Nearly three years ago, our co-founders Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus penned a column in Lab Times suggesting ways for readers to report alleged scientific misconduct. They are now retracting that advice.
Let’s say I’m collecting relevant papers to write a review, or preparing a project, and I have rather limited time. I find a few interesting papers, bump into some paywalls, ask the authors for the .pdf without any response, and finally I decide to pay, say, $20 USD each for 8 papers. However, upon reading these papers I notice that two or three of them present serious irregularities — say, they’re 90% similar to some other published papers. Well, I’ve just spent $160 USD on these papers, trusting the publisher in the mumbo jumbo that all papers “meet high quality international standards,” are “peer-reviewed by experts,” “handled by selected editors,” etc., and yet they are clearly deeply flawed. Moreover, I investigate further online and I find that these and other issues in the papers had been already pointed out by readers online, e.g., in PubPeer or Retraction Watch comments, more than a year before.
I am a postdoc and looking to supplement my income with medical writing (our lab recently didn’t get it’s funding renewed, so now on part-time to minimise costs). The most recent jobs I have been offered are two brief reports and one full article. A quick internet search of the person who contacted me shows they are in science and are genuinely wanting papers written (a number are already in print from a variety of peer reviewed journals). But my question is this. Is it ethical to ghost-write a paper? Continue reading Is it ethical to ghost-write a paper?
Do you know of any instances of meta-plagiarism, i.e. a paper plagiarizing a second paper, which plagiarized a third paper? Or even longer chains of this? I know one instance of meta-plagiarism, but there should be a few others out there, I guess.
Recently I heard a graduate student was told by their advisor, ‘Don’t do a t-test, it’s not publishable.’ This seems ridiculous to me as the t-test is a robust test to aid in answering a hypothesis. So my question is: is a t-test no longer publishable? And if so, is this true for higher tiered journals, or all peer-reviewed journals?
I would very much appreciate hearing the opinions of your readers on this issue – do they feel they need to run more ‘elaborate’ statistics (e.g., multivariate, modeling, etc.) in order for their research to be publishable? And if so, do researchers knowingly violate the assumptions of these more elaborate statistical tests so they can be ‘publishable’?
In journal club, we have been discussing a review paper on recent previous publications by the review’s authors. Basically this was a short review summarizing the findings of a few other papers by the same authors on a given topic. The images presented and textual narrative essentially repeated published contents with slight modifications, wrapping up with expected future developments on the topic.
My question: Is a review paper “allowed” to reintroduce previously published contents, and if so, to what extent? And should it be slightly modified (e.g. to avoid copyright problems) or be presented in the same exact manner?
I reviewed an article for two different journals that presented data from a large non-public data set. A previous publication from the same group had presented findings on the same topic from the dataset, but the new paper didn’t mention these previous analyses. The new paper had more detailed analyses. As a reviewer, both times I said that they really needed to mention that there were previous analyses of the same topic from the same dataset and say what their new analysis was contributing (not much!). Both times they basically refused and it got rejected. Then it got published in another journal (I didn’t review it this time) still without citing the previous analyses from the same data set.
Photo by Bilal Kamoon via flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/bilal-kamoon/
Another installment of Ask Retraction Watch:
A lab member is asked to write up a paper with some data and after a couple of drafts and some more experiments he/she realizes the data is flawed. The lab head decides to pursue the paper anyway and writes it up with another lab member. Can they use the first drafts made by the first lab member (use the introduction, the methods, and parts of the discussion)? Or can that be considered plagiarism? And if it is plagiarism, what can the first lab member do?
Photo by Bilal Kamoon via flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/bilal-kamoon/
Another installment of Ask Retraction Watch:
As experts in authorship matters, I was wondering if you could offer some guidance. I read that all authors have to approve submission of a paper. Unfortunately, a colleague of mine recently passed away. The manuscripts which he helped draft are being submitted with our colleague as author with a note of explanation to the editor and a footnote in the paper. These seem fairly simple. However, what about projects in which they were very much involved but where the manuscript drafting is done entirely after the time of death? Should their contribution be recognized in the acknowledgements rather than “author”? Many thanks.
I was curious, what happens to papers after retraction?
In some cases the papers are retracted by authors claiming that they found some error in the data. As I know, that retraction means that paper is retracted from the whole literature. If the original authors want to publish part of the paper or the whole paper itself after removing or correcting the erroneous part, is that OK? Or are they guilty of duplication?
If the authors want to republish the corrected data, should they inform the editors about earlier retraction or not? I believe if they inform the editors, they will spoil any chance of the paper being accepted.
Nearly three years ago, our co-founders Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus penned a column in Lab Times suggesting ways for readers to report alleged scientific misconduct. They are now retracting that advice.
