Drummond Rennie (1936-2025), in his own words

Drummond Rennie

I first became aware of the work of Drummond Rennie almost by accident: By borrowing his office. It was the summer of 1997, and as a rising fourth-year medical student, I was spending a month at JAMA as the co-editor-in-chief of its then-medical student section, Pulse. Rennie, who was deputy editor of the journal at the time, was mostly traveling, so the staff installed me in his office, overflowing with books and manuscripts. 

Rennie, who died on September 12, was a towering figure in scientific publishing. Trained as a nephrologist, he joined the staff of the New England Journal of Medicine in 1977, and later, JAMA, where he remained for decades. He was known for promoting improved standards in medical journals, and for organizing the first Peer Review Congress, held in 1989 and nine more times since, most recently earlier this month.

In 2013, we were just a few years into the work of Retraction Watch, and thought talking about what we’d learned so far at the Congress would be a good idea. We submitted an abstract outlining what we wanted to talk about, writing that we’d gather data by the time of the meeting. 

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Remembering Mario Biagioli, who articulated how scholarly metrics lead to fraud

Mario Biagioli

Mario Biagioli, a distinguished professor of law and communication at the University of California, Los Angeles — and a pioneering thinker about how academic reward systems incentivize misconduct — passed away in May after a long illness. He was 69. 

Among other intellectual interests, Biagioli wrote frequently about the (presumably) unintended consequences of using metrics such as citations to measure the quality and impact of published papers, and thereby the prestige of their authors and institutions. 

“It is no longer enough for scientists to publish their work. The work must be seen to have an influential shelf life,” Biagioli wrote in Nature in 2016. “This drive for impact places the academic paper at the centre of a web of metrics — typically, where it is published and how many times it is cited — and a good score on these metrics becomes a goal that scientists and publishers are willing to cheat for.” 

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