Weekend reads: Leading stem cell researcher’s work under scrutiny; faked drug trial data; troubling China practice snares publisher

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Researchers suing a journal over a retraction;
• A publisher retracting nearly 50 papers at once;
• A psychology researcher who committed misconduct, according to her former university;
• Two retractions of papers claiming a link between exposure to violence and aggressive behavior.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “More than ten scientific papers of which the renowned stem cell researcher Catherine Verfaillie (KU Leuven) is jointly or ultimately responsible, are under discussion.”
• An executive at Kolon Life Sciences has been arrested for providing false data about a drug under development to South Korea’s regulators.
• “A Tri-Cities medical researcher who received $5.6 million by faking and falsifying human drug trials could go to prison for the rest of his life.”
• “Springer Nature said…it had strengthened its guidelines on papers involving vulnerable groups of people and that it would add notes of concern to previously published papers.”
• “First and most critically, the statistical analyses reported in the article were inadequate and deviated from the analysis plan in the study’s methods article – an error the authors are aware of and had acknowledged (Kobel et al., 2015) after some of us identified it in one of their prior publications about this same program (Li et al., 2015).”
• “My one take-away message is that we underestimate how a single science article can end up informing — or misinforming — a large group of people.”
• “Many editors portray courage and commitment to maintain the integrity of the scientific record, including through error correction. But some abrogate their responsibility.”
• “The committee has determined that there was no evidence of misconduct as part of the paper review process.” A follow-up on a case in which a student committed suicide.
• Five years after retractions appeared, Kansai Medical University has determined that Hiroaki Matsubara committed misconduct.
• “A review of almost 90 UC system health faculty members, who had among the highest outside incomes at four medical schools, found that about two-thirds, including Hermanowicz, did not report all of the money as required.”
• Scientific American retracts a “hit piece” on ob-gyn Jen Gunter.
• “Trial by Twitter could be an intriguing spectacle, but it is not justice,” says The Lancet. “All parties deserve the opportunity to answer their critics.”
• The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) lifted the embargo early on a tiny study of a potential drug for endometriosis after the UK Press Association ran the story early.
• “They added that the experiment of [1] was completed in a hurry, and that the mistakes occurred in this process lead to the image duplication.”
• Could “a technique commonly used in image forensics to associate a given image with the camera used to take it” help detect plagiarized or duplicated images in papers?
• “Throwing rules and regulations to the wind, Kashmir University administration has elevated a ‘tainted’ faculty member of its Zoology Department accused of plagiarism to Head of the Department, Environmental Sciences.”
• “We present evidence of replication crisis in life sciences and highlight the need to explore in deep different sources of variation that could lead to low replicability findings.”
• “We present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research.”
• “We need to treat sexual harassment the same as research misconduct. Grant and funding withdrawals should be considered, say researchers.”
• “The joint meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology and the European Molecular Biology Organization in Washington DC this month will include a mock faculty-recruitment exercise, involving approaches such as removing applicant names and journal titles from bibliographies.”
• The New England Journal of Medicine will not be correcting a paper that a doctor-advocate says contains a serious error.
• “Biomedical researchers and social science researchers were primarily concerned with sloppy science and insufficient supervision. Natural sciences and humanities researchers discussed sloppy reviewing and theft of ideas by reviewers, a form of plagiarism.”
• The Delhi high court has dismissed a petition accusing a JNU associate professor of plagiarism, saying the charge is not established.
• Citizen scientists ‘deserve more credit,’ say the authors of a new article. “Researchers say academic journals should recognise non-professional input and indigenous knowledge.”
• “Women from some under-represented minorities are given too few talks at world’s largest Earth-science conference.”
• How often do authors allow the peer reviews from their papers to be published? After a six-month experiment at PLOS, it’s more than 40%.
• “An organization of Hoosier journalists is condemning Gov. Eric Holcomb’s use of a cease-and-desist letter to demand the Indianapolis Star retract two recent news articles.”

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