Weekend reads: Is nutrition science the worst-performing science?; gender bias in peer review; the Sherlock Holmes of science fraud

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• two investigations at King’s College London that found “poor research practices“
• a five-year ban on federal U.S. funding for a researcher who reused images over and over again
• sanctions for a former Johns Hopkins postdoc for data fabrication

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “I’ve worked in many different fields, and it’s hard to find another field that seems to be performing so poorly.”
• “Peer reviewers were more likely to reject papers from female authors, especially if the reviewer was male.”
• Elisabeth Bik “is a self-appointed, image-manipulation detective — the Sherlock Holmes of science fraud.” A profile.
• “Researchers shouldn’t be attacked for collecting data that might protect a species at risk in accordance with the law.”
• “Are legal concerns stifling scientific debate?” “For many, such lawsuits are an aggressive attempt to intimidate critics into silence, chilling debate that is vital for scientific progress.”
• Stanton Glantz, a star UCSF tobacco researcher, “violated the Faculty Code of Conduct” when he “stared at the breasts of female employees on multiple occasions.” Read our previous coverage here.
• The scientific director of an NIH institute resigned following “an investigation spurred by an internal complaint, which alleged that he sexually targeted a trainee.”
• “Nearly 200 investigations are underway at major academic centers. Critics fear that researchers of Chinese descent are being unfairly targeted.”
• A top immunologist in Israel is “accused of promoting antivaccine views.” He has retracted papers.
• “The journal Biology Letters will not retract a paper about lionfish behavior that had come under suspicion of fraud after another paper by the same first author was found to be fabricated.”
• Carlo Croce, the embattled and litigious cancer researcher at The Ohio State University, appears to have a new lawyer — from the same firm that dropped him earlier this year.
• A trial of a new peer review strategy at eLife “had the undesired effects of doubling down on the journal brand and placing increased emphasis and pressure on the initial editorial evaluation.”
• Disclosure of authors’ conflicts of interest “had no effect on any quality ratings of real manuscripts being evaluated for publication by real peer reviewers.” What next? asks an editorial.
• “An additional element to this debate is the uncertainty experienced by the growing number of JADD authors who are asked by reviewers to replace person-first language with identity-first language in their submitted manuscript, or the other way around.”
• “[T]he issue of ghostwriting at the University of Pennsylvania reached the desk of the President of the United States.” A Paxil trial and corporate influence.
• “South Korea clamps down on academics attending ‘weak’ conferences.”
• “A tale of mistake and retraction shows that science works—eventually.” The Economist picks up on a story we covered about whether religious children are less generous.
• Could “a ‘one-stop-shop’ website to consolidate information on the topic and a ‘predatory journal research observatory’ to identify ongoing research and analysis about predatory journals/publishers” help solve the predatory journal problem?
• “The decision has left several unanswered questions including the ability of academicians who were promoted on the basis of publishing their researches in the suspended journals.”
• Why do false beliefs persist, even once the papers they’re based on are retracted? [URL appears to have become dysfunctional since Weekend Reads was posted.]
• Was a well-known professor of law and psychology at Stanford a liar?
• “Freshly published and very old articles are missing out on citations as researchers try to stay abreast of the rapidly growing scientific literature, an analysis of more than 32 million papers reveals.”
• A PhD student at Hiroshima University plagiarized two papers, according to the university.
• “Launched in 2013 as a non-profit community service, the bioRxiv server has brought preprint practice to the life sciences and recently posted its 64,000th manuscript.”
• “Despite concerns being raised about ethical oversight of research published by a group of researchers, each of the four institutional investigations failed to determine and/or report whether ethics committee approval was obtained for the majority of publications assessed.“
• “Unbelievably high.”
• “Improvements of its reproducibility and precision are ongoing.” Happy 40th birthday to the Western blot.

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