Weekend reads: Disgraced surgeon earns prison sentence; politicians and plagiarism; parents who help their kids cheat

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• A political science professor who is now up to eight retractions for plagiarism
• A researcher who found the retraction of his paper “Kafkian“
• A look at how slow journals can be to correct the record — and why that matters.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Paolo Macchiarini gets “a 16 month prison sentence in Italy for forging documents and abuse of office.” It all started in 2012.
• “Politicians in eastern Europe are having a harder time getting away with a bad habit: inflating credentials by cheating to obtain fancy qualifications.”
• “Academic integrity expert Cath Ellis said friends and family comprised the largest category of academic cheating service provision.”
• “Restrict researchers to one paper a year, says UCL professor.”
• “Our results support the idea that researchers are quickly responsive to incentives they are exposed to.”
• “Addressing the crisis of confidence of the past decade will require more than changes in journal policies and editorial practices…”
• In which two French institutions argue over who has the rights to data.
• “Noni Byrnes wants to bring more transparency to grant review at the NIH.”
• “Is PLOS Running Out Of Time? Financial Statements Suggest Urgency To Innovate.” Phil Davis takes a look at the nonprofit open access publisher.
• Climate scientist Michael Mann will be allowed to continue his defamation suit against publications who called him the “Jerry Sandusky of climate science.”
• “A study of protein databases shows that discoverers who are second to publish still end up getting a substantial portion of the recognition.”
• “The analysis indicates that researchers use a variety of explanations and arguments to justify inclusion of what guidelines would describe as honorary or guest authorship.”
• “In some contexts, RCR training has been shown to result in trainees’ overconfidence in their ability to handle problems and an overemphasis on their ethicality.”
• “I will say that junior faculty and post doctorate fellows often write the best reviews because they tend to be insecure and tend to over-compensate and to be very careful in doing a good job.”
• “If universities do not promote and protect academic freedom at the heart of their research integrity policies – particularly those covering HR investigations around misconduct – then they could fall behind the curve, and as it develops the unwary may quickly find themselves on the wrong side of the law.”
• “A charge of plagiarism against a University of Colorado at Colorado Springs special-education professor has been dismissed by a review committee after the professor said she did no such thing and stands by her work.”
• “The announcement of this year’s Nobel Prize in economics has highlighted divisions within the development economics community, particularly around the efficacy of using Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) as a tool for making social interventions.”
• “Four journals also say they are scrutinizing papers coauthored by Cao Xuetao after scientists raise questions about images on Twitter and PubPeer.” But is China at the top of the retraction leaderboard?
• “The authors have not received approval from the relevant authorities to use Chinese genomic data and therefore have to suspend the CGVD database.”
• Meet the heroes of scientific and research integrity, according to Matt Hodgkinson of Hindawi — including one name you’ll find familiar.
• How do the ethical policies of Indian journals stack up? Find out.
• “Junior scientists who collaborate with a leading scholar early in their career are more likely to become top researchers themselves, particularly if they are based at a less prestigious university, according to a paper.”
• Nakamura University has found that one of its researchers plagiarized and duplicated work.
• “[W]hy, then, do philosophers not publish anonymously?What’s the point of putting our names to ideas, if we don’t publish to compete?”
• A presenter started by equating finding the airway to finding the “female G-spot.” Later he showed a photo of a man with his hands around a woman’s throat.

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