Author: Alison McCook

Ever since Cornell food researcher Brian Wansink wrote a blog post one year ago praising a graduate student’s productivity, things have gone downhill for him. Although he initially lauded the student for submitting five papers within six months of arriving at the lab, the four papers about pizza have all since been modified in some way after the research community began scrutinizing his work; two have been outright retracted. On Friday, Frontiers of Psychology retracted the fifth paper, about the shopping behavior of military veterans, with a notice stating a journal probe found “no empirical support for the conclusions of the article.” The retraction — covered by BuzzFeed — was likely not a surprise to Nick Brown, PhD student at the University of Groningen, who had expressed concerns about the paper in March.

Retraction Watch: You note that this newly retracted article was co-authored by the graduate student Wansink initially blogged about, but wasn’t as heavily scrutinized as the four papers about pizza consumption she also co-authored. Why do you think this paper wasn’t as closely examined?

Continue reading “(Hundreds of hours of) work vindicated:” Critic of food researcher reacts to new retraction

After more than 30 years working with scholarly journals, Irene Hames has some thoughts on how to improve peer review. She even wrote a book about it. As the first recipient of the Publons Sentinel Award, Hames spoke to us about the most pressing issues she believes are facing the peer review system — and what should be done about them.

Retraction Watch: At a recent event held as part of this year’s Peer Review Week, you suggested that journals publish their reviews, along with the final paper. Why?

Irene Hames: I don’t think that saying something is ‘peer reviewed’ can any longer be considered a badge of quality or rigour. The quality of peer review varies enormously, ranging from excellent through poor/inadequate to non-existent. But if reviewers’ reports were routinely published alongside articles – ideally with the authors’ responses and editorial decision correspondence – this would provide not only information on the standards of peer review and editorial handling, but also insight into why the decision to publish has been made, the strengths and weaknesses of the work, whether readers should bear reservations in mind, and so on. As I’ve said before, I can’t understand why this can’t become the norm. I haven’t heard any reasons why it shouldn’t, and I’d love the Retraction Watch audience to make suggestions in the comments here. I’m not advocating that the reviewers’ names should appear – I think that’s a decision that should be left to journals and their communities.

Continue reading Make reviews public, says peer review expert

This week, we received a press release that caught our attention: A company is releasing software it claims will write manuscripts using researchers’ data. 

The program, dubbed “Manuscript Writer,” uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate papers, according to the company that created it, sciNote LLC. A spokesperson explained the software generates a first draft the scientist should revise, and won’t write the Discussion, “the most creative and original part of the scientific article.” But can it provide any coherent text?  

According the release from sciNote, Manuscript Writer (an add-on to the company’s Electronic Lab Notebook, or ELN):

Continue reading Newly released AI software writes papers for you — what could go wrong?