Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, 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.
Sending thoughts to our readers and wishing them the best in this uncertain time.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- A researcher who felt “shocked” and “physically ill” — but still corrected the record.
- A retraction mystery in which none of the authors of a paper knew anything about it.
- The retraction of a paper in Nature after years of scrutiny.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “Much of the research that emerges in the coming weeks will be turn out to be unreliable, even wrong. We’ll be OK if we remember that.” Our Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky in WIRED.
- “[M]any of the purported breakthroughs around the virus are being shared in spaces that are unfamiliar to many civilians, and mostly unvetted.” Ivan speaks to On The Media.
- “Because of the problems with the study design—not just its observational nature but that differential loss to follow-up—the data from the French study don’t move the needle for me at all.” Perry Wilson on a much-touted study of hydroxychloroquine.
- “This would be the equivalent of allowing a student to grade their own paper.” Elisabeth Bik digs into the same study.
- “In Defense Of Coronavirus Testing Strategy, [Trump] Administration Cited Retracted Study.”
- “In the first 80 days of this year alone, the number of articles [in PubMed] about [coronaviruses] reached a staggering 1,245.”
- “Covid-19 is reshaping the world of bioscience publishing,” says Jeffrey Flier.
- “As the coronavirus pandemic disrupts the work of researchers around the world, academic journals are adjusting their expectations for what and how they publish.”
- “eLife is making changes to its policies on peer review in response to the impact of COVID-19.” Among the changes, editors will “Curtail requests for additional experiments during revisions.”
- “Seven years and hundreds of citations and media mentions later, we want to update the record.”
- “I wrote a list of several scientific articles that nobody should read or cite…The list only included my own articles.”
- “We’re not suggesting that the way that people write scientific articles, or how peer-reviewed journals operate, needs to change. But as a potential communication strategy, adding more of the scientist’s background story could be something to experiment with.”
- “Lacking interest in fundamental theory can lead to problems in academic honesty and mistakes in publications, originating from the fact that researchers are, perhaps necessarily, too eager for the next publication.”
- Diet book advice “varied widely in terms of which types of foods should be consumed or avoided and…was often contradictory.”
- “This is the story of how UC Berkeley dropped the ball when they were made aware that one of their professors possibly committed research misconduct. It is also the story of how publishers Press and Penguin failed to even acknowledge the ball’s existence.”
- “I did not love being interviewed by him.” Daniel Greenberg, a reporter who taught journalists how not to be cheerleaders for scientists, dies.
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