Weekend reads: How to be a statistical detective; a $5.5 million settlement over hidden grants; 15 studies that challenged medical dogma

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads — the last of 2019! — a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• The story of what happened when researchers tried to publish a Nature paper 600 times;
• How a plagiarized image in NEJM was discovered;
• A new scam involving special issues of journals;
• Four retractions for an endocrinology researcher in South Korea.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “You don’t need a degree in statistics to catch most of these errors.” Kristin Sainani on “how to be a statistical detective.”
• The Van Andel Research Institute pays the U.S. government $5.5 million to settle allegations that it hid generous grants from China to two of its researchers.
• 15 studies that challenged medical dogma in 2019, according to Eric Topol.
• The “I was prompted to kill my student and lover because someone was accusing me of plagiarism” defense.
• A college bookstore suspended the sales of three sociology textbooks after allegations that the author, a faculty member, plagiarized.
• Among authors of dermatology textbooks, “The total compensation [from pharmaceutical companies] for 381 authors in 2016 was $5,892,221.”
• Guess which scientific sleuth is quoted by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary for use of the word “overadjusted?”
• A Trump official committed “localized instances of plagiarism” in her thesis, Columbia found.
• “Unfortunately, many journal editors don’t have the courage to keep science clean.”
• “The current methods used to prevent/contain misconduct are vague, ineffective, insufficient, or poorly implemented.”
• A look back at the infallibity of science in the decade that is about to come to an end.
• Should publishers be suing Sci-Hub?
• “Our view is that hiding self-citation data is indefensible and needlessly confuses any attempts to understand the bibliometric impact of one’s work.”
• “Participant carelessness and fraud: Consequences for clinical research and potential solutions.”
• “How did our advice about research ethics work out, four years later?” asks Andrew Gelman.
• Finnish institutions of higher education have “inconsistent responses to notifications of suspected plagiarism,” says a new study of cases.
• “There is substantial published evidence showing that countless people enroll each year in ethically deficient clinical trials.”
• “Unfortunately, a scholar’s tendency to emphasize the claims of science are ineffective.”
• In which biotech companies duke it out by press release.

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