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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Stem cell researchers lose two more papers, making three
- A year after a federal misconduct finding, a cancer researcher loses a paper
- Journal retracts 70-year-old article on homosexuality for “long discredited beliefs, prejudices, and practices”
- COVID-19 pneumonia paper earns expression of concern — for being similar to a pre-pandemic article
- Bad, Medicine: Journal publishes doubly-brutal retraction notice
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 39.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- A co-leader of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence team at Google was fired after objecting to management’s request that she retract a paper.
- “The British Journal of Sports Medicine should retract fatally flawed research used to justify human rights violations.”
- “On the retraction of ‘A closer look at U.S. deaths’ and our coverage of COVID-19.” The Johns Hopkins News-Letter, a student newspaper, reflects. Our coverage of the story from last week.
- A former chemistry student has pleaded guilty to poisoning his roommate with thallium.
- A look at an 1800s tale involving fraud charges by an assistant to Robert Boyle.
- “…HHS data for three important values in Wisconsin hospitals—beds filled, intensive care unit (ICU) beds filled, and inpatients with COVID-19—often diverge dramatically from those collected by the other federal source, from state-supplied data, and from the apparent reality on the ground.”
- “..eLife will only review manuscripts already published as preprints.” Editor in chief Michael Eisen has more to say in this interview with Science’s Lila Guterman.
- “Retractions should get at least as much attention as the original paper did.” That and more from our Ivan Oransky in the Knight Science Journalism Science Editing Handbook.
- “He just got up, told us about how he wasn’t able to replicate this study, and sat down. It was heroic.”
- “Don’t erase undergrad researchers and technicians from author lists.”
- A look at whether the retraction of a paper on MDMA (ecstasy) earned as much coverage as the original.
- “[R]eviews that use emotive or sarcastic language are often the hardest for recipients to deal with, particularly if they are early-career researchers.”
- Should peer reviewers be strict grammarians?
- “This article was originally published on November 30, 2020 with a number of errors and misleading claims.” A major correction in Scientific American.
- “The policy applies to all types of name changes. We won’t be asking authors to provide a reason for changing their name, as we know these reasons can be personal, and shouldn’t affect their publication record.”
- “A former UCT PhD student is demanding to be compensated for reputational damage after she alleged the institution failed to fairly investigate a plagiarism complaint against a professor.”
- “How Prestige Journals Remain Elite, Exclusive And Exclusionary.” A reaction to Nature’s new article processing charge, which tops $10,000US.
- “As part of their early response to the worldwide problem presented by the COVID‐19 pandemic, there was a significant change in the characteristics of articles published by leading medical journals, with some evidence of a tendency towards publishing articles prematurely and those with lower internal validity.”
- “It is commonplace for science leaders and others to claim that the future of biomedical research rests in large part upon the public’s trust. If true, it behooves the biomedical research community to understand how it avoids taking chances with that trust.”
- “What’s more, many journal articles – and even some preprints these days – come with press releases. And the hype and attention-directing they do have more influence in media coverage than the articles themselves anyway.”
- After a typhoon delays publication of a paper, PLOS ONE tries to re-embargo the work, then reverses itself.
- “Prof Said Jade Amulets May Block COVID—and Became a Science Supervillain.” How a fringe idea emerged in a journal.
- “Citations Are the Currency of Science. Then there are the counterfeiters.”
- “Famed primatologist fired for mismanagement of funds for chimp habitat.”
- A journal wins the fourth “This Image Is Fine” Award from Elisabeth Bik.
- “Caveat emptor: preprint servers in biomedical science.”
- “How to write a superb literature review.”
- “Why Russian undergraduates cheat and how they rationalise it for themselves and others.”
- “Two papers using the same data about the same topic were published in the same surgical journal one month apart. They came up with completely opposite conclusions.”
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I predict that once eLife’s policy comes into effect that their metrics will slowly start to decline. They’re a prestige title being run by an editor who hates journals.
“The British Journal of Sports Medicine should retract fatally flawed research used to justify human rights violations.” – unless there is a solution, this will end badly.
I’m sure all the female athletes will not be happy when all the female records are broken by transgender athletes and the finals of all races at the Olympics are all transgender athletes as well.
