Weekend reads: White academic’s book about Black feminism pulled; retraction notices as a genre; forget the scientific paper?

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 219. There are more than 33,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNoteLibKeyPapers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

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4 thoughts on “Weekend reads: White academic’s book about Black feminism pulled; retraction notices as a genre; forget the scientific paper?”

  1. Fried’s article on experiments treating depression with psychedelics raises a really good point: how _could_ you design such a study to keep participants blind (as far as possible) or have a meaningful control group? One possibility that occurs to me is a broad-spectrum study where multiple groups get LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, THC, an SSRI, placebo, etc respectively — that could at least yield comparative results and the participants would mostly have a harder time telling which specific group they’re in. But as difficult as it probably is to set things up for just _one_ scheduled drug…

    1. I agree, but I can see how it would probably get harder and harder to fund/process/find volunteers/etc. the more chemicals you are trying. That’s not to say that it’s a bad idea, perhaps we need fewer, larger studies.

      And speaking from (limited) experience, I was once part of a study the measure the effect of methamphetamine effect on short-term m memory, and wow-boy, I certainly know which group I was in.

  2. The Black theology retraction is worse than the headline makes it out to be — when you look into the details, it’s clear that in humanities terms there is something like a plagiarism of ideas going on. Systemic issues behind the funding and peer review. Very interesting and enlightening story.

  3. ““‘Dysfunctional.’ NSF graduate fellowship review process draws criticism.””

    13,000 NSF GRFP applications reviewed by approximately 1,300 reviewers…
    Almost 2200 awards…

    And a Science op-ed suggesting the system is dysfunctional based on comments made by 4-5 individuals and a “chorus of voices” on Twitter. NSF programs, including GRFP, are evaluated every 4 years by an external Committee of Visitors. The composition of the committee and its findings are public information. You would think that a journalist would put in a bit of additional effort to try to learn – and report – something more substantial than just lobbing something like this article out there.

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