Weekend reads: How to kill zombie citations; wanted: 6,000 new journals; does peer review matter anymore?

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The week at Retraction Watch featured a retraction and replacement of a diet study in the New England Journal of Medicine, an introduction to the philosophy plagiarism police, and an explanation for why some PLOS ONE retraction notices include more information lately. Here’s what was happening elsewhere (and it was a lot):

• • • “Publishers can ensure that citations of zombie publications are caught before new papers go to press by running automated cross-checks of manuscript reference lists against the Retraction Watch database of retracted papers (http://retractiondatabase.org).” (Binning et al, Nature) We couldn’t agree more.
    • Indonesia wants 6,000 new journals to print all the papers it wants scholars to publishto keep up with Singapore and Malaysia. (Gemma Holliani Cahya, Evi Mariani, The Jakarta Post)
    • “Does peer review matter anymore?” asks Milton Packer. (MedPage Today)
    • The NIH is halting a controversial study of drinking and heart disease. (STAT) Questions about the study’s funding had swirled as early as 2014. (Wine Industry Insight) Earlier this week: “Brewing giant Anheuser-Busch InBev, one of five alcohol companies underwriting a $100 million federal trial on the health benefits of a daily drink, is pulling its funding from the project,saying controversy about the sponsorship threatens to undermine the study’s credibility,” Roni Caryn Rabin reports. (New York Times)
    • “Killing these resources to save a few hundred thousand dollars per year is a penny-wise, pound-foolish decision,” says a family physician of the end of a guidelines resource. Our co-founders’ latest for STAT.
    • The ideal of open data is far from fully realized, particularly when it comes to repositories, says Lisa Federer.
    • “For some journals it seems that the emphasis is placed more on the publishing end of the business than the dissemination of research findings.” Erwin Krauskopf looks at journals delisted from indices. (Scientometrics, sub req’d)
    • DNA testing: It’s a mess of errors, reports Tina Saey. See the whole Science News package here.
    • “Hanyang University’s research truth committee has concluded that there was no problem to omit the name of an associate professor who helped a plastic surgery professor to write a chapter in a U.S. plastic surgery textbook.” But he’s still suing a reporter who wrote about the allegations. (Song Soo-youn, Korea Biomedical Review)
    • “How to revise, and revise really well, for premier academic journals.” (Industrial Marketing Management, sub req’d)
    • “Arbitration is needed to resolve scientific authorship disputes,” says Zen Faulkes in PeerJ, noting that at the time he wrote his manuscript, our database listed 349 retractions for authorship issues.
    • “Provided that adequate security safeguards were in place, most participants were willing to share their data for a wide range of uses.” A survey in NEJM.
    • A “Promising open-access anthropology publication abandons its business model and faces criticism over allegations that top editor and others created toxic environment.” (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed)
    • “When a colleague with shaky data raced a competitor to be first to publish, I saw how the perverse incentives in research work.” (Anonymous, The Guardian)
    • “(Update: as of Friday morning, after the story appeared, the college had removed much of its website, including the names of all faculty and the president’s name.)” Another bizarre story unearthed by Tom Spears. (The Ottawa Citizen)
    • “Could AI Help Reform Academic Publishing?” asks Kalev Leetaru. (Forbes)
    • “A Marketing Site Deleted Over 7,000 Articles After It Was Caught Stealing Fact-Checks And Plagiarizing.” (Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed)
    • “What makes a study more valuable to replicate than another?” asks Peder Isager.
    • “Princeton Graduate wins Harvard Thesis Prize, kind of. Plagiarism hits the Ivy Leagues.” (Archintect)
    • “Can It Really Be True That Half of Academic Papers Are Never Read?” asks Arthur Jago. (Chronicle of Higher Education)
    • “1,350 papers were retracted in 2016 out of 2 million published—less than a tenth of a percent, but up from 36 out of 1 million in 2000,” our Ivan Oransky tells Marilynn Marchione of the Associated Press.
    • “The most famous psychology study of all time was a sham,” writes Ben Blum. “Why can’t we escape the Stanford Prison Experiment?” (Medium)
    • When it comes to peer review, “It is time, we suggest, for publishers to join in an effort to articulate just what is meant by widely used but imprecise labels like ‘blind,’ ‘open,’ and various descriptive qualifiers.” (Mark Edington, The Scholarly Kitchen)
    • “Sexual harassment is pervasive throughout academic science in the United States, driving talented researchers out of the field and harming others’ careers,” reports Alexandra Witze, based on a new study from the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (Nature)
    • “Study says editors of major political science journals demonstrate no systematic bias against female authors. Yet women authors remain underrepresented in the field. Why?” (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed)
    • “Early-career researchers can learn about peer review by discussing preprints at journal clubs and sending feedback to the authors.” (Prachee Avasthi, Alice Soragni, and Joshua N Bembenek, eLife)
    • Inder Verma — who recently resigned as editor of PNAS — has resigned his Salk Institute faculty position following allegations of sexual harassment. (Meredith Wadman, Science)
    • “Even when details concerning ethical approval were reported in these studies of human research, we were unable to identify almost half of the ethics committees concerned.” (Davide Zoccatelli et al, BMC Medical Ethics)
    • “The results indicate some evidence for the ‘productivity as the enemy of impact’ hypothesis in chemistry, where publishing at the higher margin of productivity leads to a stagnant or declining publication impact.” (Scientometrics)
    • “The secondment of researchers ‘has become a lucrative business for fraudsters,'” says a new report from the EU. (ResearchResearch)
    • “[J]ournal growth can have a negative effect on citation performance measures,” notes Phil Davis.
    • “In the past four years, Public Citizen has submitted five formal complaints to the [Office for Human Research Protections] about unethical clinical trials, but until Monday, had not received substantive responses from the agency for any of them.”
    • “The bleak picture for patients, however, is also attributable to avoidable impediments stemming from quality concerns in preclinical research that often escape detection by research regulation efforts).” (PLOS Biology)
    • “Has Google Become A Journal Publisher?” asks Kent Anderson. (The Scholarly Kitchen)

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