Weekend reads: p-hacking the US election; an apparently fake author sinks a stock; sued for using a research tool

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Western University materials scientist committed misconduct, according to investigation
• Public health journal “seeking further expert advice” on January paper about COVID-19 PCR testing by high-profile virologist
• Researcher at Tehran medical school loses three papers because “overlap without cross-referencing is not legitimated”
• Researcher, until last week a Miami dean, faked data in grant applications, says federal watchdog
• Authors of meta-analysis on heart disease retract it when they realize a NEJM reference had been retracted
• Elsevier looking into “very serious concerns” after student calls out journal for fleet of Star Trek articles, other issues
• The grad student who found a fatal error that may affect lots of papers

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 39.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Texas is seeking to overturn the 2020 election based on a shoddy statistical analysis. It’s just what you would expect from medical researchers.”
• “‘Fake’ Author Rap Sinks Shares of Catheter-Maker Penumbra,” Bloomberg reports. Does Dr. Antik Bose exist?
• “[A] team of our authors were threatened with legal action for citing the Morisky Adherence Scale…” Background on this story here and here.
• “Predatory journals enter biomedical databases through public funding.”
• “Faux peer-reviewed journals” are a threat to research integrity,” says Dorothy Bishop.
• “It’s not a typical reason for a retraction in some sense. But this was drawing absurd and, frankly, discriminatory conclusions. Ending up with unreliable conclusions is worthy of a retraction.”
• “Coronavirus study that found US school closures cut life expectancy criticised by epidemiologist.”
• “Pre‐registration Is A Game Changer. But, Like Random Assignment, It Is Neither Necessary Nor Sufficient For Credible Science.” And “pre-registration: Why and how.”
• The Einstein Foundation has announced a €500,000 award to promote quality science.
• “While research publications on coronavirus have mushroomed in an amazing speed in 2020, some of them had to be retracted for various reasons. Retraction Watch is a good source to help us keep track of them.”
• “A three-step process for resolving paper disputes: How early career researchers with multiple supervisors can take control of their work.”
• “While eLife is planning to publish only preprints, even it concedes that journal brand still counts for a lot, notes Michael Marinetto.”
• “Subscribe to Open: The Why, The How and The What Now?!”
• “A survey of nearly 1,000 academic researchers in South Africa suggests that the majority are in favour of keeping a government scheme that offers cash rewards for publishing research papers in accredited journals, even though they agree that this can promote unethical practices.”
• “Psychology’s replication crisis inspires ecologists to push for more reliable research.”
• Are researchers pivoting in large numbers to COVID-19?
• “Towards a Shared Peer-Review Taxonomy.”
• “These results are not evidence for a causal effect of poor practices, but it is arguable that committing research misconduct would be more difficult if not impossible in research environments adhering to good practices of research.”
• “IEEE’s Refusal to Issue Corrections.”
• “How I started a journal for postdoctoral researchers.”
• “Kindness alone won’t improve the research culture.”
• “A nonprofit consumer rights group has called for an investigation into the ‘unprecedented and inappropriate close collaboration’ between Cambridge drugmaker Biogen and the FDA.”
• “The Lancet has a particularly close relationship with the IHME, Gates’s signature project in science, and some see perverse incentives driving this relationship.”
• A preprint finds “55.2% of retracted papers have been cited at least once, where 25.4% of papers are such papers where at least one citation turned out to be a retraction.” Does fraud beget fraud?
• “We argue that punitiveness towards scientific misconduct is driven by such a cycle of invisibility.“
• “The growth of OA has also been very uneven across fields of science. We report market shares of open access in 18 Scopus-indexed disciplines ranging from 27 percent (agriculture) to 7 percent (business).”
• “[W]e found that 22% of press releases made exaggerated causal claims from correlational findings in observational studies. Furthermore, universities exaggerated more often than journal publishers by a ratio of 1.5 to 1. Encouragingly, the exaggeration rate has slightly decreased…”
• What has 2020 wrought in the public’s perception of statistics? “Facebook Epidemiology in Place of Textbook Epidemiology.”
• “Our data indicate that the number of retracted articles in rehabilitation is increasing, although the phenomenon is still limited.”
• “Earlier this fall, Clarivate Analytics announced that it was moving toward a future that calculated the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) based on the date of electronic publication and not the date of print publication. If your first reaction was ‘What took you so long!’ you are not alone.”
• “Report: Majority Of Psychological Experiments Conducted In 1970s Just Crimes.” A take from The Onion.

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