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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- a three-part series on what happened when some researchers tried to correct the sports science literature;
- a story of how flawed science involving panthers led to policy decisions;
- a journal that declined to retract a retraction.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “Michigan State University Museum Director Mark Auslander is suing MSU and three people he claims retaliated against him after he revealed decades of financial mismanagement.” The story begins here.
- “A stem cell company co-founded by the leading geneticist Professor Sir Martin Evans conducted unlawful medical trials in Greece.”
- “Now, Pruitt acknowledges in a new interview that a lawyer he hired has sent several journal editors and co-authors letters cautioning them about airing this matter on social media and admonishing them to follow retraction guidelines set up by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).” A researcher whose work is being questioned by colleagues — and some of which has been retracted — lawyers up.
- A paper on treating coronavirus with traditional Chinese medicine “promised much more than it delivered.”
- A Harvard professor sues the school, “citing a dispute concerning his employment contract” — aka a tenure denial.
- “Wow, that was rough. My dad just found out that my lab has run out of research funding,” Dr Saunders wrote.
- “Luckily,” says biotech founder Sarah Richardson of prestige publishing, “I don’t give a crap about that.”
- “A former West Virginia University professor admitted to a fraud charge…” Lewis was employed by the People’s Republic of China’s “Global Experts 1000 Talents Plan.”
- “Scientists Say Another Panic-Fueling Vaping Study Needs to Be Retracted: A paper that claimed vapes are a gateway to cigarettes relied on faulty methodology, experts say.”
- “Hundreds of scientists who post their peer-review activity on the website Publons say they’ve reviewed papers for journals termed ‘predatory’, an analysis has found.”
- “Equating citations with impact thus underestimates the impact of highly cited papers. Real citation practices thus reveal that citations are biased measures of quality and impact,” argues a new preprint.
- “The best research is done not when we pretend that we are perfectly objective, but when we acknowledge that we are not.”
- Why are hundreds of papers retracted every year? Our Ivan Oransky talks to BYU Radio.
- Remember, folks — particularly journalists covering journal studies — it’s weird embargo time season.
- PNAS lifted the embargo early on Friday of last week on a paper because the corresponding author’s institute posted a press release days before the embargo was scheduled to lift.
- What is “white hat bias?” David Allison explains.
- “[Q]uality of reporting in preprints in the life sciences is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles, albeit slightly lower on average, supporting the idea that preprints should be considered valid scientific contributions.”
- “But for more normal journals, how poisonous is suggesting reviewers?”
- “For three years, part of DARPA has funded two teams for each project: one for research and one for reproducibility. The investment is paying off.”
- “[T]he overall quality and originality of published academic research can be improved by introducing randomness into the peer review process,” argue two researchers.
- “Imagine your excitement when you receive your first email inviting you to present your esteemed article in Rome. Is this invitation a dream come true or predatory?”
- “Enforced, structured reporting and processes to assess relevance are required to make conflict of interest disclosures fit for purpose.”
- “Editor’s note: Retraction and apology for racist op-ed illustration choice.”
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“Hundreds of scientists who post their peer-review activity on the website Publons say they’ve reviewed papers for journals termed ‘predatory’, an analysis has found.”
I thought the “predatory” journals were called that because they didn’t do any peer review? Maybe the term and those smeared with it need to be re-evaluated.
A number of parasitical publishers spam strangers with invitations to peer-review, not because they intend to use the responses to decide whether to accept the authors’ money or not but rather to legitimise their scam. Much as they try to recruit Editors whose names will adorn the Editorial Boards but who will serve no other function there.
For instance, I was spammed the other day by a bot posing as ‘Vernica D’ at the ‘Peer Review Department’ of ”PeerTechz’, who operate at a level several barrels lower than the bottom of the original barrel.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ES52FmBU8AAzEIO.png
Oh good, Pruitt has lawyered up. The truth comes out in court cases.