The week at Retraction Watch featured “a concerning – largely unrecognised – threat to patient safety,” the loss of a grant following findings of misconduct in a controversial study, and a request that authors remove a reference for libel concerns. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- A researcher has hidden a marriage proposal in a paper. (Rachael Pells, Times Higher Education) It isn’t the first time.
- “That positive p-value we reported yesterday? Um, we screwed that up too.” A biotech company is forced to share more bad news.” (John Carroll, Endpoints News)
- Deborah Cohen uncovers a “systematic failure” in evaluating pre-clinical studies of a tuberculosis vaccine developed at Oxford. (The BMJ)
- “I will recognize as valuable the work of scientists who aim to correct errors in the scientific record,” says Simine Vazire as she offers an oath to keep. (Sometimes I’m Wrong)
- Citation databases have errors. Lots of errors, Terje Tüür-Fröhlich found. (Gerda Henkel Stiftung)
- Research results can be skewed by the experimenter’s gender, which often isn’t controlled for. (Richard Harris, NPR)
- “The massive consolidation of STM publishing into a small number of very large titles, as Binfield predicted, did not come to pass.” (Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen)
- U.S. Supreme Court justices make mistakes, too, but you’ll have to look extra hard to notice them. (Ryan Gabrielson, ProPublica)
- “As a high-school teacher, I have tenure, I earn a secure six-figure income, and I’ve published as many peer-reviewed papers and books as some professors, and more than others.” (Michael Wing, The Chronicle of Higher Education)
- US government-mandated reporting of clinical trial results is improving. (Charles Piller and Natalia Bronshtein, STAT)
- Women in economics must be “significantly clearer writers than men” to get published in major journals and must wait longer, too. (Jim Tankersley and Noam Scheiber, New York Times)
- Breath of fresh air: Clare Malone and Mai Nguyen, reporters at FiveThirtyEight, explain how they’ve lost faith in data underlying two stories on broadband internet access in the US.
- Open scholarship requires citations to be freely available, too, says David Shotton. (Nature)
- “The use of obsolete software is widespread” in the biological sciences and rarely recognized as a problem, but publishing guidelines might help. (Catherine Offord, The Scientist)
- “Imagine a world where Elsevier does not exist.” In it, says the often provocative Joseph Esposito, libraries lose a “best friend.” Small publishers, meanwhile, can only dream. (Scholarly Kitchen)
- “Our research indicated that altmetrics, as currently framed, are significantly weaker indicators of research quality – as measured by expert peers’ assessments – than traditional metrics.” (Robin Haunschild and Lutz Bornmann, F1000 Research blog)
- “The statistical methods used to analyze the data can influence the interpretation of the results,” writes Dick Eick of the latest Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology attempt. (eLife)
- Australia is revising its national code of research conduct, as we reported a year ago. Nature Index picks up thedispute between funders and universities over the definition of misconduct. (Yojana Sharma)
- “Middle-tier journals risk being ‘squeezed out’ by big publishers.” (Rachael Pells, Times Higher Education)
- Canadian scientists at the country’s top institutions “keep publishing their results in fake science journals, tainting the work despite years of warnings.” (Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen)
- “Realizing how difficult it is to assess novelty should give funding agencies, journal editors and scientists pause,” says Jalees Rehman in an essay on novelty in science. (The Conversation)
- Warped science: The latest fake paper submitted as part of a sting operation has Star Trek characters for authors. (American Research Journal of Biosciences)
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