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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Seven barred from research after plagiarism, duplications in eleven papers
- An author asked for multiple corrections to a paper. PLOS ONE decided to retract it.
- Researcher charged with abusing his wife has third paper retracted
- Apparent HeLa cell line mixup earns a paper an expression of concern
- Anesthesiologist loses 50 more papers in 12 months
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 117.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- A “Top German psychologist fabricated data, investigation finds.”
- “Publishing in a predatory journal is now a scientific misconduct.”
- Are scientists as good at taking criticism as they are at giving it? A cartoon guide from Hilda Bastian.
- “Why I Won’t Review or Write for Elsevier and Other Commercial Scientific Journals.”
- “Why did it take so many decades for the behavioral sciences to develop a sense of crisis around methodology and replication?”
- “Poor coverage of new medical tests can be harmful, research finds.” A new study.
- “Many people will have lingering doubts about how well internal controls hold for cases of major misconduct.”
- “Land seizures, ‘unethical’ research: University of Minnesota confronts troubled history with tribal nations.”
- “[O]n a mission to stamp out shoddy research.” Another profile of Elisabeth Bik.
- “Dr. Genden said Dr. Macchiarini’s rise and fall profoundly affected his own path.”
- “Want other scientists to cite you? Drop the jargon.”
- How often do editorial board members publish papers in their own journals?
- Is it time for a “Requiem for impact factors and high publication charges?”
- “We found that ghost-authorship in industry-sponsored [inflammatory bowel disease] biologic clinical trials has a moderately high prevalence, with the most common being manuscript or protocol writing assistance.”
- Niigata University has found that a researcher duplicated his or her work. Officials did not name the scientist.
- “Growing numbers of Chinese universities are dropping the requirement for PhD students to publish papers in journals in order to graduate.”
- A look at retractions in anesthesiology.
- You can’t make this stuff up: “Parts of Alberta’s draft school curriculum plagiarized, academic finds.”
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That abstract on editorial board members publishing in their own journals is just wrong.
If you are an editorial board member, it is 100% OK to publish in your own journal. ICMJE and COPE guidelines just say there has to be a policy in place to manage the conflict and ensure editors and reviewers are sufficiently removed from the submitting board member.
Even an EiC can publish occasionally in their own journal as long as the editorial decision-making is sufficiently protected.
“We found that ghost-authorship in industry-sponsored [inflammatory bowel disease] biologic clinical trials has a moderately high prevalence…”
Only the abstract is available. According to the Methods section, “Two authors independently identified the presence of ghost-authorship, which we defined as the exclusion on the author byline of the included RCT publication of any individuals who assisted in the writing of the trial manuscript and/or performed the data analyses.”
That definition does not align with the one used by the medical writing profession or by the ICMJE Recommendations. Both advise against including persons who provide “only” writing or editing assistance and/or perform data analyses in the byline as coauthors. Both recommend naming these persons in the Acknowledgments — a policy used by journals that follow the ICMJE Recommendations. If they are named in that section, they aren’t really ghosts.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something. It sure would be useful to read the whole paper.
That’s not the abstract to a paper, but to an oral presentation given at the Canadian Digestive Diseases Week forum that was held in March. Some meeting organizers publish abstracts of talks and posters, so they can be cited especially if the research presented isn’t published yet (or never sees the light of day). Yes, not particularly informative for those who didn’t attend the meeting…