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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Ecologist who lost thesis awards earns expressions of concern after laptop stolen
- Prominent Chinese scientist failed to disclose company ties in COVID-19 clinical trial paper
- Paper on ‘energy medicine’ retracted after reader complaints
- Rejection overruled, retraction ensues when annoyed reviewer does deep dive into data
- Years after faked peer review concerns surfaced, journals are still falling for it
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 124.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “A doctor trained nurse practitioners to do colonoscopies. Critics say his research exploited Black patients.”
- The authors of a paper on COVID-19 retractions say “Authors and publishers have a right to privacy on these decisions and may understandably want to avoid acknowledging specific errors.” Discuss.
- “Marketing Ideas: How to Write Research Articles that Readers Understand and Cite.”
- “Does Publicity in the Science Press Drive Citations?” Previous work has looked at the same question.
- Does open access status have an effect on retractions? asks a new study. (Scientometrics)
- “Does ocean acidification alter fish behavior? Fraud allegations create a sea of doubt.”
- “Methodological issues plague studies of early autism interventions.”
- “Publishing should be for social and disciplinary impact.”
- “Will publishing of biomedical literature be the same after covid-19?”
- “Swiss funder draws lots to make grant decisions.”
- “Which Scientific Disciplines Cite Philosophy of Science?”
- “What Does It Mean to Plagiarize in the Design World?”
- How are cases of misconduct represented in the scientific literature?
- “Dutch studies bring back the fun—but are they good science?” asks a Science news story.
- “Good research begins long before papers get written,” say the editors of Nature.
- Is the new Journal of Controversial Ideas, which will allow authors to use pseudonyms, a “safe space or shirking accountability?”
- “JAMA Publishes Trial Results Delayed 5 Years. Here’s Why.”
- “Battling predatory publishing.”
- “Our results suggest that the perceptions of the research climate play a substantial role in explaining variance in research misbehavior.”
- “Māori scholars say their work is not getting fair recognition because of racism and unconscious bias within the world of publishing.”
- A “dispatch from an era that assumed that science was a meritocracy–despite ample evidence to the contrary.”
- “The editor of digital health’s newest journal wants to democratize medicine with data.”
- “Open should create more spaces for more perspectives, not limit researchers and writers to an artificial pool of publications.”
- “Universities, funders and others want to expand the contributions that the scientific community values and recognizes.”
- In Australian medical journals, “our data indicate that the proportion of women as first authors has increased, but that of last authorship has grown only in some specialities.”
- “How to navigate authorship of scientific manuscripts.”
- “How three major news organizations all got a story about Rudy Giuliani wrong.”
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“The authors of a paper on COVID-19 retractions say ‘Authors and publishers have a right to privacy on these decisions and may understandably want to avoid acknowledging specific errors.’”
Completely agree. Unless, er, uh, the mistakes relate to publications in the open science literature, which is kinda what publishers tend to get involved with.
“Does ocean acidification alter fish behavior?”
That story has many echoes of the Jonathan Pruitt saga (especially the repeated columns of identical values in data files).
Is there any news about the Pruitt investigation at McMaster University? It has been going on for 15 months now.
“Does ocean acidification alter fish behavior?”
The story notes the problems found with the research conducted by Oona Lönnstedt and Peter Eklöv into fish consumption of micro-plastics. But Lönnstedt has form. Her PhD research included the now discredited Lionfish study. One of here supervisors at JCU was Philip Munday. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/can-you-spot-duplicates-critics-say-these-photos-lionfish-point-fraud
On nurse practitioners performing colonoscopies, the following quote jumped out at me:
“My God, it’s such a no-brainer to me almost. Why wouldn’t you want to save costs, especially when you have demands for a procedure that’s increasing and increasing,” he said. “So the logical thing, in terms of supply and demand, would be to train nurse practitioners to do this.”
Is this a bit disingenuous? My GI colleagues created little ‘clinics’ next door to their offices to be able to charge exorbitant fees for colonoscopies — they may want to lower “costs” but my guess is that the prices will remain high.
Perhaps, but if every clinic (or every nurse school) trains NPs to perform colonoscopies, then the supply of colonoscopy-providers increases, and clinics undercutting the price will spring up, bringing the price down. Or maybe something else will happen. Economics is complicated.