The week at Retraction Watch featured an inscrutable retraction notice, and a raft of new retractions for a cancer researcher who once threatened to sue us. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- If you thought submitting to scientific journals was convoluted and angst-ridden, wait until you read this guide to submitting to law reviews. (Brian Galle)
- “After numerous futile attempts by a mentor to engage with a graduate student in preparation for an upcoming presentation, the student presented possibly one of the worst seminars to ever come out of a particular research group. When the mentor attempted to talk to the student about what went wrong in the presentation, the student allegedly told the mentor, ‘I don’t know why it bothers you. My friends liked it!’” The “Trophy Generation” goes to graduate school. (Apryll Stalcup, Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry)
- “What does it mean, in science, for science to be fucked?” Everything is Fucked: The Syllabus, from Sanjay Srivastava.
- “We’re going to build a wall, and we’re going to make them pay for it.” That seems to be the message of a new article in the NEJM, say our co-founders in STAT.
- “This is the success of science, this is what science does.” Physics’ promising new elementary particle vanishes with more data. (Dennis Overbye, New York Times)
- “Falling in love with a single theory can cut off fruitful avenues of enquiry,” writes Julia Rosen in Nature. “Here’s how to keep your mind open.”
- The Allen Brain Observatory “is a striking case-study in how modern science is worryingly broken, because it prioritises private achievement over the public good,” writes Mark Humphries.
- After a Danish government minister was cleared of scientific misconduct, his tutor lashed out at those involved in the process, which he said should be done in the open. (Sebastian Zeiler, University Post)
- “A star scientist stands accused of misconduct, but colleagues say he’s being railroaded,” reports Michael Balter. (The Verge)
- “Concerns regarding click-bait questions in academic publications may, therefore, be unwarranted.” James Cook and Dawn Plourde look at how often papers have question titles. (Scientometrics, sub req’d)
- Biochemist Howard Schachman, a pioneer in research ethics, has died. He was 97. (Robert Sanders, Berkeley News)
- Retractions: Why They’re Good For The Scientific Record. Our Ivan Oransky speaks at Evidence Live at Oxford.
- “Perhaps I’m naive, but I need to believe that employability is not directly correlated to how many likes you get on your Instagram posts.” An anonymous academic sparks a social media firestorm after downplaying the importance of social media. (The Guardian)
- When, if ever, can scientific results be dismissed, even if the study was methodologically sound? Neuroskeptic weighs in. (Discover)
- “The Replication Crisis:” Video of a panel featuring Brian Nosek, Stuart Buck, Julia Galef, Stephanie Wykstra, and our own Ivan Oransky.
- Is the problem with intelligent design that it lacked adequate peer review? A zinger from Abbey Fenbert. (McSweeney’s)
- “Science is a winner-take-all enterprise, where whoever makes the decisive discovery first gets all the fame and credit.” Stefano Balietti on how this competition makes the peer review process unfair. (The Conversation)
- In physics, choosing your collaborators matters. (arXiv)
- A new investigation of the infamous Piltdown Man suggests that the century-old hoax may have been the work of a lone forger. (press release, via Phys.org)
- “Evidence shows that most papers in scientific journals violate scientific principles. As a consequence, most published papers are useless.” Seems a bit harsh, but check out this paper’s checklist for improving scientific practice. (ResearchGate)
- Peter Orszag, an Affordable Care Act architect, published an editorial in support of the in JAMA. So why wasn’t his conflict of interest mentioned? (Brant S. Mittler, MedPage Today)
- What to share a new study on Reddit? First you’ll have to make sure it comes from a journal with a high enough Impact Factor. (Jon Tennant, Green Tea and Velociraptors)
- Ever wonder how much it costs a journal to publish a research paper? For eLife, it was about £3,630 last year.
- “We hear that the definition of science is reproducibility but if there’s no one reproducing it how do we know about the veracity of what we’ve discovered?” (Science Friday)
- Gotta catch ’em all: A collection of the claimed health benefits of Pokemon GO — including one that cited a non-existent study. (Gary Schwitzer, Health News Review)
- Statins: A warning for modern medicine’s problems? Ben Goldacre thinks so. (Andrew Masterson, Cosmos)
- Zika’s moving quickly, and scientists are worried that journals can’t keep up. (Paul Basken, The Chronicle of Higher Education)
- Neuroscientists from MIT and elsewhere are objecting to The New York Times Magazine’s portrayal of a colleague, particularly how she handled data regarding a famous patient and whether she tried to influence how some findings were published. (Sharon Begley, STAT)
- “Do declarative titles affect readers’ perceptions of research findings?” A new study from Elizabeth Wager – a member of our parent organization’s board of directors – and colleagues tries to find out. (Research Integrity and Peer Review)
- “Sci-Hub is a pirate organization involved in the mass theft of copyrighted material.” The Association of American Publishers weighs in on Sci-Hub.
- How do authors choose which journals in which to publish? (Publications)
- “Ethical publishing in intensive care medicine: A narrative review.” (Christian Wiedermann, World Journal of Critical Care Medicine)
- Post-publication peer review, 350 years later. (Add yours here.)
