Weekend reads: Researcher loses grant following bullying allegations; 40+ retractions later, still an enigma; predatory journal critic suspended

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The week at Retraction Watch featured a look at a court case that suggests senior researchers are responsible for misconduct by others; a journal full of baloney; and how a researcher with 16 retractions earned a new professorship. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “One of the world’s largest research-funding charities has revoked a £3.5-million (US$4.5-million) grant awarded to a top cancer geneticist, Nazneen Rahman, following allegations that she bullied scientists and other staff when she worked at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London.” (Holly Else, Nature)
• “The researcher at the center of an epic scientific fraud remains an enigma to the scientists who exposed him.” Kai Kupferschmidt tries to solve the mystery of Yoshihiro Sato, the researcher who is #6 on our all-time retraction leaderboard. (Science)
• An economist who spoke out about colleagues publishing in predatory journals has been suspended without pay. (Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun) Background.
• Lawyers should know about predatory journals — an adversary’s next witness may have published in one. (William Childs, Law360)
• A researcher remains “unconvinced that there is an immediacy to sharing most forms of scientific data.” (Scientific American)
• “Instead of using a scientist’s misbehavior to change the way we see his genius, we let his genius change the way we see his misbehavior.” (Dan Engber, Slate)
• “As a researcher in statistical methods and applications,…I have found feminism to help me do better science.” (Andrew Gelman)
• “While the appeal of a quality seal is clear, the risk remains that it would be misappropriated by predatory journals, similar to how ‘white lists’ can potentially be abused.” (Philippe Terheggen, Elsevier Connect)
• “In British universities alone, more than 5,000 scientists have published articles through Omics and Waset in the past five years, according to a Guardian analysis.” (Alex Hern and Pamela Duncan, The Guardian)
• “If a university bars a professor from teaching grad students, does it make sense not to bar him from teaching undergrads?” (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed)
• Want to judge how good a trial’s randomization was? Hilda Bastian has tips. (Statistically Funny)
• “[T]he findings have already influenced one journal, International Studies Review, to start analyzing the percentage of women cited in its papers, giving authors 100 extra words to explain any citation gap.” (Rachael Pells, Times Higher Education, via Inside Higher Ed)
• “[J]unior researchers (PhD students, postdocs and assistant professors) perceive the research integrity climate more negatively than senior researchers (associate and full professors).” (PsyArXiv preprint)
• Randy Schekman, the founding editor-in-chief of eLife, is stepping down. (eLife)
• “Last but not least, using gmail and other non-academic emails to correspond with journals should be highly prohibited, at least for reviewers.” (Amin Talebi Bezmin Abadi on preventing fake peer reviews, Archives of Iranian Medicine)
• “A major higher education research journal is suspending submissions to clear out a two-year backlog.” (Collen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed)
• That’s a lot of names to spell incorrectly, CDC MMWR.
• A research institute in India has found misconduct by a group of researchers with 14 retractions. (Prasad Ravindranath, Journos Diary)
• How do researchers who have committed to sharing their data view their experiences? (Annals of Internal Medicine)
• In China, a “lack of scientific spirit,” says Liu Yadong, comes with “a host of ugly phenomena like corruption and fraud.” (South China Morning Post)
• “A deceptive and factually challenged blog post on an anti-vaccine website is not a ‘Harvard study,’ yet its false conclusions are popular on social media.” (Snopes)
• Ann L. Berrios explains how a university punished her husband for blowing the whistle. Note that the host blog has “not asked her to satisfy a burden of proof.” (Research Whisperer)
• A group of researchers “outline a unified framework for estimating the credibility of published research by examining four fundamental falsifiability-related dimensions.” (Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, sub req’d)
• “An investigation is underway into the treatment of lab animals at the University of Calgary after several former students complained,” Catherine Offord of The Scientist reports via the CBC.
• Wiley is trialing an alerting service from PubPeer. Chris Graf asks PubPeer’s Brandon Stell a few questions.
• “There’s just one problem. Scientists can’t seem to reproduce the results of these experiments.” (Anna Azvolinsky, The Scientist, on two diabetes studies)
• “Why is so much nutrition research kept confidential before publication?” asks William Masters, questioning the value of pre-publication embargoes.
• “So, a few months ago I submitted my first paper with open data. A couple of weeks ago, the paper got rejected because of the data I shared. Let me tell you, this experience has been quite a rollercoaster ride.” Kaitlyn Werner has a story to tell.
• “The stated conclusions are contradicted by the data, based on inappropriate statistics, and should be corrected…” (Pediatric Obesity, sub req’d, but the headline tells the story)
• A retraction — involving Florida, politics, and a fake diploma —gets retracted. (David Bishop, FLANews Online)

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