Weekend reads: A whistleblower is fired; problems in heart research; doing the right thing in science

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• The retraction of a paper claiming that the sun was responsible for global warming
• Fake peer review and a made-up author; and
• Four retractions following an investigation at the University of Maryland

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “She Blew the Whistle on Pathogens That Escaped From a Government Lab. Now She’s Being Fired.”
• “Consumers depend on researchers to get it right, especially if they are fragile and suffering from multiple ailments. But do they?” Problems in heart research.
• “Scientists reveal what they learnt from their biggest mistakes.” In Nature Index, four cases of “doing the right thing” that we’ve covered previously on Retraction Watch.”
• “I proposed the H-index hoping it would be an objective measure of scientific achievement. By and large, I think this is believed to be the case. But I have now come to believe that it can also fail spectacularly and have severe unintended negative consequences.”
• Another problematic COVID-19 paper in a peer-reviewed journal. But go on, keep saying it’s preprints we should worry about.
• A “very interesting” referee report asks for 147 references to be cited and seems to be an example of behavior by a highly cited researcher recently banned from a journal board.
• “Publisher prestige is a barrier to open access.”
• A study was unsuccessful in its initial aims — but it instead ended up revealing an unknown fact about cat food.
• “A torrent of data is being released daily via preprint servers, then dissected on platforms such as Slack and Twitter, and in the media, before formal peer review begins. Journal staffers are working overtime to review, edit, and publish papers at record speeds, and hundreds of genomes so far have been released on a platform named GISAID.”
• Richard Smith (a member of the board of directors of our parent non-profit organization) makes a case for workshops on publication and research ethics.
• “[There are many repeat syntheses that have been performed but not reported in the literature,” suggests a paper with “simple steps that could be taken to greatly increase the number of reports.”
• “Consequently, Daubert spawned cottage industries of forensic boards, certifying organizations and quasi-academic journals, all aimed at conferring legitimacy on dubious fields.”
• “On Mar. 3, 2020, the Campanil published an editorial of an alumni student titled “Sexual harassment in English Department” that discussed details of a Title IX case with a current professor at Mills College. This editorial did not meet the Campanil’s editorial standards and has been retracted.”
• “We demonstrate empirically that measures of novelty are correlated with but distinct from measures of scientific impact, which suggests that if also novelty metrics were utilized in scientist evaluation, scientists might pursue more innovative, riskier, projects.”
• “Four out of five early-career researchers in Australia have considered leaving science or their jobs because of factors including questionable research practices and an absence of institutional support, suggests a survey of 658 postdocs and junior faculty members.”
• In pain journals, “The median COS Transparency Factor score was 3.5 (IQR 2.8) of 29 possible points, and only 7 of 10 journals’ stated requirements for disclosure of conflicts of interest aligned fully with the ICMJE recommendations.”
• “But I wonder how many tenured faculty take up utterly contrary positions?”
• Elisabeth (Lis) Handley has been permanently appointed director of the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.
• “In brief, if you’d like to tune up your skepticism chops, Retraction Watch will help you do so.”
• “The Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome on Monday cleared a Scottish bishop of plagiarism in his 2003 doctoral dissertation.”
• The office of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker asked the editor of a west-central Illinois newspaper in February to unpublish a news story by The Center Square about the governor’s plans to cut spending if voters don’t pass a progressive income tax in November.” More on The Center Square here.
• “The New England Journal of Medicine has launched a review into a trial comparing stents with bypass surgery for blocked arteries, after a series of allegations made by the BBC’s Newsnight programme.”
• “[T]he history of science is haunted by the ghosts of unacknowledged individuals who helped to produce key scientific breakthroughs.”
• “Why, then, have humanities journals and scholars not taken up open review practices in more than a few notable instances?”
• “We report the results of a metascientific field experiment on the effect of the originality of a study and the statistical significance of its primary outcome on reviewers’ evaluations.”
• A look at researchers’ perceptions of integrity issues.

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