Weekend reads: Women’s authorships bounce back?; scientists go to court; demoted for plagiarism

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• “I don’t think I slept for a day and a half:” Bad news for study about bad news
• Here comes the judge, ready to plagiarize your paper
• “The whole thing is yucky:” When you’re surprised to find yourself as an author on a paper
• ‘Immortal time bias’ fells JAMA journal asthma paper
• A tale of three journals: Paper retracted when associate editor submits to the wrong title
• Former Texas postdoc earns 10-year federal funding ban for faking authors and papers to boost metrics
• What is a figure about budgies — aka parakeets — doing in four different plant papers?

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 81.

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

• “Women’s research output appears to have bounced back in the latter part of 2020 as the lockdowns that closed schools and nurseries in many parts of the world were eased, new data suggest.”
• “Scientists are increasingly involved in defamation claims. Sometimes they are defendants in disputes over the accuracy of articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.”
• “Three Dhaka University teachers have been demoted on charge of plagiarism in their research papers.”
• “How to Protect the Credibility of Articles Published in Predatory Journals.”
• The Biden administration has published a “Memorandum on Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking.”
• “I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?” Updates on a case we’ve covered.
• “In the case of COVID-19 health policy, a frank appraisal of the strength of the studies on which policies are based is needed, alongside the understanding that we often must make decisions when strong evidence is not feasible.”
• “There is cut and paste, but also ‘shake and paste,’ where passages are stolen but rearranged, and the ‘pawn sacrifice,’ in which a source is credited narrowly.”
• A U Penn professor “resigned this week after stirring a controversy by using a Nazi salute and expression during a virtual conference.”
• “Federal officials repeatedly raided a fund earmarked for biomedical research in the years leading up to the covid-19 pandemic,” says a whistleblower.
• “Sloppy science or groundbreaking idea? Theory for how cells organize contents divides biologists.” And an example of how the debate plays out.
• “Risk of being scooped drives scientists to shoddy methods.”
• “However, without a clear structure, the peer-review process can be problematic.”
• “This study showed that more [research integrity] guidance documents are needed for natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities since only a small number of documents was developed specifically for these research fields.”
• “Given the challenges inherent to modern science and preventing misconduct, research institutions should empower future generations of researchers to engage in responsible research practices.”
• A look at “patient involvement in journal review processes.”
• After Reason reported on the disappearance of a Kamala Harris profile, the Washington Post restored it.
• When “shortly” means “seven months” from retraction request to retraction of a criminology paper, and citations accrue.
• “Academic calls for press boycott over cancellation of Thai book.”
• “Researchers are embracing visual tools to give fair credit for work on papers.”
• “Even when software work is widely recognized, the breadth of its application can be hard to measure if it is not cited.”
• “Only one third of COVID-19 preprints posted during the first nine months of the pandemic appeared as peer-reviewed journal articles.”
• Why one of the authors of a paper on herd immunity for COVID-19 now regrets the title of the paper.
• “Publishers Still Don’t Prioritize Researchers.”
• “Publication ethics: Role and responsibility of authors.”
• How common is research misconduct in ethics and philosophy?
• The difference between a press release, an abstract, and results, in a meme.
• A cartoon based on Stuart Ritchie’s Science Fictions. Read an excerpt of the book here.

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