The final week of 2016 at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a high-profile paper on diabetes from Harvard, and the retraction of a JAMA article on whether zinc was useful for the common cold. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- Fake news: It’s not just a problem in politics, it’s a problem in science, too. Our co-founders’ latest for STAT.
- “If I say just trust me and I’m wrong, I’m untrustworthy. If I say here’s my work and it’s wrong, I’m honest, human, and serving scientific progress.” (A quote that inspired Jeff Leek, of Simply Statistics, to write a great list of ways not to stress about science)
- “We suspect the journal may have published the piece online without actually reading it — which would explain why it allowed its own editorial to accuse it of cheating, of being a wolf in sheep’s clothing that preys on scientists, of self-aggrandizement and of smelling bad.” Another hilarious sting from Tom Spears of the Ottawa Citizen.
- “Perez-Melgosa believes she has been unjustly accused of falsification, which is an element of career-killing scientific misconduct.” Can a reputation damaged by such allegations ever be rescued? (Beryl Lieff Benderly, Science)
- Academic journals won’t take your paper? Try submitting it to the New York Times as an advertisement instead. (Robin Lloyd, Undark)
- What science publishing could look like in the years to come. (Ben Sutherland, In Between Manuscripts) Also: Curious about what the scientific paper of the future might look like? Caltech will host a panel discussion on that question on January 9th.
- Lab mice have been bred to fit researchers’ every need, but that hasn’t stopped the studies that use them from having reproducibility problems. (The Economist)
- “Is retraction sufficient for medical papers?” ask the authors of a new article in the Polish Archives of Internal Medicine.
- PLOS CEO Elizabeth Marincola steps down and talks about her successes and what’s next for the publisher. (Tracy Vence, The Scientist)
- Open data isn’t just for meta-analyses and improving research methods—it’s also a helpful resource for teaching, says Christopher Madan. (Medium)
- Veruscript, publisher of the Journal of Intelligence and Terrorism Studies, announce that they are shuttering the journal after what they say are unfounded claims of state sponsorship.
- “One can reasonably ask, therefore, if corruption is seeping into the culture of biomedical research and contaminating the published content of its journals.” (John H. Noble, Jr., IJME)
- “Let us submit manuscripts with no name list, no institution details and no grant information.” (Stuart Auld)
- Does being early in the alphabet help you earn more citations? Nope, says a new study. (Journal of Informetrics, sub req’d)
- Although misattribution of gender in science is rare, women “are cited as if they were male more than ten times more often than the opposite happens,” according to a new study. (Michal Krawczyk, Scientometrics)
- “A peek inside the strange world of fake academia:” Kevin Carey takes on OMICS and its ilk in The New York Times.
- Outrage at potential fraud uncovered by a recent analysis “could be rooted in our disdain at our failures in peer review, given that this special effort was required to detect long-running potential fraud,” writes Gary Cutter. (Nature Reviews Neurology, sub req’d)
- The embattled head of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research will be stepping down. (Elizabeth Payne, Ottawa Citizen)
- Lies, Damned Lies, and P Values: Some medical studies are wrong. But how many? Perry Wilson has an answer. (MedPage Today)
- “How to Perform an Operational Audit of the Scholarly Journals You Publish:” A guide from Scholastica.
- David Garcia Aristegui and Miguel A. Camblor take a look at plagiarism and fraud in Spain. (Diario16, in Spanish)
- Is it time to retire the persistent identifier ResearcherID? asks Jeffrey Beall.
- A court has ordered that two lecturers at a university in Nigeria be given their jobs back, after losing them in 2013 for alleged plagiarism. (Dimeji Kayode-Adedeji, Premium Times)
- A look at 24 psychology textbooks “indicated numerous errors of factual reporting across textbooks, particularly related to failing to inform students of the controversial nature of some research fields and repeating some scientific urban legends as if true.” (Current Psychology, sub req’d)
- “Is the accepted way of doing science bad for science?” asks Andre Picard. (Globe and Mail)
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].