RE: eLIFE’s new mandatory pre-print policy
In the interview conducted by SCIENCE’s Lila Guterman (link in the seventh entry under ‘Here’s what happened elsewhere’), Michael Eisen, Editor-in-Chief of eLIFE, stated:
“ I imagine Francis Bacon and the other early scientists of the Royal Society involved in creating the first journals: If they came forward to 2020, everything in our world would shock and terrify them, but they’d find deep comfort in scientific journals. That’s a deep condemnation. We’ve been stuck in one model. I view what we’re doing here as a critical step in the unsticking of science publishing.”
Ouch … Francis Bacon was dead for over 30 years when the Royal Society came into existence, and for almost 40 years when the Society published the first issue of what is considered the first scientific journal. More importantly, the idea that scientific journals of today are more or less indistinguishable from those of the 17th century, seems, with all due respect, well beyond the line that separates the merely naïve from the utterly grotesque (for starters, see e.g. DOI 10.1017/S0018246X17000334).
Could it be that the editorial board of eLIFE have no clue what they’re talking about? I don’t think so. If the majority of customers able to put down 2.5 grand for one publication appears to find preprint servers sexy, then turning eLIFE into one probably is a good idea. And if a bunch of historical horsefeathers can help flattering these customers into believing that they are part of “unsticking science publishing”, they might even become willing to help closing the gap between the publication fees demanded by eLIFE and NATURE. It’s the economy, stupid …
Sarcasm meets transphobia is how we should characterize this ^^^ comment. And also a strawman. The paper in question was NOT about transfolk, but about women with disorders of sexual development, most of them with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, meaning that their bodies can’t recognize testosterone. On the surface of it, it would seem silly to test for high levels of testosterone in an individual whose androgen receptors are non-functional. But the reason they do it is not because these women have any type of “unfair advantage”, but because of unreasoning hate and disgust of people with disorders of sexual development, that is to say… bigotry.
The reasons for this disgust and hate warrant examination. And when they are, they allow us to see why commenters like the one above conflate the issues of women with disorders of sexual development with transsexual women:
https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2017/06/04/its-just-not-fair/
I guess you missed the fact that the author of the article complains about the sex-testing procedures of the World ATHLETICS, based on a paper published in the British Journal of SPORTS Medicine.
Much of the concern in world sports IS about trans athletes. An athlete who goes through puberty sexually as a male – whether she decides her gender is female before or after puberty – has a huge advantage over other female athletes. How do YOU propose to ensure equity in women’s athletics and protect the rights of fair competition for all female athletes?
But that’s alright. Ad hominem attacks are all good. Anyone with a different opinion to you is a sexist / racist / bigot, etc. These conflated insults have lost all meaning.
Grow up.
Once again, insults and transphobia replacing reason. The paper in no way was about transfolk. It was about women with disorders of sex development. But interestingly, bigots do conflate the two wishing to introduce an occasion where they can exibit their transphobic attitudes, opinions, and sarcasm. And yes, your comment was by definition snarky transphobia. Your gratious final statement proves it.
“Two papers using the same data about the same topic were published in the same surgical journal one month apart. They came up with completely opposite conclusions.”
I don’t think that’s quite correct. The effects seen were in the same direction but one was adjudged statistically significant, the other not. That would be of concern of they were the same effect, but they were not. One was for “intra-abdominal abscesses” and the other was for “postoperative surgical site (superficial, deep, and organ space) infections”. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that these are different things.
So: two papers examine the same data comparing the same two variants of an operative procedure at looking at two different outcomes. The studies use different inclusion and exclusion criteria, outcome measures, sample sizes, and covariates. Each study finds that the same variant procedure leads to better outcomes, one outcome being better by an amount which is statistically significant, the other not significant.
That does not sound so exciting.
Thank you for commenting. A difference that is not statistically significant is not a difference. The words “better” and “trend” are not scientifically valid.
Yes, I know the studies were retrospective. The point is that neither study was done correctly and caution should be used when interpreting studies of databases.
If that’s in response to my comment, it’s a little wide of the mark. I didn’t use the word “trend”, for example. But more to the point, are you suggesting that there is in fact no difference between “intra-abdominal abscesses” and “postoperative surgical site infections”? I mat add that speaking as a mere patient, “better” seems a useful word to describe the absence of an infection and/or abscess as opposed to their presence.