The week at Retraction Watch featured an unusual warning from the New England Journal of Medicine, and the withdrawal of a paper over a fear of legal threats. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- A paper exposed as a “pile of dung” has been accepted for publication — for the second time. Tom Spears is at it again. (Ottawa Citizen)
- “Science needs a solution for the temptation of positive results,” says Aaron Carroll. (New York Times)
- Publishing negative results “may not be informative and journals run the risk of becoming mere archives instead of media of the debate,” writes Fritz Strack. (Frontiers in Psychology, via Neuroskeptic)
- “My Most Regretted Statements.” Econ Journal Watch asked economists to share theirs. It’s a worthwhile read.
- A friend told Richard Mann he’d made a mistake. Mann felt dismay, but then retracted the paper. Five years later, he’s doing just fine. Our co-founders’ latest in STAT.
- “A lot falls between the cracks of journals, authors, authors’ institutions, and funder and other agencies with a responsibility for research integrity,” Hilda Bastian found when she examined expressions of concern in the literature. (PLOS Blogs)
- Is science self-correcting? Our co-founder Ivan Oransky, in Amsterdam for th World Conference on Research Integrity, talks to NRC. (Marcel aan de Brugh; in Dutch)
- Findings of a new study “suggest that selective outcome reporting may be a concern in obesity clinical trials.” (Clinical Obesity, sub req’d)
- Clarivate Analytics, owner of Web of Science, has bought peer review platform Publons, which could mean a better way to detect fake peer reviews, writes Richard van Noorden. (Nature)
- A philosophy journal has apologized for publishing an issue dedicated to Black Lives Matter that did not include any black authors. (Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed)
- Stephan Lewandowsky, whose name may be familiar to Retraction Watch readers, warned at the World Conference on Research Integrity against the unintended consequences of making all data open. (John Elmes, Times Higher Education)
- Want to figure out how often studies in economics are replicated? It’s not easy, Lucas Coffman and Alistair Wilson found when they looked. (The Replication Network)
- “How much citation manipulation is acceptable?” Phil Davis offers an illuminating analysis of a case were recently covered involving soil science journals. (The Scholarly Kitchen)
- “What do we really mean by a “good” scientific journal?” asks Roberto Piazza, who has a new metric to judge just that. (arXiv)
- “[I]ntroducing recommendations on the responsible use of statistics in psychology journals was followed by an increase in authors reporting their findings using certain good research practices,” according to a new study. (Holly Else, Times Higher Education)
- Patent, don’t publish, says one university vice-president. (Ellie Bothwell, Times Higher Education)
- There will soon be a new blacklist of predatory journals in town, a pay service from Cabell’s. (Andrew Silver, Nature)
- Jeffrey Beall is still facing harassment online months after shuttering his list of potential predatory journals, reports Carl Straumsheim. (Inside Higher Ed)
- Don’t publish that: “Poaching has been documented in species within months of their taxonomic description in journals.” (Science)
- “Crowd-based peer review can be good and fast,” says Benjamin List. (Nature)
- “Some of the top political science journals are biased against women,” write Dawn Langan Teele and Kathleen Thelen. “Here’s the evidence.” (Washington Post)
- Papers with female first authors receive 10% fewer citations than comparable papers with male first authors,” according to a new study. (Maggie Kuo, Science)
- A medical journal has begun including Twitter handles for authors. And, we should note that Neuroskeptic noticed the phenomenon on a paper called simply “Nutella.” Delicious. (Twitter)
- A new PubPeer is coming. Check out the beta version, and give them feedback.
- Does adding an “institutional publications officer” help researchers navigate publishing? One institution found that it did. (peerJ)
- “Stamp out fake peer review,” say two researchers. (Nature)
- “Croatian citizens are fed up with public officials with undeserved academic credit, gained thanks to plagiarism.” This time, it’s the minister of science and education. (Filip Stojanovski, Global Voices)
- Ukraine: Another country heard from in the “government ministers plagiarize their theses” saga. (Ararat Osipian, Inside Higher Ed)
- The Argus Leader has retracted a story, saying that an intern had made up quotes.
- “Science does not have a separate special method for learning about the world, the ‘scientific method’ as taught in schools is a damaging illusion, and the falsifiability criterion has itself been falsified,” writes Paul Braterman. (Primate’s Progress)
- The CEO of a biotech company has resigned following the retraction of a report in which he claimed that one of the company’s drugs worked better than it does. (Maria Armental, Wall Street Journal, via MarketWatch)
- “Publication bias is a bitch, but poor hypothesising may be worse,” says Anne Scheel. (The 100% CI)
- “Formal recognition for peer review will propel research forward,” say Andrew Preston and Tom Culley, both of Publons. (LSE Impact Blog)
- A new study by NIH’s Michael Lauer and colleagues confirms “prior findings of decreasing marginal returns with higher levels of research funding support.” (bioRxiv)
- What can watching Star Trek teach you about scientific integrity? Jop de Vrieze found out at the World Conference on Research Integrity. (Science)
- Five years after the implementation of a new policy, “the majority of top U.S. research universities have not complied with the National Science Foundation’s policy on instruction in the responsible conduct of research,” Trisha Phillips and her colleagues have found. (Press release) (Study in Science and Engineering Ethics here.)
- Nature will now “publish a new reporting-summary document, to which authors will now be expected to add details of experimental design, reagents and analysis,” along with every life sciences paper.
- “Despite decades of warnings, many areas of science still insist on labelling a result of P < 0.05 as ‘significant,’” writes David Colquhoun. “This must account for a substantial part of the lack of reproducibility in some areas of science.” (bioRxiv)
- “Scientific integrity has become a major issue in scientific research,” writes Michel Morange. (EuroScientist)
- “An effort to test whether reviewers are biased against blacks applying for grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is proving to be much harder to carry out than expected,” writes Jeffrey Mervis. (Science)
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