Weekend reads: When peer review fails; gender imbalances in citations; COVID-19 science under scrutiny

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• A paper that took a journal three days to accept — and more than two months to retract
• The retraction of a 2012 paper widely derided as racist
• The retraction of a paper co-authored by someone no one can find
• A retraction of a Nature paper by a Harvard group

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 20.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Scientists Take Aim at Another Coronavirus Study in a Major Journal.” The authors were allowed to choose their own reviews.
• “But peer review fails more often than anyone admits. We should be surprised it catches anything at all, the way it’s set up.”
• “How Did This Pass Peer Review? Thoughts on the Lancet and NEJM COVID-19 Retractions.”
• “Retractions are not new. These particular retractions just happened to get a lot of publicity. I am not sure if this will be a sea change…I doubt that there will be any major changes beyond a little more careful scrutiny in the immediate future.
• “Mandeep Mehra, the medical director of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Heart and Vascular Center and a coauthor on all three Surgisphere papers, tells The Scientist in a statement that he ‘requested the ivermectin preprint to be removed from SSRN as he felt further analysis was needed to consider additional confounding factors.’”
• “The variety of systems developed within European countries and the lack of systems in some countries create a heterogeneity of responses to research misconduct, and obstacles to dealing with research misconduct in particular in international scientific collaborations.”
• “Reference lists of neuroscience articles show marked gender imbalances.”
• “Science isn’t broken, but gatekeeping journals expected to give any kind of stamp of quality are.”
• “Nearly half of the education research journals endorsed by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training should lose their accreditation, the country’s science academy has said.”
• “On average retractions take about three years. These are taking days or weeks at most.”
• During the #COVID19 pandemic, preprint servers have become “a place where the tension between speed and the importance of getting [research] right has become front and center.”
• “In The Rush to Provide Information on COVID-19, Are We Losing Faith in Scientists, Government Institutions and the Media?” A conversation with our Ivan Oransky on June 24th.
• “Is Research Ethics Committee review of most clinical trials fundamentally broken?”
• Should psychology departments abolish requirements that undergrads take part in research?
• “DRC Withdrawn from Auction After Protest.” A withdrawal for fraud from another sphere: the world of wine.
• A new paper looks at ways to standardize “fair investigations of allegations of research misconduct.”
• A look at retractions in ophthalmology.
• “Peer review should be an honest, but collegial, conversation,” says a new Nature survey.
• A paper “reveals that existing educational and research systems partly fail to foster research integrity.”
• Anxious that you haven’t yet written a paper about COVID-19? Mason Porter is here to help.

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