Weekend reads: Top journals under scrutiny; a toxic legacy; science by press release

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It was a particularly busy week at Retraction Watch, featuring retractions from four of the top journals in the world:

• A retraction from Nature
• The retraction of an Annals of Internal Medicine paper claiming masks didn’t halt the spread of COVID-19
• A group of anesthesiologists losing 10 papers at once
• Retractions from NEJM and Lancet of highly influential COVID-19 papers

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “The Lancet has made one of the biggest retractions in modern history. How could this happen?”
• An author of two now-retracted NEJM and Lancet papers once sounded the alarm about research misconduct.
• “Fake Science: XMRV, COVID-19, and the Toxic Legacy of Dr. Judy Mikovits.”
• “I trust (science) more than I trust politics, more than I trust a lot of human endeavors, but I certainly don’t blindly trust it.”
• “By 1 June Covid-19 had prompted more than 42,700 academic papers and 3,100 clinical trials, they say.”
• “There’s Lots Of Research Being Published About The Coronavirus. Not All Of It Is Good.”
• “How You Should Read Coronavirus Studies, or Any Science Paper: Published scientific research, like any piece of writing, is a peculiar literary genre.”
• “Amid the concern about unvetted preprints getting undue media attention, it would be easy to overcorrect, treating peer-reviewed papers as if they are flawless.”
• “This notion that if it’s peer-reviewed, it somehow has the Good Housekeeping seal of approval, and that if it’s a preprint, it’s automatically wrong — the world is a far more gray place than that.”
• “Will the pandemic permanently alter scientific publishing?” asks Ewen Callaway at Nature.
• “Science will not move forward if others can’t check researchers’ work. The need for speed is no excuse.” The recent events are “also a reminder that policy U-turns based on a single study are almost always a bad idea.”
• “Journals hardly ever look at the underlying data.”
• “And many members of the public and politicians are treating every scrap of scientific information about the pandemic equally, he said — whether data comes from a peer-reviewed study or a company press release.”
• “The problem also stems from the fact that even leading journals rely too heavily on an honor system, but ‘you never know when a catastrophe is going to happen, if you’re not willing to put into place some reasonable safeguards.'”
• “[David] Steensma notes that the journal [NEJM] later published a letter detailing a three-day trial of COVID transmission in three cats. ‘Sometimes the journal surprises me by publishing things that I thought weren’t up to their standards, but it’s something provocative and novel,’ he says.”
• Are scientific journals just like any other media?
• Prosecutors say an Oklahoma couple spent “grant money on matters unrelated to the purpose of the grant funding, including on personal expenses.”
• “‘It’s true what they say about Reviewer Two,’ a friend said to me recently, joking that his own second reviewer had been the one barring the way to his new article’s publication yet again, asking for another round of changes.”
• Why co-authorship isn’t just what you know — it’s also who you know.
• “Early career researchers face unique challenges when a senior collaborator becomes embroiled in allegations of scientific malpractice.”
• A look at diversity in scholarly publishing.
• “Members of the scholarly publishing community may enjoy watching judges and lawyers argue over the finer points of predatory journals, peer review, the impact factor, journal indexing, and article processing charges.”
• “Given the comments of Dr Elisabeth Bik https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2020/02/21/the-tadpole-paper-mill/ regarding this article, the journal requested the author to provide the raw data. However, the author was not able to fulfil this request.”
• In a study, “participants suggested that the lack of clear and consistent policies regarding the attribution and evaluation of [equal co-first authorship] contributes to tensions amongst ECFA authors and obscures their preferred attributions of credit.”
• “Bellona wants answers about data fabrication scandal at Norwegian research reactor.”
• “The implementation of ICMJE data-sharing requirements in online journal policies was suboptimal for ICMJE-member journals and poor for ICMJE-affiliated journals.”
• “What Keeps Patients Out of Clinical Trials?”

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