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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Swedish beauty study that sparked ‘storm of criticism’ is cleared
- Exclusive: Probe suggests new retraction awaiting embattled Korean heart doctor
- Nature pulls study that found climate fears were overblown
- Nature pulls study that found climate fears were overblown
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to well over 350. There are now nearly 43,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains 200 titles. 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):
- “Scientific sleuthing: who should pay the plagiarism hunters?”
- The sleuths behind Data Colada, who are being sued by Harvard professor Francesca Gino, publish retraction requests made by the university.
- “University of Leiden halts projects over fraud investigation.”
- “The traditional ways of measuring it for tenure and promotion may seem too rooted to challenge, but faculty can start to bring about meaningful positive change, says Clark M. Peters.”
- “Australia needs a science fraud watchdog — one with teeth.”
- “Manchester boots out masturbation paper PhD student.”
- “Hokkaido University admits misconduct by chemistry research team.” Our coverage of the team’s retractions here.
- “Rising number of ‘predatory’ academic journals undermines research and public trust in scholarship.”
- “How to deal with predatory scientific journals?”
- “India: neutralizing temptation by predatory journals.”
- “When scientific theories change, why do textbooks lag behind?”
- “Textbook publishers sue shadow library LibGen for copyright infringement.”
- “Science publishers settle lawsuits with ResearchGate.”
- “TL;DR: peer-review times appear to have been growing for a long time. The effects of COVID-lockdowns on peer-review are surprising.”
- “Criticism builds against Ph.D. careers firm Cheeky Scientist.”
- “The Publication Facts Label: Ascertaining a Publication’s Adherence to Scholarly Standards.”
- “How to curb bias in manuscript assessments.”
- “Their growth was extraordinary, but so has been their contraction. MDPI has declined by 27% and Frontiers by 36% in comparison to their peak.”
- “Scholarly Peer Review is an Age-Old Practice, But Publishing is Changing.”
- No “Twitter bump” for citations, study finds.
- “Defining ‘recklessness’ in research misconduct proceedings.”
- “Is Someone Selling Your Dissertation Without Your Permission?”
- “Publication retraction in spine surgery: a systematic review.”
- “What facilitates or prevents academic fraud in a Colombian faculty of medicine.”
- “The author ‘disappeared’ after the article was removed.”
- A 1963 story is corrected.
- Find out more about a big development for The Retraction Watch Database in this webinar on Sept. 27.
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I enjoy the Weekend Reads. But did nothing interesting happen at Boston University this week? I hope RW will catch up next week with that story.
Australia doesn’t need a research fraud watchdog so much as it needs to review its national guidelines for investigations.
The current guide for managing and investigating potential breaches is clearly designed to prevent an institution from finding misconduct. After a complaint is triaged (initial assessment), it is first subject to a “preliminary assessment”. This preliminary assessment can look an awful lot like an investigation, since facts and evidence are gathered, catalogued and assessed. BUT at the end of it, guess what? If it’s really bad it *might* go to “investigation”. This is where you get the lawyers involved and appoint a “panel”. I mean, we already catalogued facts and evidence but let’s just do it all again because we don’t trust the Assessment Officer or Designated Officer to do their jobs and we would rather quibble over “breach” vs “potential breach” and “misconduct”.
And of course, misconduct is narrowly defined as a serious breach that is intentional, reckless or negligent. So we can’t just say this is very bad, it’s misconduct, we need to have evidence strong enough to see into someone’s mental state.
So let’s say that you’re an NHMRC funded Australian who likes to manipulate gel blots. To get away with it you only need to convince *one* of the following people, Assessment Officer, Designated Officer, Responsible Executive Officer, Investigation Panel member(s) or their lawyers that your breach wasn’t sufficiently serious and/or intentional, reckless or negligent.
There’s no point having a watchdog if the rules have been written to make it impossible for them to bite. We need to write the rules in a sensible way first – an institution should get a complaint, triage the complaint and then investigate. The outcome of the investigation should be the outcome and discipline decided based on the investigation’s findings. These things are hard enough to do without doing them 5 times. If that doesn’t work, then maybe a watchdog is needed, but let’s try designing the system to stop misconduct first instead of adding bureaucracy.
Funding of university research should be put in jeopardy if more than 3 research papers are found to be fraudulent or draw conclusions based on data manipulation in a 5 year period. It is at the whole university level and not just the individual researcher or department.
For example, the common case of asking “On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being always and 1 being never, is it acceptable to protect yourself from a violent attack?” and then reporting that any answer not being a 1 “Never protect yourself” means that the person will use violence towards others. This was used to claim that “30% of men thing it is acceptable to use violence towards their wife/girlfriend” when, in fact, the original question was about using self-defense and a 1 was “never use self defense”. This type of dishonesty for headlines and agenda pushing is done all the times in certain fields of study with friendly journal review committees and self-citation plus citation within the acceptable agenda setting group.
Another example, interviewing a small sample of 25 women for their view on several topics and then extrapolating to the entire college student population or country population and stating for friendly new agencies “24% of women have experienced X” when in fact it was 24% of a 25 women sample and dishonestly restated as if it applies to a much larger group to get agenda setting headlines.
Science should be scientific and not to set an agenda