Join our team: Retraction Watch is hiring a second staff writer

anniversary
Retraction Watch co-founders Adam Marcus (left) and Ivan Oransky (right)

Thanks to a generous grant, we’re in the enviable position of being able to add a second staff writer. Which means we’re looking for applicants.

The job is not for the faint of heart. It’s definitely fast-paced; our staff writer will be expected to write an average of two posts per day, and feel comfortable dropping the day’s plan to jump on a breaking story. Our writers also contribute to bigger projects such as the feature we wrote for Nature on fake peer reviews.

We’re looking for Continue reading Join our team: Retraction Watch is hiring a second staff writer

Meet the new Retraction Watch researcher, Alison Abritis

Alison Abritis
Alison Abritis

Retraction Watch readers, please join us in welcoming the newest member of our staff, Alison Abritis.

To say that Abritis is a good fit for Retraction Watch would be a colossal understatement. Abritis started her PhD in public health at the University of South Florida several years ago, intending to focus on toxicology. But her advisor noticed that every time they met, she would describe problematic papers she was reading. So he suggested that she focus on scientific publishing in her research.

The result was a fascinating dissertation, Continue reading Meet the new Retraction Watch researcher, Alison Abritis

New $300,000 grant marks the fifth anniversary of Retraction Watch

logoFive years ago today, we wrote our first post, “Why write a blog about retractions?” And although every year since has been terrific, this year we have the most to celebrate so far. Here are some highlights:  Continue reading New $300,000 grant marks the fifth anniversary of Retraction Watch

Meet the new Retraction Watch staff writer, Shannon Palus

Shannon Palus
Shannon Palus

Retraction Watch readers, please join us in welcoming Shannon Palus to our team.

Palus, who has written for Discover, Slate, The Atlantic, and a host of other publications, joined us last week. She has a B.Sc. in physics, with a minor in anthropology, from McGill, where she worked at The McGill Daily. Since graduating, she’s worked as an intern at Idaho National Lab and as a fact-checker for publications including Popular Science.

It was Palus’s eye as a fact-checker, along with her passion for truth-seeking and digging, that convinced us she was perfect for Retraction Watch. She writes: Continue reading Meet the new Retraction Watch staff writer, Shannon Palus

Who has the most retractions? Introducing the Retraction Watch leaderboard

Ever since we broke the news about the issues with the now-retracted Science paper about changing people’s minds on gay marriage, we’ve been the subject of a lot of press coverage, which has in turn led a number of people to ask us: Who has the most retractions?

Well, we’ve tried to answer that in our new Retraction Watch leaderboard.

Here is the current list (click here for more detailed information about our methodology and additional notes): Continue reading Who has the most retractions? Introducing the Retraction Watch leaderboard

New York Times pushes for more focus, funding on research misconduct

nytThe New York Times has an editorial today with which we wholeheartedly agree: The newspaper is calling on scientists — and even the government — to pay more attention to misconduct in research. (It also doesn’t hurt that the paper mentions us.)

The proximate cause of the editorial, titled “Scientists Who Cheat,” is the retraction by Science of the gay marriage study by Michael LaCour, which we — and the Times, among others — have covered extensively.

As the editorial rightly notes, the pressures to publish are pushing some researchers to make up data. (Monday’s paper also carries a page 1 article about the dangers of splashy science that’s worth reading.) Continue reading New York Times pushes for more focus, funding on research misconduct

What should an ideal retraction notice look like?

logoHave you seen our “unhelpful retraction notices” category, a motley collection of vague, misleading, and even information-free entries? We’d like to make it obsolete, and we need our readers’ help.

Here’s what we mean: Next month, Ivan will be traveling to Rio to take part in the World Conference on Research Integrity. One of his presentations is a set of proposed guidelines for retraction notices and their dissemination that we hope will inform publishing practices and severely limit the number of entries in our “unhelpful retraction notices” category. In September, for example, we announced that our guidelines would be linked from PRE-val, which “verifies for the end user that content has gone through the peer review process and provides information that is vital to assessing the quality of that process.”

Here’s a draft of our proposed guidelines, which include many of the items recommended by the Committee on Publication Ethics and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors: Continue reading What should an ideal retraction notice look like?

Don’t like annoying ads on Retraction Watch? Here’s how to keep them turned off

logoDear Retraction Watch readers: In recent months, since we switched to Google AdSense, we’ve heard from a number of you that you find some of the ads on our site annoying. Here’s a secret: Continue reading Don’t like annoying ads on Retraction Watch? Here’s how to keep them turned off

Retraction Watch is hiring!

anniversarySince becoming our intern in June of last year, and then our first-ever staff writer in October, Cat Ferguson has written more than 200 posts, breaking news left and right. But as we noted on Twitter the other day with not a small degree of sadness, Cat has left Retraction Watch for a great gig at BuzzFeed.

That means we’re hiring.

The job is definitely fast-paced. Continue reading Retraction Watch is hiring!

How should journals handle multiple allegations from the same person?

copeIt’s not uncommon for us to hear from overworked journal editors that they are faced with a deluge of allegations about a particular author’s papers. And while we think it’s the responsibility of said editors to make sure their publications are as transparent as possible, we’re also sympathetic to the demands that investigations can take.

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) offers suggestions for dealing with these issues in a new discussion document. As COPE explains: Continue reading How should journals handle multiple allegations from the same person?