Weekend reads: Papers de-emphasized for funding; reproducibility revolution; reining in fraud in China

The week at Retraction Watch featured a particularly misleading retraction notice, and a university stripping a graduate of her PhD for misconduct. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Academic publications will become less important in funding decisions in Australia, reports Matthew Knott in The Age. But before you cheer, see what officials will use instead.
• “Like chemists and physicists, we will understand that it is not an insult when others try to replicate our research—it is standard science,” writes Bobbie Spellman, the outgoing editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science, in a reflection on today’s revolution in science. (Ivan makes a cameo.)
• China is trying to rein in fraud by its researchers publishing in international journals, Jason Chan reports at Elsevier Connect, with details of how a recent case of fake peer reviews was uncovered. Mara Hvistendahl has more at Science about the developments. (See last week’s Weekend Reads for a report on the developments from state news agency Xinhua.)
• A professor in China is being punished for having “radical views,” Zhuang Pinghui of the South China Morning Post reports.
• When the Impact Factor “is used as a shortcut to determine whether or not an author will earn a Ph.D., be awarded a grant, or earn tenure, it’s just plain ridiculous,” say Tracey DePellegrin and Mark Johnston of Genetics.
• Neuroscientists’ brains apparently get more excited by the prospect of publishing a Nature Neuroscience paper than they do by piles of Euro notes, reports Neuroskeptic based on a new study.
• “The Constitution doesn’t provide you with a blank check to harass research scientists with whose results you disagree.” A member of the U.S. Congress rails against Lamar Smith’s tactics on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee.
• Psychology researchers, watch out: The editors of Psychological Science are on the lookout for your p-hacking, says Stephen Lindsay in an editorial he told us was on the way when discussing the retraction of a color perception study from his journal earlier this month.
• Fraudsters are finding a new target: Academics. Our latest column for STAT.
• Just “25 to 50 percent of experimental papers, depending upon the significance level and test, are able to reject the null of no treatment effect whatsoever,” reports Alwyn Young in a new preprint.
• “The role and definition of authorship in scientific and medical publishing has become increasingly complicated in recent years,” say four editorial coordinators at Wolters Kluwer in a discussion of best practices.
• “If tens of thousands of papers should be retracted each year, that comes to something like 100 a day,” says Andrew Gelman. “So if only 1 paper a day is retracted, my guess is that something like 99% of the papers that should be retracted, aren’t.”
• “Are scientists a workforce?” asks Yuri Lazebnik in EMBO Reports. “Or, how Dr. Frankenstein made biomedical research sick.”
• “Confessions of an accidental plagiarist,” from Wendy Robinson in Inside Higher Ed.
• “Peer-review is neither reliable, fair, nor a valid basis for predicting ‘impact’: as quality control, peer-review is not fit for purpose,” writes Stephen Cowley in Frontiers in Psychology.
• Clinical trials that are requiring medical residents to work up to 28 hours or more at a time are unethical, say some medical students. (John Fauber, MedPage Today)
• “We contend that the current lack of financial transparency around scholarly communication is an obstacle to evidence-based policy-making – leaving researchers, decision-makers and institutions in the dark about the systemic implications of new financial models,” write Stuart Lawson, Jonathan Gray, and Michele Mauri in a new preprint.
• If you’re a scientist, it is neither “despicable” nor “terrible” to provide your data. Dorothy Bishop explains why it’s just…science.
• Ranjit Chandra, who lost a libel suit against the CBC, has been ordered to pay $1.6 million CAD to the network for their legal expenses, the CBC reports. And Peter Jackson reflects on the case in The Telegram.
• A new BMJ Open study finds that “just one-third of the clinical trials that ought to have been reported by the trial sponsors were indeed published,” Kerry Grens reports at The Scientist.
• “Racial bias continues to haunt NIH grants,” reports Erika Check Hayden in Nature.
• How do you choose the right journal for your work? Four questions to ask, from Kathryn Chaloux at Wiley.
• Meanwhile, Jeffrey Beall warns against using NCBI databases as whitelists.
• Fun but useless fact: Major League Baseball team doctors publish nearly twice as often as National Hockey League team doctors, report orthopedic surgeons in the American Journal of Orthopedics.
• All of the NIH’s research chimpanzees are being retired, director Francis Collins announced this week.
• Science editor in chief Marcia McNutt “blazed a trail for women in science,” but hit roadblocks with allegations of sexism in the journal, writes Megan Thielking at STAT.
• Why is it so difficult to admit error? Andrew Gelman wishes this was the response of authors whose work is critiqued: “We spent a year working on this paper, sweating out every number, sweating out over what we were doing, and we’re happy to see people blogging about it in real time.”
• “The public’s confidence may have been shattered by high-profile cases of fraud that were isolated but highly visible deviations from the norm of honesty and transparency prevailing in clinical research,” write Junichi Sakamoto and Marc Buyse in the International Journal of Clinical Oncology as an introduction to a special issue on clinical trial fraud (sub req’d)
• Impregnated by a bullet? Rose Eveleth, in The Atlantic, on “How science’s craziest stories get passed from one generation to the next.”
• “Another study finds that housing experimental mice at lower-than-optimal temperatures may alter research outcomes, this time with regard to inflammation and diet,” reports Bob Grant at The Scientist.

Retractions And Corrections Outside Of Scientific Journals

• “All the information in it came from an article on noodle.com, a private education website unaffiliated with the Catholic Church,” says The Queens Chronicle. “We regret the errors.”
• A retraction from Val Kilmer, involving Top Gun 2.
• The link between PlayStation 4 and the Paris attacks was based on a reporting error, The Verge notes.
• U.S. Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson is blaming his co-author for inaccuracies in his book. (Wall Street Journal)
• A retraction…boot?

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, 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].