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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Researchers face disciplinary action as dozens of their studies fall under scrutiny
- Journal retracts paper claiming that group of Indigenous Americans were Black Africans
- In which a researcher named Das plagiarizes from another researcher named Das, one with 20 retractions
- The bizarre anti-vaccine paper a Florida professor has been trying to have retracted to no avail
- Study finding patients of female surgeons fare better is temporarily removed
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 36.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- A new paper “demonstrates how retracted research can continue to spread and how the current information environment contributes to this problem.”
- In a study of 250 random citations, one in four quoted the reference incorrectly in some way.
- A winery owner says wine institutions in Australia have plagiarized her PhD thesis.
- “Don’t leave us this way:” A researcher in The Netherlands reflects on what Brexit will mean for scientific integrity.
- What is “parallel peer review?”
- “From amazing work to I beg to differ – analysis of bioRxiv preprints that received one public comment till September 2019.”
- “The Influence of bioRχiv on PLOS ONE’s Peer-Review and Acceptance Time.”
- “A physicist who won an employment tribunal against the University of Oxford over its compulsory retirement policy has had his job reinstated and been awarded almost £30,000 in compensation.”
- “How often do leading biomedical journals use statistical experts to evaluate statistical methods?”
- “Some cannabinoid researchers make honest errors, others engage in fraud, but few are held accountable.”
- “The findings indicate a statistically significant effect of highly-cited papers and citations to other papers in the same journal issue.”
- “Research integrity: nine ways to move from talk to walk.” More than 20 authors weigh in at Nature.
- “Rethink on university research needs a business-like footing.”
- Does science self-correct? A talk by one of our co-founders about what we’ve learned in a decade.
- PLOS to “honor requests from transgender and non-binary authors of published papers to update their names.”
- “Why does a high-impact publication matter so much for a career in research?”
- “Most animals used in biomedical experiments are not accounted for in published papers, a first-of-its-kind study suggests.”
- “Honesty and transparency are not enough. Bad science is bad science even if it open, and applying transparency to poor measurement and design will, in and of itself, not create good science.”
- Unprecedented? “Three of the Most Prestigious Scientific Journals Have Condemned Trump’s Handling of COVID-19.”
- We’re a decade into the “replication crisis,” writes Kelsey Piper. “Bad papers are still published. But some other things might be getting better.”
- “However, for the sake of argument, if the scientific literature continues to exaggerate the claims of host manipulation by parasites without check, it is possible that, for example, specialists and non-specialists alike will start to unequivocally believe that hairworms are capable of creating suicidal insect hosts or that T. gondii causes rodents to be attracted to cat urine.”
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Good stuff.
Thank you.’
Devra Marcus