Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Introducing two sites that claim to sell authorships on scientific papers
- Authors object after Springer Nature journal cedes to publisher Frontiers’ demand for retraction
- University orders PhD supervisor to retract paper that plagiarized his student
- Obama intelligence official shortchanged grad student in 2015 book
- ‘Misleading and inaccurate information’: Rocky tenure for high mountain paper as complaints prompt retraction
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 154. And there are now 30,000 retractions in our database.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “In his resignation letter, Peter Boghossian – known for his ‘hoax’ articles – says Portland State has turned into a ‘Social Justice factory.’”
- “Two Scientific Journals Retract Articles Involving Chinese DNA Research,” and editorial board members resign. Background here.
- “Thanks to Adrian Barnett who would have been an author but it was him or the p-values.”
- A Niigata professor duplicated his work but did not violate any university rules, Asahi Shimbun reports. But the university reposted a summary of its investigation to clarify.
- “U.S. judge acquits academic accused of deceiving NASA about his China ties.”
- A look at why researcher post their work as preprints, and what they choose to post.
- “No revolution: COVID-19 boosted open access, but preprints are only a fraction of pandemic papers.”
- “Exposure of faked dishonesty study makes me proud to be a behavioural scientist.”
- “How misconduct helped psychological science to thrive.”
- A six-page correction for plagiarism and an explanation of why it wasn’t a retraction in the case of an author who has had a dozen papers retracted.
- “How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science.”
- “The dawn of the age of duplicate peer review.” Relevant: “The Law Review Submission Process: A Guide for (and by) the Perplexed.”
- “For the first time, the FDA warns a trial investigator for failing to report study results.” (Ed Silverman, Pharmalot, STAT)
- “Moving Scientific Publishing Toward Social Justice.”
- “Publisher to reissue Pa. senator’s WWI book with corrections.”
- “Great variation exists in the understanding of plagiarism, potentially contributing to unethical publications and even retractions.”
- A lab promotes work that walks back its original autism research.
- A research institute settles a second time with the U.S. DOJ over undisclosed ties.
- “An unpublished COVID-19 paper alarmed this scientist—but he had to keep silent.”
- “Racist ocean science pioneer, once honored, is now rejected by scientific community.”
- Nottingham Trent “University professor facing criticism after convicted murderer taught students.”
- “A new platform to run and publish academic seminars will help researchers access early stage findings without relying on preprints or requests to see unpublished papers.”
- “How can institutions and funders help to police questionable research practices?”
- “Systemic Obstacles to Addressing Research Misconduct in Higher Education: A Case Study.”
- “More than 200 health journals call for urgent action on climate crisis.”
- A Dhaka court questions “the legality of demoting Dhaka University teacher Samia Rahman on charges of plagiarism.”
- A story about ivermectin that was “Too Good To Check: A Play In Three Acts.”
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a one-time tax-deductible contribution or a monthly tax-deductible donation to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
From the “Moving Scientific Publishing Toward Social Justice” article (written by 20 Women and Nonbinary [?] Scholars):
“Too often, top-ranking journals publish articles that are based on or perpetuate exclusionary and harmful ideas, including by falsely defining sex and gender as binary or tying socially driven inequities, such as disparities in income and educational attainment, to genetics.”
“Doing so would have highlighted for stakeholders of the review process that 1) sex is distinct from gender and 2) neither sex nor gender are binary.”
Does RW promote these anti-scientific ideas?
Does RW believe we are a gonochoric oogamous species? Does RW understand Sex As A Biological Variable?
https://orwh.od.nih.gov/sex-gender/sexgender-influences-health-and-disease/infographic-how-sexgender-influence-health
If sex is not a categorical binary/dichotomous variable, what is it? Continuous? N-dimensional? What are its units? Why do we only see ‘male’ and ‘female’ in the largest authoritative database of clinical trials?
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/search/advanced?cond=&term=&cntry=&state=&city=&dist=#:~:text=Older%20Adult%20(65%2B)-,Sex,-%3A%20%C2%A0
Relax. I agree with you that sex is largely binary in humans – I say largely because there are edge cases due to genetic or developmental disorders where the definitions break down. But I think RW just links articles that might be interesting to us readers. I don’t assume that they necessarily endorse all of the views in every article they link to.
That SJW piece doesn’t sound very interesting to me, so I’ll skip it. But if others find it interesting or enjoyable, I won’t hold it against them.
Odd that you would respond to my comment suggesting I relax, articulate an incoherent position on sex (do answer the questions I ask in my post if you believe there are other sex categories, continuous multidimensional distributions of sex etc.) and then admit to not reading the article.
Why would I bother with the article? Didn’t you say it was antiscientific? I don’t want to waste my time with that. I think sex is binary. There’s male and female. I’m vaguely aware sometimes things go wrong with chromosomes and hormones that interfere with that. But I don’t think there is a third sex or anything like that. Have you met anyone who is neither male nor female or a percentage male/female? I haven’t.
I’m glad that you trust that the article is not scientific; it is quite reasonable to bring up concerns that it is being posted on this website since the RW post presents it without any context. It has simply become impossible to presume that the article is being presented with implicit derision wrt the absurd claims it makes.
Bet you have. They just didn’t want to tell you about it, for reasons that are obvious from reading your comment.
dk, We are all born with X chromosomes and about half of us with SRY. You might be talking about people with complete gonadal dysgenesis, maybe certain forms of sex reversal…tiny prevalences. Looking at the numbers it is a good bet I have not met such a person.
Also, as is now bog standard for anti-scientific claims about sex and gender the claim in the IH article:
“…falsely defining sex and gender as binary” links to the following piece in Nature:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s12276-019-0341-0
It’s actually a very sensible piece that is pleading for the use of “sex” in scientific work and not the ambiguous notion of “gender”:
“Sex is biological. It is determined by the X and Y chromosomes. The article focused on male and female mice. There is no clinical identifier for gender. Thus, “sex” should have been used in the title and throughout the article.”
The link absolutely does not support the claim (obviously absurd) claim that sex is falsely defined as binary in scientific work. The piece implicitly supports the correct claim that sex is binary and comes in two categories: male and female.
I doubt RW will respond to this comment, but in my years of readership, RW does not typically editorialize on issues that aren’t directly related to retractions (e.g., arguing for more transparency and detail in retraction notices). I’m guessing that RW, as an organization, does not promote any view on this issue. They are a news organization, and links are not necessarily endorsements.
You say it as if they could post any ant-science link here without expecting any questions about why they did.
No one is stopping you or anyone from asking questions. My point was that you probably won’t get an answer. RW has no obligation to explain their reasons for including that link to you, me, or anyone else. I believe they included it because they found it newsworthy, rather than as an endorsement of the point of view of the letters’ authors. You can believe as you like.
So we should expect journals to respond to inquiries about questionable articles they promote…..but not RW? You are far too eager to suggest that this is somehow not antithetical to what RW generally does.
I agree.
A year without pvalues? Where in the links?
It’s referring to the Adrian Barnett piece – see https://medianwatch.netlify.app/post/pvalue_year/.