Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
The week at Retraction Watch featured a call for more than 30 retractions by former Harvard stem cell scientists, a settlement in a sexual harassment suit by UCSF and a high-profile researcher, and the retraction of a paper based on the long-discredited vaccine-autism paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “A Star Surgeon Left a Trail of Dead Patients—and His Whistleblowers Were Punished. “One of those whistleblowers, Karl-Henrik Grinnemo, speaks. (Eve Herold, Leapsmag) Here’s a Q&A we did with Grinnemo last year.
- We’ve updated our top ten list of retracted papers with the most citations. Now on top: A study about the Mediterranean diet from the New England Journal of Medicine.
- A bill in Egypt would, among other things, criminalize scientific misconduct — but the president has so far declined to sign it into law. Could it “render scientists fearful off seeing their research through?” (Hazem Badr, SciDevNet)
- “In recent months, some scientists have spotted distortions of their own academic papers in far-right internet forums. “Meet the debunkers. (Amy Harmon, The New York Times)
- Academics call on Cornell to release the report of its investigation into the work of Brian Wansink. (Maryam Zafar, Cornell Daily Sun) Why it should.
- “Cochrane has determined that the lead author of its review on human papillomavirus vaccine, Marc Arbyn, did not breach its rules on commercial sponsorship by not declaring his involvement in two organisations funded in whole or part by industry.” (Nigel Hawkes, The BMJ; sub req’d)
- “A company given millions of taxpayer dollars to cull the devastating crown-of-thorns starfish on the Great Barrier Reef altered a scientific report about the ‘poor management’ of its own program, an ABC investigation can reveal.” (Michael Slezak, ABC Australia)
- A new study “found an increase in the average number of authors on pulmonology publications between 1994 and 2014 as well as an increase in the number of females with a lead or main author position.” (bioRxiv)
- “In short,…the public learned it was the history-denying historian, Nishioka, who fabricated evidence—not the journalist, Uemura.” (Asia-Pacific Journal)
- “An academic who paid £2,500 to attend a ‘predatory’ conference in Canada has told how its organiser fled the event after angry delegates demanded their money back.” (Jack Grove, Times Higher Education)
- When turf battles play out in the scientific literature: “The oncology team disagreed with the authors’ attribution of the metabolic acidosis to posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome.” (The American Journal of Emergency Medicine)
- “[H]ow can science preserve its credibility as curator of knowledge while engaging audiences with a communication format that is agnostic to truth?” (Mark Dahlstrom, Dietram Scheufele, PLOS Biology)
- The dominoes have started to fall: NEJM retracts one paper and issues an expression of concern about two others by Piero Anversa. (Elizabeth Cooney, STAT)
- The Cochrane Library plans “to withdraw a much-cited review of evidence on an illness known as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) amid fierce criticism and pressure from activists and patients.” (Kate Kelland, Reuters)
- “In a world that increasingly reflects confusion in distinguishing between truth and falsehoods, it is ever more critical that scientific journals vigorously defend the scientific method as a means to gain true understandings of our world,” writes Philip Yeagle, the first Scientific Integrity Officer at Science Advances.
- Jose Baselga, who recently resigned from his top post at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center following an investigation by The New York Times and ProPublica that found he had failed to disclose numerous conflicts of interest, has corrected another paper, this one in Science Translational Medicine.
- “The Risk Analysis Editor rejected the letter partly because he did not consider depositions to be a valid reference source.” (David Egilman, Joan Steffen, New Solutions; sub req’d)
- “Research institutions have a duty to foster integrity, and that includes monitoring.” (Lex Bouter, Nature)
- “A dubious predatory academic publisher… seems to have died…taking 1,500 scientific papers with it.” (Neuroskeptic, Discover)
- “A proposal by the Chinese government to create a national blacklist of journals is creating much debate among the country’s scientists, who are still waiting for the list to be revealed, five months after the plan to create it was announced.” (David Cyranoski, Nature) And an editorial on blacklists from Nature.
- “Looking back, I wish I could tell my recently graduated self that I shouldn’t have defined myself based on my publication record.” (Amir Sheikhi, Science)
- Open peer review has “proven so popular that we have decided to make open peer review an option for all MDPI journals.” (Martyn Rittman, MDPI)
- A scientist has accused Albania’s deputy minister of education, Ervin Demo, of plagiarism. (Oculus News)
- Not happening in a vacuum: “The initial efforts of the American Vacuum Society to raise awareness of a new generation of reproducibility challenges and provide tools to help address them serve as examples of mitigating actions that can be undertaken.” (Donald Baer and Ian Gilmore, Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology)
- “Does plagiarism matter to Christians?” asks Warren Throckmorton.
- A new feature from BioMed Central “offers authors a personal dashboard to easily track the status of their manuscript, and the opportunity to share it with the wider community earlier in the submission and peer review process.” (Amye Kenall, BMC Research in Progress blog)
- The Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience section of Royal Society Open Science now “guarantees to publish any close replication of any article published in our journal, and from most other major journals too.” Sanjay Srivastava explains why this is important.
- “To date, JAMA has had very few disagreements with individuals making allegations of scientific misconduct, although some have been critical of the time it has taken for JAMA and other journals to resolve an issue of alleged scientific misconduct.” The editors of JAMA talk about their experience with retractions.
- “The impact of POP (Publish Or Perish) culture on pharmaceutical journals.” Bonus: Read about our database of retractions in French. (Annales Pharmaceutiques Françaises)
- “Do Economics Journals Enforce Their Data Policies?” ask Sven Vlaeminck and Felix Podkrajac.
- “Had Wakefield been disciplined and his article retracted 12 months after publication rather than 12 years, we might not be remarking that this year marks the twentieth anniversary of its publication,” writes Heidi Larson. (Nature) And Gizmodo UK gives Wakefield this year’s “Worst Pseudoscience Award.”
- “American University discriminated against a former professor on the basis of her age when it denied her tenure, a unanimous jury in Washington Superior Court found Monday.” (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed)
- “It is tempting to treat [the Brian Wansink case] as an isolated case, but retractions are not uncommon and are increasing in frequency, although whether this reflects increased detection or prevalence is unknown.” (Marcus Munafò, Gareth Hollands, Theresa M Marteau; The BMJ)
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our growth, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, sign up for an email every time there’s a new post (look for the “follow” button at the lower right part of your screen), or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].