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The week at Retraction Watch featured allegations of text reuse by a Harvard professor, news about a new predatory publishing scam, and the refusal of a journal to retract a paper by Paolo Macchiarini. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “Italian scientists have been citing themselves more often since a controversial law came into effect in 2010 demanding academics meet productivity thresholds to gain promotion,” reports Dalmeet Singh Chawla. (Nature Index)
- A new study finds that “adequate statistical power was most often present in clinical trials with a male first author and a female last author,” and the authors conclude that “Our results demonstrate the importance of gender diversity in research collaborations and emphasize the need to increase the number of women in senior positions in medicine.” (eLife)
- Two authors who plagiarized are going to jail after not paying a fine. (Yunus S. Saliu, The Point)
- “The Indian government is barring Pakistani scholars from participating in a conference in New Delhi co-sponsored by an American academic association.” (Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed)
- “The greater the publication pressure or the more publications a researcher reported, the higher the misconduct frequency score.” (bioRxiv) Read a Q&A with two of the authors about an earlier paper from this project.
- Douglas Altman, one of the world’s leading experts on clinical trials, has died at the age of 69. (The BMJ, via Twitter)
- The growth of preprints in CrossRef data is ten times that of papers, according to Jennifer Lin.
- Is Science Really Broken? David Corcoran speaks to the Annenberg Center’s Kathleen Hall Jamieson — who says no, and it’s risky to talk about a “crisis.”(Undark podcast)
- “Can auditing scientific research help fix its reproducibility crisis?” (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Pacific Standard)
- “How I Fail” talks to Daniel Lakens, who studies, among other things, meta-science. (Veronika Cheplygina)
- “[I] have decided my contribution to science will be better served by not signing my reviews.” Kristen Naegle on gender and transparency.
- The takeaway: “discourse around graduate student mentorship must expand to include how to prepare them to respond to critical commentary on their work.” (University Affairs)
- “City-based advocate and Congress spokesperson Shailesh Amin on Sunday demanded action against the two professors who are accused of plagiarism.” (Times of India)
- “We find a large disparity between the strength of language as presented to the research consumer and the underlying strength of causal inference among the studies most widely shared on social media.” But read the caveats. (PLOS ONE)
- “Fascinating to hear from eLife that people create fake ORCID accounts to bypass ID requirement for annotations [and that their comments weren’t “bad” just pseudonymous],” says Richard Sever. (Twitter)
- “The World’s Largest GMO Study Was Launched By Russians In 2014. Then It Disappeared.” (Dan Vergano, BuzzFeed)
- Want to build a great scientific abstract? Hilda Bastian has a six-point checklist — and a cartoon. (PLOS Blogs)
- “Sloppy Science Happens More Than You Think,” writes Diana Gitig. (LeapsMag)
- “The replication crisis is largely concerned with known problems, such as the lack of replication standards, non-availability of data, or p-hacking. One hitherto unknown problem is the potential for software companies’ changes to the algorithms used for calculations to cause discrepancies between two sets of reported results.” (Anastasia Ershova and Gerald Schneider, LSE Impact Blog)
- “Questionable research practices seem to be so common that it’s almost the norm,” says Lex Bouter. (Erica Cervini, The Australian)
- A former professor at the University of California, Davis filmed individuals showering without their consent, reports Hannah Holzer. (The California Aggie)
- A new study shows “a correlation between attitudes towards misconduct and self-reported problematic behaviors.” (Accountability in Research)
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I started to see a trend here in retraction watch showing papers about gender diversity. Although there are only 2 gender (male and female), I think the term gender diversity is like showing there is more than 2 gender. (Yes, i am reffering to the “trend” in the united states.)
For example, one of the post here regarding the study ” female last author shows adequate statistical power”. The study conclude and said we needed to included more female into medical research group. But the usage of “female and male” might be better than the term gender diversity. That term is more decisive and emphasizing their result than the gender diversity.
This because people from those factions (the one that said there are many genders) like to play with gender terminology. I’m afraid that these papers will be cited for their cause because the used of ambigious terminology. Just my thoughts.
For most of us, yes, gender will tend to be masculine or feminine. But there is diversity in how we perform our gender roles – e.g. more or less masculine/feminine. There are also people who do not conform to the gender role that corresponds to their biological sex. Look up ‘gender’ on wikipedia.
I don’t see any benefit from using alternative phrasing – ‘gender diversity’ is a much more concise way of saying ‘a mixture of men and women’. For the most part, the term ‘gender diversity’ usually connotes ‘more females’. I think that’s OK because most of these fields have or are still male-dominated.
If you’re worried that the term ‘gender diversity’ will mean that this paper is appropriated by queer activists to advance their cause then I don’t think you should worry. Queer and feminist fields are closely related and often overlapping, but there is a distinction and the people involved are mostly intelligent enough to appreciate it.
I think we should just take away from these papers that treating people with respect regardless of sex/gender/race etc can help us not just build a fairer society but also improve our lab’s performance.
There is a great deal of confusion regarding the terms “sex” and “gender”. Hamid says “…there are only 2 gender (male and female)…”
Hamid’s claim is incorrect. There has been considerable ambiguity in the past, but there are clear consensus definitions for these words now. It would be correct to say that there are, essentially, two sexes male and female:
https://orwh.od.nih.gov/sites/orwh/files/docs/SexGenderInfographic_11x17_508.pdf
The above is incorrectly referring to the above commentor; it should say “Hadi” not “Hamid”.