Weekend reads: The risks of spotlighting reproducibility; harassment = scientific misconduct?; trouble with funnel plots

The week at Retraction Watch featured the case of a peer review nightmare, and a story about harassment by a would-be scientific critic. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Mr. Shiffrin […] said he recognizes the now-very-clear risk of spotlighting reproducibility while a U.S. president and a like-minded Congress appear eager to question the fundamental tenets of science.” (Paul Basken, The Chronicle of Higher Education)
• “Proposed new language [from the American Geophysical Union] identifies harassment as a form of scientific misconduct.” (Billy Williams, Eos)
• “Stop using funnel plots to diagnose publication bias.” The beloved meta-analysis tool isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, argues Uri Simonsohn. (Data Colada blog) Neuroskeptic reacts.
• “Is it time for a Journal of Insignificant Results?” asks Angela Menclova. (The Replication Network)
• A new sting involving “Dr. Fraud,” while amusing, beat a dead horse, say our co-founders. (STAT).
• Is misconduct running rampant at high school science fairs? asks a new study in PLOS ONE. “Only one student out of 122 reported research misconduct, in his case making up the data.”
• Citations are “not just about distributing credit where it’s due,” writes Patrick Dunleavy. (Writing For Research)
• Current practices can lead us to commit “‘metricide’ by abandoning time-consuming impact narratives in favour of simple metrics,” writes Claire Donovan. (Journal of Responsible Innovation, sub req’d)
• “The shackles of scientific journals, and how to shake them off.” The Economist takes on scientific publishing, including altmetrics.
• “The process of getting findings published and shared as fast as possible proves to be frustrating due to many hurdles beyond an author’s control.” So F1000 is giving control of the peer review process back to the authors. (Sabina Alam, F1000 Research blog)
• One of four doctors charged at India’s Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research with making false claims in a paper subject to a correction has accepted fault, Tanbir Dhaliwal of the Hindustan Times reports. And the institute will be coming up with new policies on plagiarism and misconduct.
• A group of researchers argues “that the field of extracellular vesicle (EV) biology needs more transparent reporting to facilitate interpretation and replication of experiments,” and offer a solution. (Nature Methods, sub req’d)
• “Retractions that explicitly repeated the misinformation were more effective in reducing misinformation effects than retractions that avoided repetition, presumably because of enhanced salience,” write the authors of a new study. “Recommendations for effective myth debunking may thus need to be revised.” (Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, sub req’d)
• A new study in eLife “found that, on average, male editors were much more likely to pick male reviewers, whereas female editors were more likely to pick other women.” (Erin Ross, Nature)
• “Progestogens to prevent pregnancy loss, an example of P-hacking.” (British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, sub req’d)
• “The literature is turning into a giant leaderboard, where publication depends on numbers and little else (such as insight and explanation).” (Kenneth Ward Church, Natural Language Engineering)
• The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has warned two drugmakers [in] China, over data integrity and manufacturing issues uncovered during inspections last year. (Michael Mezher, RAPS)
• “…Newell’s ideas might help address the current crisis of lack of replication and fraud in psychology.” (Fernand Gobet, Topics in Cognitive Science)
• “In 2015, Japanese researchers published about 600 fewer papers in the internationally influential journals indexed in the Web of Science than in 2005.” (press release)
• New guidelines for recognizing predatory journals are useful, but “a few lapses and limitations need to be taken into account when translating these policies to the situation in developing countries,” argue the authors of a paper in Science and Engineering Ethics. (sub req’d)
• “Despite the widespread registration of clinical trials, there remain serious concerns of trial results not being published or being published with a long delay.” (BMJ Open)
• “Coauthorship increased at about one author per article per decade,” according to a new study in PLOS ONE. “Clinical trials, supported research, and research of broader scope produced articles with more authors, while review articles credited fewer; and more popular journals published higher-authorship articles.”
• Journals are “plagued by bogus impact factors,” says a new paper. (Publishing Research Quarterly, sub req’d)
• “Overall, I blame the lack of uptake on a deep inertia in the researcher community in adopting new workflows, particularly one that cost them even a small amount of money.” Tim Vines, founder of Axios Review, weighs in on what he learned from his experiences providing portable peer review. (Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen)
• When research oversight bodies conduct investigations, they rarely interview research subjects. That’s a mistake, says Carl Elliot. (The Hastings Center)
• Amid new massive, open efforts to foster reproducibility, defense of the status quo is emerging. (John Ioannidis, Clinical Chemistry, sub req’d)
• 52% of researchers agree there is a “significant reproducibility crisis.” So how can the situation be improved? (Ottoline Leyser, Danny Kingsley and Jim Grange, The Conversation)
• The former editor of the British Journal of Diabetes and recently appointed editor in chief of Clinical Medicine allegedly fabricated data. (The BMJ, sub req’d)
• A headline-grabbing paper drawing attention to the risks of microplastics unravels amid accusations that the paper’s underlying research never happened. (Martin Enserink, Science) See our earlier coverage of the accusations against the paper here.
• “Over half [of scientists], however, still have faith in published literature in their field – with chemists being amongst the most confident despite reporting the most difficulty replicating other researchers’ or their own work.” (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Chemistry World)
• “There are, and I anticipate there will be additional, consequences for my career.” David Sanders, whose efforts have graced our pages, has called out multiple cases of scientific misconduct. (Meghan Holden, Lafayette Journal & Courier)
• The already massive problem of research waste is compounded by attempts to replicate poorly designed and reported papers, say Paul Glasziou and Iain Chalmers. (The BMJ)
• Atale of two stem cell retractions: One lab agreed to a retraction after they couldn’t replicate their own results, while a different researcher has chosen to blame his former institution. (Paul Knoepfler, The Niche)
• A New York medical school concludes, following an investigation, that a professor’s paper was not ghostwritten by Monsanto —but the investigation was quite rapid, and the school won’t disclose details. (Warren Cornwall, Science)
• “The NIH encourages investigators to use interim research products, such as preprints, to speed the dissemination and enhance the rigor of their work.” Reactions, courtesy of Jocelyn Kaiser at Science.
• The Gates Foundation will launch an open-access publishing venture in order to more quickly disseminate research funded by the charity. (Declan Butler, Nature) The organization will partner with F1000Research to accomplish it. (Rebecca Lawrence, F1000 blog)
• “It seems up to 30 per cent plagiarism is acceptable in thesis submitted for PhD in Mysore University.” That’s the conclusion Shyam Prasad S of the Bangalore Mirror came to based on a recent case.

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