The week at Retraction Watch featured a refreshingly honest retraction, and a big win for PubPeer. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “They just shovelled the data into their computer like you’d shovel food into a cow.” How a flawed paper made it into Nature. (Hester van Santen, NRC)
- Lack of reproducibility, failing peer review, the stress: Science is in big trouble, says Lex Bouter. (Elsevier Connect)
- “Two common features of the current peer review system subvert the goals of science, and should be changed,” says Jeffrey S. Flier in STAT.
- PubPeer’s victory in a suit to unmask its anonymous commenters is good for science, say our co-founders in STAT.
- The reproducibility crisis is older than you think. Here’s the complete timeline, starting way back in the 1950s. (Hilda Bastian, Absolutely Maybe blog)
- “We have to think of the responsibility as being the authors’, not the journals,” says Andrew Gelman. “Journals just don’t have the resources to adjudicate this sort of dispute.”
- “We do understand that, in view of the misanthropic psychopaths you have on your editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they weren’t reviewing manuscripts they’d probably be out mugging old ladies or clubbing baby seals to death.” Authors turn in a revision. (Roy F. Baumeister, Academia Obscura)
- A professor at Tshwane University of Technology is facing allegations of plagiarism and failure to disclose a conflict of interest. (Bongani Nkosi, The Sowetan)
- “If such grounds are to be taken at face value, many of us, and especially those who have a critical attitude to management dispositions, could be sacked as well.” A prominent geoscientist’s firing causes concern in the community. (Quirin Schiermeier, Nature)
- One journal’s misconduct investigation process: Seek advice and involve the authors and institutions whenever necessary. (Alistair M. Hetherington and Sarah Lennon)
- More than 2,500 Finnish researchers have signed a petition about the costs of scientific publishing getting out of hand. (Courtesy of Mikko Tolonen)
- The Alliance of Science Organizations in Germany is objecting to a country-wide site license proposal from Elsevier.
- Two researchers are accusing Elsevier of anti-competitive practices and abuse of its market position. (Martin Paul Eve)
- Elsevier “could not be a profitable enterprise if it wasn’t for this tax-funded public sector science,” says Lancet Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton, who goes on to say that publishers have an obligation to be political. (Alison Bert, Elsevier Connect)
- A prominent French physicist and science popularizer is accused of plagiarizing other scientists and philosophers. (Martin Enserink, Science)
- A paper presents a new set of principles aimed at improving the reproducibility of computational methods in research. (Science)
- EMBO extends “scoop protection” to preprints, hoping it will allow researchers to share their research more quickly and improve the amount of data available to others. (Bernd Pulverer, EMBO Press)
- “Use of impact factor (IF) to quantify scientific merit is severely flawed,” says Robert Carey, who has three suggestions for improving it. (Circulation Research)
- Elsevier launches the CiteScore index, a competitor to the Impact Factor. (Richard Van Noorden, Nature)
- One of the three people shortlisted for an institute directorship in India had a paper withdrawn in 2015 for plagiarism. (Tanbir Dhaliwal, The Hindustan Times) Here’s our coverage of the withdrawal. Meanwhile, the institute has determined that going forward, copying 10 consecutive words will be considered plagiarism. (The Tribune)
- “Publishing is so embedded in the practice of science that whoever controls the journals controls access to the entire profession,” write Peter Walter and Dyche Mullins. (ASCB newsletter)
- “Am I Famous Yet?” A pair of papers in Perspectives in Psychological Science looks at giving credit in the field. And among those considered eminent, “where are the women?” asks another paper.
- OMICS has bought yet another publisher in Canada. (Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen)
- “The book is bad in so many many ways, I don’t really feel like going into it. There’s nothing interesting here at all, the examples are uniformly fake, and I really can’t imagine this is a good way to teach this material to anybody.” Dear major publishers: Don’t send bad stats textbooks to Andrew Gelman.
- ResearchGate is too lenient about the inclusion of “ghost journals” on the site, writes Aamir Raoof Memon (Journal of Pakistan Medical Association)
- The third reviewer “had little to say about the scientific merits of our work,” writes an anonymous author on Jeffrey Beall’s blog. “Instead, he just asked us to cite five more papers in our manuscript. All of those papers were authored by Dr. Blagosklonny, the very same editor who was handling our submission.”
- What happened to scholarly citations during World War II? (Scientometics, sub req’d)
- British and American peer reviews and letters of recommendation, side by side. (Shit Academics Say)
- The results of a survey published in PLOS ONE “indicate that there may be considerable scope for improvement of scientific rigor in experimental conduct of animal research,” write the authors, “and that concepts and methods of good research practice should play a more important role in the education of young researchers.”
- “Could you still recall the first time you’ve been invited by an editor to review a scientific paper?” (International Orthopaedics)
- A professor at Montana State University is fighting his dismissal, which he argues was due to a mistaken belief that he had engaged in research misconduct. (Gail Schontzler, Bozeman Daily Chronicle)
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I must say I found the article on publication of the lflawed paper in Nature very poorly argued and full of pseudo-scientific, untestable claptrap such as “They just shovelled the data into their computer like you’d shovel food into a cow.”.
That’s not pseudoscientific, nor is it untestable. It’s an *opinion* from someone who saw the authors’ original submission.
By your own rationale, one could argue that your comment is pseudoscience.
