”
• “Two key partners have suspended the Venice Time Machine project after reaching an impasse over issues surrounding open data and methodology.”
• “Holding reviewers to a code of conduct would be a mistake in my opinion, because it implies that the peer-review process should facilitate an author’s research.”
• “Is science doing as well today as Merton thought it was back in 1942?”
• Researchers are enthusiastic about replications in ecology — but few are doing them.
• “As one index of research misconduct, the number of articles retracted by journals has continued to increase, initially, due to fraud but more recently, through efforts to detect and expose the problem.”
• A university has fired a lecturer after determining that his degree had been faked — and that he was holding down more than one job.
• “All co-first authors are equal, but some are more equal than others,” says Jean Fan, who cautions against counting on reviewers to count accurately.
• “Going solely by the plagiarism detection software is like making a clinical diagnosis by looking at the results of laboratory tests without taking a history from the patient or undertaking a thorough clinical examination.” And a related piece from the same journal.
• “A publishing company plans to add an advisory note to future copies of a book written by White House adviser Peter Navarro, after it was revealed that Navarro fabricated one of the people he quoted.”
• “Bypassing peer review is bad medicine,” says Melissa Jenkins.
• “Recent allegations of copyright violations against a professor who shared his own work on his website spark debate about ownership and whether peer reviewers should be paid.”
• “The University of Maryland said late last week it has fired two employees…after discovering ‘irregularities’ in how its business school handled documents associated with federal contracts.”
• “Contrary to the way that he is depicted today, [Franz Joseph] Gall, [the father of phrenology,] is not presented as a charlatan, a quack, or a fraud.”
• “Scholars preoccupied with mere publishing will find it difficult to thrive, or even survive, in the increasingly competitive landscape.”
• A university committee said that Serbian Finance Minister Sinisa Mali did not commit plagiarism, but faculty are concerned about the investigation process.
• At eLife, “A new approach to peer review resulted in a moderately higher acceptance rate, with all the issues raised by reviewers addressed by the authors in the vast majority of revised submissions.”
• “Female scientists in Australia were less likely to win a major type of medical-research grants this year than their male counterparts, despite an overhaul of the country’s science funding that was supposed to address gender inequity.”
• “Dear STEM Students: Don’t Write Thesis Chapters – Write Manuscripts.”
• Sounds just like unwitting co-authors on a fraudulent paper: “It involves a band releasing an album with several tracks that were plagiarized from YouTube, an effort to hide which member of the band was responsible, that member then outing themselves on accident, getting fired and then releasing a weak apology.”

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