Ivan Oransky

A university went to great lengths to block the release of information about a trial gone wrong. A reporter fought them and revealed the truth.

Here’s a story that shows the lengths a public university — The University of Illinois at Chicago — went to block the release of information about a child psychiatry trial gone wrong, and how a reporter — Jodi S. Cohen of ProPublica — fought them effectively at every turn to reveal the truth.

Earlier this year, ProPublica “revealed that the National Institute of Mental Health ordered the university to repay $3.1 million in grant money it had received to fund [Mani] Pavuluri’s study.” This kind of clawback is very, very rare.

We tipped our hats to Cohen then, because we had been trying for years to obtain documents that would tell the full story of the Pavuluri case, which we had been covering since 2015 when a retraction appeared. In particular, we’ve been trying to get the university to release their report of the investigation into Pavuluri’s work. We have been making a push for such reports, as we noted earlier this week in a roundup of more than 16 of them. Continue reading A university went to great lengths to block the release of information about a trial gone wrong. A reporter fought them and revealed the truth.

Reports of misconduct investigations can tell us a lot. Here are more than a dozen of them.

Fakery. Ignored whistleblowers. Sabotage. Subterfuge.

Reading reports of institutional investigations into allegations of misconduct can sometimes feel like reading a spy novel about science. And we’ve read a lot of them.

In a recent post that drew from one such report, we wrote:

Whenever we learn about misconduct cases at public universities, we file such public records requests to obtain more information because we believe, as did Justice Louis Brandeis, that sunlight is the best disinfectant.

But just as retraction notices are often unhelpful and even misleading, suggesting a lack of transparency, reports of institutional investigations can leave a lot to be desired, and reveal flaws in the the process that lead to them. As we and C.K. Gunsalus noted recently in JAMA:

Weekend reads: The fall of a Crossfit science watchdog; a CDC retraction about suicides; “superb subterfuge” by predatory journals

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 critic with more than two dozen retractions; why twenty journals were punished; and why 35,000 papers may be eligible for retraction. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Continue reading Weekend reads: The fall of a Crossfit science watchdog; a CDC retraction about suicides; “superb subterfuge” by predatory journals

High-profile indexing service punishes 20 journals, issues unusual warning about five others

If scientific publishing were the World Cup, twenty scientific journals are being effectively taken out of competition today. And five others are being given a stern first-time warning.

Every year, Clarivate Analytics, a company that indexes more than 11,000 journals — and which, in turn, designates their powerful, but controversial, Impact Factors and rankings, based on citation rates — issues an annual report, noting how journals’ metrics changed, and which ones showed worrisome behavior that might be an attempt to game the system, such as citing themselves too frequently. And this year is no different: In this year’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR), Clarivate is stripping 20 journals of their Impact Factors by suppressing them from the rankings. Continue reading High-profile indexing service punishes 20 journals, issues unusual warning about five others

Weekend reads: Bragging about burying bad science; women still underrepresented in Nature; does brilliance justify bad behavior?

The week at Retraction Watch featured a look at a dozen scientific sleuths; the story of how gambling got in the way of a promising scientific career; and details on why a misconduct probe took more than four years. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Bragging about burying bad science; women still underrepresented in Nature; does brilliance justify bad behavior?

Meet the scientific sleuths: More than two dozen who’ve had an impact on the scientific literature

Over the years, we have written about a number of the sleuths who, on their own time and often at great risks to their careers or finances, have looked for issues in the scientific literature. Here’s a sampling: Continue reading Meet the scientific sleuths: More than two dozen who’ve had an impact on the scientific literature