It’s been another busy week at Retraction Watch. Here’s a sampling of scientific publishing and misconduct news from around the web: Continue reading Weekend reads: Stapel as an object lesson, peer review’s flaws, and salami slicing
Category: studies about retractions
Should scientific misconduct be handled by the police? It’s fraud week at Nature and Nature Medicine
It’s really hard to get papers retracted, police might be best-equipped to handle scientific misconduct investigations, and there’s finally software that will identify likely image manipulation.
Those are three highlights from a number of pieces that have appeared in Nature and Nature Medicine in the past few weeks. Not surprisingly, there are common threads, so join us as we follow the bouncing ball. Continue reading Should scientific misconduct be handled by the police? It’s fraud week at Nature and Nature Medicine
“Why Growing Retractions Are (Mostly) a Good Sign”: New study makes the case
Retraction Watch readers will no doubt be familiar with the fact that retraction rates are rising, but one of the unanswered questions has been whether that increase is due to more misconduct, greater awareness, or some combination of the two.
In a new paper in PLOS Medicine, Daniele Fanelli, who has studied misconduct and related issues, tries to sift through the evidence. Noting that the number of corrections has stayed constant since 1980, Fanelli writes that: Continue reading “Why Growing Retractions Are (Mostly) a Good Sign”: New study makes the case
Weekend reads: China’s scientific publishing black market, how to blow the whistle, and more
It’s been a busy week here at Retraction Watch, with breaking news about hotly debated papers from Nature and about GMOs, but there have been interesting stories about retractions and scientific misconduct elsewhere, too. Here’s a sampling:
Continue reading Weekend reads: China’s scientific publishing black market, how to blow the whistle, and more
P values: Scientific journals’ top ten plagiarism euphemisms
The other day, we nominated a phrase in a retraction notice for the prize “of most-extra-syllables-used-to-say-the-word-plagiarism” because a journal decided to call the act “inclusion of significant passages of unattributed material from other authors.”
That lovely phrase can now be added to our list of best euphemisms for plagiarism, which we highlight in our most recent column for LabTimes. There, you’ll find such gems as “unattributed overlap,” “a significant originality issue,” an “approach,” and an “administrative error.”
As we write: Continue reading P values: Scientific journals’ top ten plagiarism euphemisms
Want to report a case of plagiarism? Here’s how
If you’ve come across a case of plagiarism and want to report it to the proper authorities, a new article in the journal Ethics & Behavior would be a good place to start.
Mark Fox, a professor of management and entrepreneurship at Indiana University, and Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, known for Beall’s List of questionable publishers, teamed up for the article. As they write in their abstract: Continue reading Want to report a case of plagiarism? Here’s how
Retractions, medical journalism, and post-publication peer review: Ivan speaks at the Karolinska
This past week, Ivan was in Sweden to speak at the Karolinska Institutet and the Nov2K conference. Here’s video of one of his talks.
Here’s the slideshow:
Doing the right thing: Scientists reward authors who report their own errors, says study
We’ve always like to highlight cases in which scientists do the right thing and retract problematic papers themselves, rather than being forced to by editors and publishers. Apparently, according to a new paper by economists and management scholars, scientists reward that sort of behavior, too.
The study by Benjamin Jones of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and the National Bureau of Economic Research and colleagues, “The Retraction Penalty: Evidence from the Web of Science,” was published yesterday in Scientific Reports, a Nature Publishing Group title.
The authors lay out what they do: Continue reading Doing the right thing: Scientists reward authors who report their own errors, says study
Do authors who retract papers end up cited less often? Depends how eminent you are
A picture of the downstream effects of retractions is starting to emerge.
In a new working paper, economists at the University of Maryland, the University of Rochester, and Northwestern University focused on work by teams of scientists. Their main findings: Continue reading Do authors who retract papers end up cited less often? Depends how eminent you are
Big trouble in little China: Two looks at what warps scientific publishing there
The press corps has turned its attention to scientific publishing in China this week.
Here’s Naomi Ching’s lede — that’s how we spell it in journalism — from Nautilus:
You may have heard that Chinese researchers are not very well compensated, compared to their Western counterparts. What you might not know is that they can increase their income by a factor of 10 with a single publication. The better the journal they publish in, as judged by the average number of times that its papers are cited, the more money they make. According to an anonymous source specializing in science evaluation in China, some research institutions follow a simple formula for determining cash rewards: 10,000 yuan, multiplied by one plus the journal impact factor (the impact factor reflects average citation levels). For example, publication in The Lancet, whose impact factor was 39.06 in 2012, would fetch 400,600 yuan (about $65,000). By comparison, the average yearly income of Chinese scientific researchers was 39,850 yuan in 2007, according to a survey by the China Association for Science and Technology.
Hmm, that sort of incentive wouldn’t create any problems, would it? Read the rest of Ching’s piece for more.
And here’s Gady Epstein’s top, from The Economist: Continue reading Big trouble in little China: Two looks at what warps scientific publishing there