The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a paper from Yale on ketamine and depression, a retraction for Carlo Croce, and a discussion of when a citation may not be enough. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- A researcher published 77 papers in a year. Should that be a red flag? (Soumya Chatterjee, The News Minute)
- Scientists raise doubts about the validity of a high-profile Nature paper about using CRISPR gene editing in human embryos, suggesting that many of the embryos weren’t actually edited. (Paul Knopfler, The Niche blog)
- It’s not just developing countries: Big pharmaceutical companies publish their research in predatory journals, too. (Esme Deprez and Caroline Chen, Bloomberg)
- Three journals published by the Royal Society of Chemistry are hit by fake peer reviews, prompting the retraction of five articles. (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Chemistry World)
- Our database of retractions isn’t yet complete, but it now contains more than 10,000 retractions.
- Thousands of scientists have signed an open letter to the U.S. NIH saying “that classifying human behaviour studies as clinical trials creates unnecessary red tape.” (Sara Reardon, Nature)
- “Why not do a study? Why not join the great tradition of scientists, going back to Galileo and Newton, and make my mark on the world?” For starters, because getting through an IRB is a nightmarishly difficult process, as Scott Alexander discovered personally. (Slate Star Codex)
- “No article defined ‘sex’ and/or ‘gender.’ No publication carried out a comprehensive sex and gender analysis.” A look at randomized controlled trials in Canada. (Research Integrity and Peer Review)
- “Greetings from Clinical Depression.” An unintentional metaphor for predatory publishing spam? (Riddled blog)
- “The emperor of junk science forensics has died,” reports Radley Balko, in a piece that also introduces the reader to Fraud magazine.
- “Research is that horrifying Frankenstein at large which is hunting down everyone in the education department.” (Fatima Batool, Pakistan Today)
- More plagiarism charges at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India (NDTV) and North-West University in South Africa. (News24)
- Confusion over preprints? “An academic is boycotting peer review for a scholarly journal after it turned down a manuscript that had previously been published on the website of an education centre.” (Holly Else, Times Higher Education)
- “There’s a new preprint on @PeerJPreprints about preprints, where the author only cites 19 of their own preprints.” Jon Tennant muses about this paper.
- “Dr Con Man: the rise and fall of a celebrity scientist who fooled almost everyone.” An essay in the Guardian about Paolo Macchiarini. (John Rasko, Carl Power)
- “Allegations of serious misconduct, especially in relation to academic matters, should be tested by academics.” A push to get rid of some disciplinary committees at Australian universities. (Bernard Lane, The Australian)
- “We all carry a range of biases that are products of our culture and experiences or, in some cases, of outcomes that we desire.” Science editor in chief Jeremy Berg on measuring and managing bias.
- “Left with the imitators, who perform solid, sometimes useful incremental research, we are moving in a circle instead of forward,like circus elephants following each other’s tail.” (Sui Huang, Times Higher Education).
- A new article asks who is actually harmed by predatory publishing practices, taking aim at an earlier article by Jeffrey Beall in the same journal in the process. (Communication, Capitalism & Critique)
- Badges to reward data sharing? That study is filled with bias, says Hilda Bastian. (PLOS blogs)
- Japanese finance minister Taro Aso retracts a statement in which he claimed that Hitler had “the right motives.”(Justin McCurry, The Guardian)
- A new paper examines whether the difficulty journal editors have in recruiting reviewers influences the outcome of the review process itself. (Scientometrics)
- 120 Dartmouth faculty sign a letter to the university’s president to retract his condemnation of a scholar who is a rising expert on the antifa. (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed)
- Six new preprint servers launch to support increased scholarly communication in disciplines ranging from sports medicine to paleontology. (Center for Open Science)
- “These studies help decide whether to progress the drug to human trials and, if so, what a reasonable starting dose for a human might be. However, because of species differences, something that is effective and safe in an animal might not be so in a human.” (Ri Scarborough, The Conversation)
- An ecologist posts a letter from the U.S. Department of Energy asking her to remove mentions of “climate change” in her grant application. She has now taken the post down. (Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post)
- The Cureus Journal of Medical Science offers a new opportunity to quickly publish case studies, by modeling itself on Turbotax, of all things. (Megan Molteni, Wired) But it’s not without its issues, as we’ve covered as well.
- Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ, offers advice to NEJM on dealing with old, undisclosed conflicts of interest. (The BMJ Opinion; Smith is on the board of directors of our parent non-profit organization)
- Publons announces the shortlist for the first ever Sentinel Award. We’re honored to be nominated, and in such good company.
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