Weekend reads: Double-dipping with industry funding; a bully is rehired; organized crime scholar charged with money laundering

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• A look at why an infamous paper on autism and vaccines continues to be cited;
• A journal that decided to play it safe instead of retracting a paper;
• The lifting of sanctions on Duke University following concerns about how they handled cases of misconduct.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “A Science investigation has shown that he, like more than one-third of the 182 clinical scientist ambassadors whose years of participation could be determined, broke the program’s rules against certain forms of industry funding.”
• “The case of a UW-Madison professor who bullied students working in his lab and is scheduled to return to work after a two-year suspension has some students and staff on campus questioning whether the professor’s tenured status afforded him a lighter punishment.”
• “A Miami professor who’s an expert on drug trafficking and organized crime was charged by the U.S. with laundering money from Venezuela,” Bloomberg reports.
• “Science prevailing over politics: That’s how a researcher who was snubbed for a high-profile award earlier this year has characterized the decision to finally recognize his achievements.”
• “The scientific literature is riddled with bad charts and graphs, leading to misunderstanding and worse.”
• “[S]cience should depend on validity of arguments and data, not on numbers of voters.” Tom Hardwicke and John Ioannidis surveyed those who signed the “retire statistical significance” petition. Here are their results, with a response.
• “I don’t know who to tell when bad things happen.”
• “Many radiation biology studies, however, lack adequate reporting of irradiation methodology, which makes replication difficult.”
• “This is what we teach our students that science should look like,” she says, “but until recently, it almost never actually looked that way, at least in my corner of science.”
• How many authors on Google Scholar are “manlocked?” And what does the term mean? Lior Pachter explains.
• “Over the years, however, the definition of education records has become something that’s more loosely defined and schools use it to prevent student journalists from reporting on any events that happen at the school that school officials don’t want to get out to the public.” That has certainly been our experience with FERPA.
• “New research blows the lid on China’s claim to have stopped using prisoners and groups such as Falun Gong for organ donation, finding that China appears to have systematically falsified its official data.”
• Some think that “plagiarism is only an error but not misconduct,” and “One concern is perpetuating these views in mentor/mentee relationships.” What a survey of 25,000 PhD holders in Brazil reveals.
• Thompson Rivers University breached academic freedom when they punished a predatory journal critic, says a report. Background here.
• “[A] handful of European institutions have told Nature that they have now hired external companies or dedicated in-house experts to check research manuscripts.”
• “Virtually every time JAMA publishes an article on the effects of pollution or climate change on health, the journal immediately receives demands from critics to retract the article for various reasons.”
• “The game revolves around the player traveling through Lycoming College and defeating ‘plagiarism goblins’ by correctly answering questions about plagiarism.”
• “Why do some other funders and scholarly publishers still allow researchers to suggest reviewers to evaluate their work?”
• From the archives: “The author mentioned that it was a non voluntary mistake and requested immediate erasal [sic] of the paper.”
• “Pre-specification of study design, outcomes, and analytic decisions are good scientific practice. Deviations from such plans should be faithfully reported for transparency and interpretation.”
• “Serbian Finance Minister Sinisa Mali…plagiarised his PhD thesis, the Professional Ethics Committee of the University of Belgrade ruled.”
• A skin cancer doctor is “in hot water” after having two papers retracted.
• After a scandal that ended in tragedy, “Whatever happened to the STAP cell scientists including Haruko Obokata?”
• “The Chinese Academy of Engineering is investigating the president of a leading university over claims that academic papers he supervised may have questionable data.”
• “Why engage with preprints?”
• Junior researchers using a new tool were “more likely to detect inadequate reporting in RCTs than the usual peer review processes used by journals.”
• “How to manage a multi-author megapaper.”
• Bradley Fikes, a beloved science writer at the San Diego Union-Tribune, has died at the age of 61. Fikes had a real sense of wonder about science, but he also knew how to figure out what was true and what wasn’t. An example: His reporting led the San Diego VA to correct a press release in 2015. RIP.

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