The week at Retraction Watch featured a survey of researchers in China with an alarming result, and asked whether philosophy has a plagiarism problem. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- There’s a new paper hoax in town, this one involving the “conceptual penis as a social construct.” The authors, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, explain. (Skeptic)
- “From mislabeled antibodies to watered-down catalysts — to the wrong kind of cells entirely — problems with lab supplies have wasted labs’ resources and scuppered their research findings.” Our co-founders’ latest for STAT.
- A paper on plagiarism includes — irony of ironies — plagiarism. (Neuroskeptic, Discover) We covered a similarly ironic case here.
- A new statement from the board of a journal mired in controversy over an article by Rebecca Tuvel “appears to rule out the possibility that the article will be retracted, barring the discovery of academic misconduct by Ms. Tuvel.” (Lindsay McKenzie, The Chronicle of Higher Education)
- Daryl Bem proved extrasensory perception is real — and in the process cast doubt on the standard methods of psychology and the results they achieve. (Daniel Engber, Slate)
- Tumor Biology, which recently set a record for most papers retracted from a single journal at once, also has several editorial board members who say they have no relationship to the journal. (Hinnerk Feldwisch-Drentrup, Science)
- A New Zealand school closes: “some Linguis staff seemed unclear about what constituted plagiarism.” (Adele Redmond, NZ Stuff)
- Trustworthiness is “strongly influenced by the false positive rate and the pressures from journals for positive results.” (bioRxiv)
- Politwoops, a new project by ProPublica, is like Retraction Watch, but for all of the tweets politicians delete.
- The last six years has been “a time of momentous and dizzying changes in academic publishing,” says Ginny Barbour, as she steps down as chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
- “We believe that supervisors have a right to be included as co-authors on their students’ publications. Moreover, they have a moral responsibility to help their students to publish, promote and defend their work.” (Roger Watson & Mark Hayter, Times Higher Education)
- The superstar surgeon who was already fired from the Karolinska for ethical violations is fired again — this time in Russia. (Alla Astakhova, Science)
- Given all the scrutiny science is under, Owen Bennett-Jones asks experts: Is the problem how science is done or is there something fundamentally wrong with it? (BBC Newshour Extra)
- A new paper looking at retraction reasons for cancer research finds that most retractions are due to academic misconduct. (Research Integrity and Peer Review)
- “If a researcher chooses to publish using a Creative Commons license, what difference does it make whether the author retains or transfers copyright to the publisher?” (Todd A. Carpenter, The Scholarly Kitchen)
- From Significosis to Disjunctivitis, John Antonakis diagnosed five diseases plaguing publishing —Elsevier wants to treat them. (Jenny Ellis & Alice Atkinson-Bonasio). Our conversation with Antonakis.
- The quick rise and fall of STAP stem cells due to misconduct illustrates the possibilities and pitfalls in the age of open science, a new paper in Science as Culture explains. (sub req’d)
- The journal eLife hopes that using working scientists to make editorial decisions will make the review process more fair and transparent.
- A new paper uses a systematic review to uncover what incentives actually increase data sharing in health and medical research. (It’s a very small number.) (Research Integrity and Peer Review)
- A brief primer on citation-based metrics. (Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen)
- “Citing work that hasn’t been peer reviewed has been traditionally seen as a big academic no-no.” But does this mean citing preprints should be an academic no-no as well? (Jon Tennant, Green Tea and Velociraptors blog)
- “Gender bias, previously identified in clinical research and in clinical authorship, extends into the patients presented in clinical case reports.” (PLOS ONE)
- TrueReview is a new open-source tool to support post-publication review, according to a new preprint. (arXiv)
- A paper on using the gene editing technique CRISPR on human DNA plagiarizes an author’s earlier work, and the author is quite irritated. (Paul Knoepfler, The Niche blog)
- What does a 1966 proposal for overwhelming the American welfare state have to do with peer review? Let Thomas Leeper explain.
- Who’s behind the campaign to examine now-re-elected Iranian president Hassan Rouhani’s PhD thesis for plagiarism? Fereshteh Sadeghi tries to find out. (Al-Monitor)
- PLOS has a new CEO: Alison Mudditt. (PLOS Blog)
- “Curiously strong effects:” Joe Hilgard describes problems in papers that “cannot be detected through any statistical test…[whose] effects on theory may be stronger than that of p-hacking.”
- “[C]oncurrent replication forms an underrepresented but potentially extremely valuable form of replication,” write Rolf Zwaan and colleagues.
- “Ten simple rules to consider regarding preprint submission,” from Philip E. Bourne and colleagues. (PLOS Computational Biology)
- Calling for more peer review in government policy is just playing in to the hands of the Trump administration, writes Daniel Engber. (Slate)
- “A very important factor in the reproducibility crisis is the failed peer-review system,” says Jan Voskuil. “It fails due to lack of transparency.”
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