Weekend reads: Fake scientists; fake research; major evils of modern research

The week at Retraction Watch featured the story of a graduate student who fought back after being caught in the middle of a fraud case, and the retraction of a hotly debated paper from Nature Cell Biology. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Borat, the prominent scientist: Making up names and CVs is one of the latest tricks to game scientific metrics, our co-founders write in Nautilus.
• “The new owner of two prominent chains of Canadian medical journals is publishing fake research for cash, and pretending it is genuine.” (National Post)
• “[S]elective reporting, selective citing, and flaws in quality assurance and mentoring are the major evils of modern research.” (Research Integrity and Peer Review)
• Grad students and postdocs are frequently the scapegoats in cases of fraud, and they have little in the way of recourse in the current system, note our co-founders in STAT.
• When it comes to failing to publish clinical trial data, Canadian institutions are among the worst. (Darryl Hol, CBC News)
• “If a paper is published containing evidence of misconduct (e.g. dodgy or duplicated figures), is this a failure of peer review?” Neuroskeptic polled his Twitter followers.
• At one publisher, “The majority of retractions were due to some form of misconduct (102 articles, 76%), that is, compromised peer review (44 articles, 33%), plagiarism (22 articles, 16%) and data falsification/fabrication (10 articles, 7%).” (BMJ Open)
• A university in Spain is investigating charges of plagiarism against its rector. (El Diario; in Spanish)
• “The good news is that the emergence [predatory publishing] has resulted in the development of professional associations, educational movements and best practices that can help educate authors, publishers, researchers and academia alike.” (Regina Romano Reynolds, UKSG Insights)
• As PLOS CEO Elizabeth Marincola steps down, Richard Poynder speaks with PLOS’ David Knutson about the transition. (Open and Shut?)
• “Legal counsel advises it would be unwise for the Journal of Sexual Medicine to directly identify any predatory journals operating on the margins of our field.” (Jason Roberts)
• Tweets can predict the citation rates of ecological research, a new paper finds. (PLOS ONE)
• A researcher is fighting to keep her interview data confidential as a company seeks access. (Wayne Kondro, Science)
• Following a federal probe that found several violations in an ongoing paralysis study, the researchers prepare to resume their work. (Kate Howard, KYCIR). See our Q&A with the study’s whistleblower here.
• “Overall, it seems likely that a robust capacity for extended online discussion of published research will eventually advance scientific progress, and may hasten discovery of problems with some papers, while creating unfortunate opportunities for anonymous and misdirected harassment in some cases.” (Jeffrey S. Flier, Molecular Metabolism)
• Students at National Taiwan University urge a follow up probe into the institution’s president after his article is retracted for image manipulation. (Wu Po-hsuan and William Hetherington, Taipei Times) See our coverage of the retraction here.
• “What happens when you put 120 or so [persistent identifier] aficionados in a room together?” Alice Meadows and Phill Jones tell us. (The Scholarly Kitchen)
• “Though replicability issues pervade many areas of experimental science, cognitive neuroscience and psychology are particularly susceptible.” Ben Wills explains why. (The Neuroethics Blog)
• In the latest salvo in the “short titles vs. long titles” debate, a new paper says that studies with longer titles are cited less often. (Jack Grove, Times Higher Education)
• A group of authors takes the U.S. Office of Research Integrity to task for their handling of the Anil Potti case at Duke, noting that they “made no comment on the institution’s responsibility and its failure to provide adequate oversight and investigation.” (Science and Engineering Ethics, sub req’d)

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