The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a hoax article from a philosophy journal and an image in a paper that looked familiar because it was from a catalog. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- Disney tried to get a nutrition paper retracted – even though the results weren’t unfavorable to them, Sheila Kaplan of STAT reports.
- The New England Journal of Medicine is facing more and more public attacks, according to Charles Ornstein at ProPublica.
- A British scientist thought an unfavorable grant review was unfair, so he sued, and won five million euros. (Ewen Callaway, Nature)
- What happens when universities stonewall misconduct investigations? Our latest for STAT is on the similarities between the Macchiarini and Potti cases.
- Self-plagiarism, duplicate publication, falsification and fabrication: A look back at scientific publishing 60 years ago, from the editors of the Journal of Neurochemistry, asks, what has changed?
- A guide to top medical journals: Delightful (and useful!) satire, from Michael Accad.
- The former graduate students who debunked the LaCour paper in Science have done what they planned to do at the start: Extend the findings. And the results are surprising, Katie Palmer reports at WIRED.
- 7 steps to publishing in a scientific journal, from Aijaz A. Shaikh. (Elsevier Connect)
- After trying to shrug off the incident, the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) is investigating why a predatory publisher’s conference took place there in 2014, Mauricio Tuffani reports. (in Portuguese)
- Andrew Gelman has an update on the “himmicanes and hurricanes” paper.
- On average, “papers with shorter editorial delay do have larger probabilities of becoming highly cited papers,” according to a new study of papers in Nature, Science, and Physical Review Letters. (sub req’d)
- Here’s a detailed follow-up on a Cochrane Review on alcoholism that we covered last fall.
- Why do taxonomists write the meanest obituaries? asks Ansel Payne in Nautilus.
- The Center for Science in the Public Interest is calling on the National Library of Medicine to include conflict of interest information in PubMed abstracts.
- A new transparency policy hasn’t kept “a prominent climate contrarian…from reeling in $65,000 in ‘dark money’ to fund a secret research project,” David Hasemyer of Inside Climate News reports.
- The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Council has a few vacancies.
- A lab head has started calling every project a “moonshot. “Wonder why? (The Allium)
- “Funding this proposal will finally turn PI’s frown upside down, increasing the welfare of coworkers at Big State University who have been taking antidepressants every time the PI came into their offices.” The Grumpy Geophysicist offers a template for more honest grant impact statements.
- “It’s not the end of the world if you research gets ‘scooped,’” says Sam Schwarzkopf in Times Higher Education.
- Has student plagiarism changed over time? asks a new study in Higher Education Research and Development. (sub req’d)