Weekend reads: What really happened in that lab?; best excuses for falsifying data and rejecting grants

The week at Retraction Watch featured the correction of a widely covered study claiming to find evidence of the plague and anthrax on New York City subways, and rulings against scientists suing Harvard, a journal, and the CBC. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Workers in the lab of Sylvia Asa and Shereen Ezzat, who have had two papers retracted, told the Toronto hospital investigating allegations that they used Photoshop to manipulate images, The Canadian Press reports.
• Here’s one excuse for falsifying data: “it can save money.”
• An Australian funding agency rejected a grant proposal because a “header was in 13 point font rather than 14 point font,” reports Adrian Barnett.
• “Failure to publish the results of all clinical trials is skewing medical science,” says The Economist.
• A look at “the dark underside of academe:” A review of Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals.
• Is science in crisis? Ferric Fang and Arturo Casadevall weigh in.
• The lead author of a paper on a four-legged snake fossil “doesn’t care a damn how the fossil came from Brazil,” despite the fact that some scientists in that country suspect the specimen was taken from the country illegally, Herton Escobar reports.
• Some alternative medicine journals should be delisted from indices, says Edzard Ernst.
• “What if I told you that half of the studies published in scientific journals today – the ones upon which news coverage of medical advances is often based – won’t hold up under scrutiny?” Ivan tackles reproducibility in The Conversation.
• Glamour retracts “13 Little Things That Can Make a Man Fall Hard for You.”
• “In my view, this kind of post-hoc explanation for negative findings is unfalsifiable and not very helpful,” says Neuroskeptic of the reaction to attempts to replicate social priming studies.
• “Evidence-based medicine is only as good as the evidence it’s based on,” says Beth Skwarecki, looking at the myths about missing drug trial data.
• “The most impressive achievement of any publication, in science or journalism, is that it changes people’s minds on a certain subject.” Felix Salmon compares scientific publishing to the media.
• Can we trust psychological research? asks Brian Kurilla.
• Want to see a play that combines a TV show with a knockout mouse produced? Click here.
• “Could Greece become prosperous again?” Research reliability guru John Ioannidis offers his take.
• Science vs. Science: Wendy Zukerman interviews Ivan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, among others.
• The New York Times takes heat for its errors in a story about Hillary Clinton, and how it handled the corrections.
• “When scientists blunder, these bloggers are watching:” Alison talks to WHYY.
• The University of California, San Diego, has won a court battle against the University of Southern California about who owns control of a major Alzheimer’s research project.
• A high school student appears to have proven a professor wrong about the existence of “No Irish Need Apply” signs, Patrick Young reports.
• “You don’t go around telling people that you’re going to cure cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or what have you,” says Derek Lowe.
• Here’s how to deal with reviewer comments, from Roger Watson.
• “[A]n appreciable portion of the content in pharmacology textbooks is open to the influence of undisclosed potential financial conflicts of interest,” write the authors of a new study.
• What are the costs of vilifying pharma? The CMAJ weighs in on the conflict of interest debate.
• The Department of Defense sent live anthrax, instead of inactivated cells, to 86 labs, according to a new report.
• “We can keep debating this after 11 years, but I’m sure we all have much more pressing things to do (grants? papers? family time? attacking 11-year-old papers by former classmates? guitar practice?)” Andrew Gelman picks up the Pachter-Kellis debate.
• A Q&A with Simine Vazire, researcher and author of the “Sometimes I’m Wrong: Truth and Error in Research and In Life” blog.
• “What do IKEA, Thomas Edison, and peer review have in common?” Richard Threlfall explains.
• “The publisher and journals’ editorial team don’t take any responsibility regarding plagiarism and any other issues raised out of any article.” Well OK then, says Jeffrey Beall.
• PubMed now offers an “articles frequently viewed together” function, The Scientist reports.
• A journal “is proud to step forward and improve the peer-review process with the adoption of the iThenticate in the editorial routine, and it is committed with the wise application of anti-plagiarism policies, in order to avoid that a valued initiative becomes an irrational witch-hunt.”
• A skeptic’s guide to health news and fads: On The Media features John Bohannon, Timothy Caulfield, and Gary Schwitzer.
• Will Dana, who oversaw the now-retracted Rolling Stone story about sexual assault at the University of Virginia, is leaving the magazine.

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