Weekend reads: Plagiarism and death threats; peer review by robot; a university apologizes for a job ad

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Retraction Watch came back online on Wednesday of this week, after a 10-day outage for technical issues that may have involved a DDOS attack. That meant there was no Weekend Reads for two weeks, so to catch up, we’ll post one today, and one tomorrow. Here’s what’s been happening elsewhere:

• Emilia Sercan, a reporter who sniffs out plagiarism in Romania, had a death threat — from a police officer.
• “It’s a big day today: I had a scientific manuscript rejected by a robot.” (Jean-François Bonnefon)
• “A university that pledged not to judge academics on the journals that they publish in has apologised for posting a job advert calling for a postdoc who had published in a title such as Nature or Science.”
• Can cell phone use cause us to grow horns? No, as our Ivan Oransky said on CBC’s The National. The researcher behind the study in question “sells posture pillows,” Katherine Foley reports.
• The authors of an article about two cancer drugs have retracted it just months after publication, citing Chinese regulators as a factor.
• “We Tried to Publish a Replication of a Science Paper in Science. The Journal Refused.” (Slate) We are fans of this sub-genre, having published a three-part series on another case last year: “Nature says it wants to publish replication attempts. So what happened when a group of authors submitted one to Nature Neuroscience?“
• What’s next for Brian Wansink, after 17 retractions? Peter Hess of Inverse has the story.
• “The authors have stated that a language editing company submitted a wrong article on their behalf.”
• Ohio State University professor Carlo Croce isn’t giving up his libel suit against The New York Times.
• Recall the “Destructo-Critics” debate? A study of bloggers is out. Hilda Bastian’s take.
• “Scientists need to be more honest when describing their ideas for patent applications,” according to a new study. (Rachael Pells, Times Higher Education)
• “The answer to my confirmation bias is having to respond to other people’s ideas.” (Alexander Danvers, Psychology Today)
• “Of course, we must be critical, but we are taught to mix criticism with disregard.”
• India’s University Grants Commission is cracking down on “publications in predatory, dubious journals or presentations and dubious conferences.”
• “[A]n open discussion of plagiarizing articles in philosophy is necessary.”
• “What universities can learn from one of science’s biggest frauds.”
  (Holly Else, Nature) Here’s our earlier story about the research by Andrew Grey and colleagues.
• “The Rise of Junk Science: Fake publications are corrupting the world of research—and influencing real news.” (Alex Gillis, The Walrus)
• “Our study aimed to evaluate the trends of post retraction citations of articles reporting a radiology-imaging diagnostic method and to find if a different pattern exists between manuscripts reporting an ultrasound method and those reporting other radiology diagnostic methods.” (PLoS ONE)
• “It’s Time to Lift the Veil on Peer Review,” says Dalmeet Singh Chawla. (Undark)
• The New England Journal of Medicine has a new editor in chief, Eric Rubin of Harvard. The first female editor of JAMA said it would have been a disservice to name a woman editor of NEJM just for the sake of it.
• Following plagiarism charges and multiple retractions, a priest resigns from a position at a television network. Father Thomas Rosica is now on our leaderboard.
• A plant scientist has sued his university and four female students, accusing them of leaking a confidential investigation report to the media.
• “It could take 118 years for female computer scientists to match publishing rates of male colleagues,” reports Jeffrey Brainard. (Science)
• South Korea’s “Institute for Basic Science (IBS) is facing an additional audit by the science ministry for alleged misconduct, including misusing research funds and improper recruiting, according to ministry officials Monday.”
• There is a lot going on in this now-retracted paper. Apparently, the findings “are unreliable as a result of an experimental honest error.” What, exactly, is an experimental honest error? Then there is the intro of the original paper: “Pregnancy is a period of transition, which makes women more vulnerable and in unfavorable conditions may lead to psychopathology in both mother and infant.”

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