Weekend reads: an editor wonders whether data exist, ‘how universities cover up scientific fraud,’ detecting paper mills

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• the retraction of a hotly debated paper that claimed vaping was linked to heart attacks;
• the retraction of a Nature paper on dramatic streamflow changes;
• a retraction notice that referred to data as “fictional;”
• and our 5,000th post.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere.

• “Thus, more than 97% of the 41 manuscripts did not present the raw data supporting their results when requested by an editor, suggesting a possibility that the raw data did not exist from the beginning, at least in some portions of these cases.”
• “[N]ot all universities can be trusted to investigate accusations of fraud, or even to follow their own misconduct policies.”
• “How can journals and peer reviewers detect manuscripts and publications from paper mills?”
• “Why We Should Be Talking About Reproducibility — But Not Forget About Fraud.” Our Ivan Oransky’s #AAAS2020 presentation.
• “A concerning rate of questionable research practices by colleagues (34.1% to 41.1%) was reported to have impacted ECR career advancement.”
• “The University of Central Florida has reversed its decision to terminate a professor in its Institute for Simulation and Training who was accused of trading a degree for grant funding.”
• “It is common nowadays to publish a draft of an article on a preprint server — to place an approximation of a finished article in an archive that the public can access and judge. The research adviser of a graduate student can use this opportunity for educational purposes by assigning that student the responsibility of “reviewing” that preprint.”
• “There is generally no substitute for reporting and replicating experiments.” Kamran Abbasi describes “bad science in a plastic world.”
• “How to bounce back from a bruising peer-review or paper rejection.”
• A professor in Nigeria reveals how a Kenyan lecturer plagiarized her thesis.
• Who cites who? “The biggest citation relationships between journals also reflect some of the biggest rivalries,” according to a new analysis.
• “The Scientific Paper Is Outdated: For the sake of research, their careers, and their mental health, scientists should spend more time developing software.”
• In the Arab region, “The proportion of retracted papers to the total number of published papers (0.17%) was higher than the global proportion and was the highest for Algeria (1%) and the lowest for Lebanon (0.03%).”
• “We confirmed that, for the whole period, studies reported in newspapers received on average more citations.”
• “What to do when your grant is rejected: Failed funding applications are inevitable, but perseverance can pay dividends.” (Nature Index)
• “A Controversial Study Claimed To Explain Why Women Don’t Go Into Science And Tech. It Just Got A 1,113-Word Correction.” (BuzzFeed News)
• “Science should never be for sale.”
• “Journals like us to think it’s the Good Housekeeping Seal of approval and it just isn’t.” Our Ivan Oransky on peer review.
• “Retractions: the good, the bad, and the ugly. What researchers stand to gain from taking more care to understand errors in the scientific record.”
• “In the publicity resulting from the allegations, other questions have emerged about Leach’s academic qualifications and his behavior in the field.”
• “Journals must assume responsibility for ensuring that those data are made available and that the mechanism to access the data be cited in the same way that previous literature reports are cited.”

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