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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Should journals retract when an author is sent to prison for a crime unrelated to their work?
- Researcher who faked co-authors earns two more retractions, publication ban following Retraction Watch coverage
- Neuroscientist’s work earns three expressions of concern
- On our 11th birthday, we’d be grateful for your help.
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 147.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- Meet the professor who “served on the faculty senate’s Ethics and Institutional Integrity Committee” and also “sold grades for cash.”
- “Assessing Research Misconduct in Randomized Controlled Trials.”
- “Athira cited altered studies in $15 million NIH grant application, creating legal risk.” (For more on the False Claims Act, see this post.)
- “Some 98 percent of the articles Uzbek academics publish abroad appear in discredited journals.” (For another look at Uzbekistan, see this post.)
- “[W]e identified 712 papers across 78 journals that described at least one wrongly identified nucleotide sequence.”
- Those COVID-19 sequences that mysteriously disappeared? “An odd explanation has emerged,” involving a scientific journal.
- “They discovered that women were less likely to continue publishing papers than were men, whatever year they began their careers.”
- “Reliability of researcher metric the h-index is in decline.”
- A paper about COVID-19 based on Surgisphere was retracted in June 2020 but continues to be cited, confirming an earlier analysis in Science.
- A preprint on the Delta variant and breakthrough infections was not rejected during peer review, despite some confusion. We’ll explain.
- “The creation of the Retraction Watch Database…has been an invaluable resource for informing authors and publishers about retractions, but not all reference managers link automatically to the database.”
- “The Retraction Watch database contains more (728) Iranian retractions than we found in Scopus (343).”
- Editorial board members resign because a journal published papers critics say could be used to persecute ethnic minorities in China.
- “NYU Researchers Were Studying Disinformation On Facebook. The Company Cut Them Off.”
- “Microbiologist Elisabeth Bik queried Covid research – that’s when the abuse and trolling began.”
- “Does double-blind peer review impact gender authorship trends? An evaluation of two leading neurosurgical journals from 2010 to 2019.”
- A homeopathy journal accepts a paper that says homeopathy is BS.
- “Editorial Peer Reviewers as Shepherds, Rather Than Gatekeepers.”
- “Academic misconduct must be attended to.”
- “Do authorship disputes deter Indian medical students from pursuing research?”
- What happens to rejected papers? Here’s a tracker to find out.
- “Moreover, ‘unduly favorable’ commentaries for new cancer drugs are significantly associated with editorialists having direct conflicts of interest with the companies producing those drugs.”
- “An update to our policy on reporting requirements for geological and palaeontological materials aims to tackle ethical issues surrounding the collection, traceability and archiving of field samples.”
- The impact of preprints on the work of journalists.
- A platform “will serve as the ultimate exchange and analysis tool to enhance data validity and robustness as well as the reproducibility of preclinical research,” say its creators.
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The story of the missing sequences appears to be more of a political cautionary tale than a straightforward lab leak coverup. I speculate that there was some sort of decision to remove such sequences from foreign databases just in case they contained information harmful to China. Whoever made the decision does not seem to have known the implications of the sequences and may not have known anything else about the origin of the virus. In this case the Chinese anxiety was unnecessary, so the data is now restored. Regardless, databases need to be on guard against political orders to delete inconvenient scientific data.
Regarding the professor who sold grades for cash, I wonder what penalties, if any, were meted out to the students who bought grades or access codes.
Regarding “Reliability of researcher metric the h-index is in decline.” I find it funny that this ChemistryWorld news uses a wrong definition of the h-index: “A scientist with an h-index of 30 has published 30 papers that have each been cited more than 30 times”. Should read: “A scientist with an h-index of 30 has published 30 papers that have each been cited at least 30 times”.
Anyway, I agree with the main conclusion about the poor reliability of the h-index as a metric measuring individual scientists’ impact in their fields. In my humble opinion, something barely relevant would be to compute h’ = log(log(h)). Scientists with h’ 0 are consolidated researchers. Now, comparing h’ = 0.18 and h’ = 0.20 really makes no sense whatsoever.
Unfortunately, the current h-index is fine for academic bodies and their obsessive mantra (rank, rank, rank!): 1) It’s an integer. 2) The full scale is approximately 0-100, omitting marginal cases, like Didier Raoult (h = 193), Sigmund Freund (h > 250), etc. 3) It’s available free of charge using Google Scholar or simple tools like “publish or perish”. 4) It’s a monotonically increasing function over time; your h-index will never decline, giving the false impression that any scientist improves over and over, which, obviously, is not true.
Sorry, something went wrong with one sentence in my previous comment, paragraph 2. Please read:
“Scientists with h’ 0 are consolidated researchers”
“Scientists with negative h’ have still to prove themselves, while those with positive h’ are consolidated researchers”.
What base logarithm for h’?
Wow, Dider Raoult has a really high h-index. He must be an excellent researcher! /s