- How to achieve reproducibility in research. (Leila Walker)
- Five clinical trials conducted without consent. (Scott Y.H. Kim, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, sub req’d)
- “There needs to be a transparent and openly recorded submission and review process,” says Hamidreza Mani. (The Lancet)
- Nature Biotechnology is reviewing criticisms of a paper describing a gene editing technique. (Paul Knoepfler, The Niche)
- Which lab notebook is best for you? Authors of a new paper looked at six, and compared two. (PLOS ONE)
- The American Chemical Society has just announced plans to create a preprint server for chemists, even though their flagship journal takes a dim view of publishing in such venues first. (Daniel Cressey, Nature)
- 8 Rejected Papers That Won The Nobel Prize. (Authorea)
- “It is clear that the journal impact factor is not effective in predicting future citations of successful authors,” concludes a new study. (Scientometrics, sub req’d)
- Studies of dentistry have some catching up to do when it comes to statistics, says a new study. (Scientometrics, sub req’d)
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I support the efforts to reduce corruption and restore integrity to science. However, I want to warn against corruption in the retraction process. Not all those pressing for a paper to be retracted or who kill a grant proposal are altruistic. Due to the colossal size of institutional science, there are powerful interests—corporate, governmental, academic—that will do whatever it takes to prevent criticism. We need to guard against using retraction as a weapon to protect turf, stifle criticism, and destroy innocent individuals who threaten vested interests.
Dave
You may find this of interest: https://www.statnews.com/2016/03/29/concussion-retractions-nfl/
I am sorry, but does the word used in the headline have any place in serious scientific discourse?
Gutter language is best kept to the gutter.
@PWK: I wrote a response earlier but did not submit earlier thinking that majority accepts such language. Yes, i had the same feeling if the person who started the course with the F-word title submits a comment /letter to journal, would it be f..ed ? When there are fans, i will not surprised if this word gets accepted as title of an article in the future. If teachers are allowed to display their glamorous vocabulary – why not in the journal articles? I wrote a comment on this professors blog as well.
Anyone who has written grant proposals or submitted papers for publication has learned (consciously or unconsciously) to practice self censorship to increase the odds of approval. Self-censorship is the primary means of protecting the status quo, and is much more effective than retraction.
Then there are those papers—innocent of machinations and self-censorship—that appear on the radar of a powerful vested interest. It is relatively easy, for example, to understand why the NFL (through a surrogate) would press to retract a paper on concussions caused by playing football.
It is considerably more difficult to uncover the truth when powerful interests use subterfuge behind the scenes to kill a grant proposal, or when they enlist activists to press a publisher or editor to retract a “dangerous” paper. The extent to which this happens is unknown. Cui bono? is probably the first question to ask when assessing calls to retract a paper, especially when the true identities of the instigators are unknown.
Dave
“It is clear that the journal impact factor is not effective in predicting future citations of successful authors,” concludes a new study. (Scientometrics, sub req’d)
It is probably correct but in this study the authors evaluated seven authors, three of whom were from the same institution. So, I suggest renaming this article as “It is clear that FOR SEVEN AUTHORS the journal impact factor is not effective in predicting future citations of successful authors”. In general, it is very helpful when evaluating the validity of conclusions and recommending an article to others to read the article beyond its abstract.
“In general, it is very helpful when evaluating the validity of conclusions and recommending an article to others to read the article beyond its abstract.”
How could that possibly be true? The impact factor has no link to article validity – it is a metric based on number of citations an average article in the journal gets. With regards to an article, at best it’s an indicator of how popular a subject is and how novel the paper. Articles selected by journal editors for consideration are chosen on many factors of which validity is one, but one with a relatively low threshold. Results in impact factor 1 journals are no less valid than their counterparts in NEJM and Nature, and there are plenty of examples of high impact factor journals putting hype over rigour. Science’s publication of Venter’s human genome sequence, which was well known even at the time to be less than candid in its methodology, and Nature’s publication of the STAP papers, despite very public concerns in the field about the results and rejection from Science, are two great examples of where anticipation of publicity trumped scientific validity.
I’d take a replication in an impact factor 5 journal over a “novel” finding in Cell any day.
One of my colleagues pointed out that the article linked to:
“Evidence shows that most papers in scientific journals violate scientific principles. As a consequence, most published papers are useless.” Seems a bit harsh, but check out this paper’s checklist for improving scientific practice. (ResearchGate)
raises important points regarding improving science practices, but this paper might itself be an example of excessive self-citation, since 38 of the 130 citations are (co)authored by either Armstrong or Green.
“The “Trophy Generation” goes to graduate school”
You’d think maybe scientists of all people would realize that EVERY SINGLE generation has complained about “those kids” who don’t have a work ethic, and that maybe they would realize that their single experience with one individual is NOT indicative of everyone from that generation?
But no, let’s keep writing thinkpieces trashing Kids These Days because it makes us feel better about the inevitable march of time.