The article at NRC seems to be the third in a series, with previous reports covering the flaws and inadequacies of the Nature paper. I think that is why this third report doesn’t argue against the paper’s statistics… it is more of an attempt to reconstruct what went wrong in Nature’s peer-review.
In my view, anything that is not testable against he world of experience may be rightly considered outside the scientific method. The statement ‘God exits’ is **an opinion** but it is also non-scientific as it cannot be falsified by testing against the world of experience (ie by experiment). The statement I referred to is IMO meaningless claptrap on many levels: I have never seen anyone shovel food into a cow (but I suppose that is possible), for example. Furthermore, science does not progress on unsubstantiated opinion no matter how eminent. As the Royal Society put it: Nullius in verba.
“Shovel food into a cow” is what we call a “metaphor”. “I shovelled food into my mouth” does not mean I actually used a shovel.
You may not have noticed, but the article is not a peer-reviewed published criticism. As the article says, those are in the works. The article is people giving their opinion on the manuscript and–as the very title of the article suggests–explaining how that manuscript came to be published in Nature.
Seems like a pretty easy thing to comprehend.
I don’t think you are at all unusual for considering ‘Shovel food into a cow’ to be a metaphor. This is known (and accepted) the world over since at least the time of Shakespeare. I did notice that the article is not peer-reviewed, and I never said or implied that I did not comprehend any part of the article.
The article does, however, purport to be a serious criticism of an article in a leading scientific journal. It is reasonable to expect the author to argue within the scientific method and not to resort to ‘sniggers and chuckles’ argument.
Please note that I published an additional account that explains the major points of the methodological criticism on the paper, which links to discussions on scientific forums. https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2016/12/09/statistical-problems-but-not-enough-to-warrant-a-rejection-a1535908 . But my point was not to proof the paper wrong – that’s something that should be discussed among scientists. I am a journalist, and I described how the field has handled the paper – chuckles and cows included.
OMICS has bought yet another publisher in Canada. (Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen)
The Internet Archive indicates that OMICS had already acquired the publisher back in August 2015:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150810053106/http://www.icdtdi.ca/home.html
At the time, the “Intellectual Consortium” and its flagship “Journal of Applied Pharmacy” were flawed but well-meaning: they did not charge authorship or article processing fees. Conceivably its founders were naive, thought they were accepting some financial support, didn’t read the small print, and did not realise that they had ceded control.
There is a hiatus in the Archive between April 2016 and now, so we don’t get to see the stages of the takeover. But now the J.App.Pharm has acquired a new Editor, all the new sister-journals as additional money-extraction channels, and a policy of charging.
Tom Spears notes that “[OMICS’] business model is charging upwards of US $1,000 for authors who can’t get published anywhere else, and who need a publication record to advance their careers.” In the case of these Intellectual Consortium spigots, the amount of the charge is unspecified — potential contributors contract themselves to paying however much OMICS later decide. Contributors who can’t pay are referred to a list of “Funding Dodies” where they can scrounge for money. That is, the OMICS business model is about out-sourcing the grift and sub-contracting contributors as scammers on the publisher’s behalf.
I looks to me that there is something amiss with the NRC article “A Flawed Paper Makes Its Way Into Nature”. The NRC article quotes Jean-Marie Robine saying “In France, there are now about 30 people over the age of 110”. I don’t know where the number comes from. From the latest list of the widely respected Gerontology Research Group (http://www.grg.org/SC/SCindex.html) there are only 46 such individuals validated in the whole world; only 4 of these are in France. The statement that there were none in 1960 and “about 30” presently gives to me a false impression that there has been a large increase of people over 110 years old in the last half century or so; I do not believe that this is the case and this makes me think that the NRC article is itself biased and flawed.
“In France, there are now about 30 people over the age of 110”
I wonder if the tense has changed slightly during translation, and if Robine was referring to a cumulative count of supercentenarians — not necessarily those who are alive right now.
See Table 1. here.
Hi Steven, thanks for pointing this out. No, this was not a translation error. I am checking this with JM Robine and will get back to you.
Hi, I checked and the number quoted was correct. The exact number is 34 supercentenarians (people of age 110+) currently living in France, Jean-Marie Robine explained. These data have been gathered by Laurent Toussaint. By the way, there are currently about 21.000 centenarians (people of age 100+) in France!
Thanks!
Greetings,
The GRG’s “World Supercentenarian Rankings List” is for the “oldest validated living persons”, NOT “ALL” supercentenarians.
http://www.grg.org/SC/WorldSCRankingsList.html
Of the 34 people on Mr. Laurent Toussaint (a GRG correspondent’s list), which includes both validated and unvalidated data and a lower age threshold (110.00 instead of 111.75), there are four persons currently validated to be old enough to attain the world rankings. One must understand that 50% of persons who turn 110 die at age 110, and of those who reach their 111th birthday, 50% again die at 111, so only a small number of persons will reach age 112+. For the 5th French case, age 112+, the case is currently in the stage of gathering documents but is likely nearing completion. In regards to both the Nature article and the Hester van Santen response to it, I would be pleased to explain details regarding GRG data, should we be asked.
Put another way: age 110+ is like the major leagues; age 112+ is like the all-star team. One cannot expect world-scale coverage when the reality is that there are an estimated 1,000 persons now living worldwide age 110+, of which at least 20%-30% (200-300) are validatable (i.e., a system of recordkeeping existed 110+ years ago in only a minority of the world’s population…if the records don’t exist, there’s no way to validate the claim, as science has not yet devised a biological method for determining someone’s age).