Weekend reads: 100 fake professors; study on police killings retracted; false data won’t scuttle company buyout

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• The top retractions of 2019;
• Two retractions and three corrections by an award-winning researcher;
• The retraction of a neuroscience paper from Science.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• A Nigerian “commission discovered about 100 fake professors in the universities system,” University World News reports.
• A study tying “police killings of unarmed black people with health problems in black infants has been retracted due to problems with the data.”
• “Boston Scientific Corp. must complete a $275 million buyout of Channel Medsystems Inc., a judge said, ruling the deal couldn’t be canceled just because a former Channel executive submitted false data to federal regulators about its flagship product.”
• “There’s No Winter Break From ‘Publish or Perish.’”
• “Our results show that removing impact factors from evaluation does not negate the influence of journals.”
• “Facing public pressure to rein in its pollution, a Japanese chemical manufacturer has instead launched an aggressive, years-long campaign to undermine the science showing that its compounds could cause cancer, according to newly released documents reviewed by the Guardian.”
• “Joelle Pineau doesn’t want science’s reproducibility crisis to come to artificial intelligence (AI).”
• “It is likely that improving chair training in the management of discussion as well as creating review procedures that are informed by the science of leadership and team communication would improve review processes and proposal review reliability.”
• “Justice Department investigates Sci-Hub founder on suspicion of working for Russian intelligence.”
• More than 100 scientific societies have warned the Trump administration not to change rules on publishing embargoes that would make all papers deriving from government-funded research immediately free.
• “As a result, one may argue that over the past 20 years, tenure policies have helped develop research excellence of China’s higher education, but at the expense of the quality of teaching and service.”
• “This practice of listing co-authors alphabetically, along with the privileging of the first author, may disadvantage minority group members, whose names often appear later in the alphabet than white scholars.”
• “Kenya’s Commission for University Education (CUE) is developing criteria according to which it will evaluate academic journals produced by universities, in what it says is a step towards regulating publications and ensuring their quality.”
• The Belgrade University Senate unanimously declared Serbia’s Finance Minister Sinisa Mali’s doctorate as plagiarism and annulled it.
• “An Army deputy chief of staff has been retired at a lower rank after a watchdog investigation found he had plagiarized…”
• “Women were 12.3% less likely than men to frame their work with positive words like ‘novel’ or ‘excellent’ in abstracts,” says a new study.
• “This summer, I killed a bird while on a research trip.” A graduate student reflects on ethics in research.
• “Of course, there are things that we can’t tell you and make completely public, like the way we will detect potential misconduct. If you specify the means you apply to detect issues, you allow people to avoid detection.”
• “A retraction, for even stronger reasons, would be wrong. That would be saying to a reader or viewer: ‘Forget about what you read in the past; it never happened.'”
• An academic whose paper in a Taylor & Francis journal linking the HPV vaccine to reduced pregnancy rates was just retracted says, on a site known for pushing the false vaccines cause autism narrative, that one of T&F’s journals just asked her to peer review another paper.
• “[W]hen assessing potential retractions, demonstrating conscious culpability is not a mandatory requirement.” Another look at the Hans Eysenck case.
• “What publishing as a lead author has taught me: Four scientists reveal their key lessons from the publication process.”
• “Is N-hacking ever OK?”
• “Many researchers, me included, find the idea that you should only publish in certain venues limiting, frustrating and fraught with problems.”
• “As raised on PubPeer, there is image duplication in Figure 2. Further issues were found with the figures and reporting, including when compared with the thesis of the first author.” An extensive retraction notice.
• “Peer-review for six-year-olds:” A “Groundbreaking journal unearths new talent.”
• “There is a prevalent myth that peer review began fully formed in the seventeenth or early eighteenth century,” says Mark Hooper. “This is false.”
• “Here’s what happens when you report plagiarism to a journal editor.”
• “What is the point of reading a paper if you have to contact the authors for all of the details that you would actually need to reproduce their original study?”
• “Basically, as long as scientists are willing to transform research into a business – i.e. by setting up journals ­of any kind, open-access or not – high impact journals will indirectly benefit.”
• A journal “accepted the research paper from ‘Andrra Qielli,’…a professor at Triumph University in Tirana, which does not exist.”

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