Category: RW announcements

Regular Retraction Watch readers may have noticed that legal issues seem to be popping up more often in the cases we cover. There has been a lawsuit filed against PubPeer commenters, for example, and Nature last month blamed lawyers for delayed and opaque retraction notices.

It was those cases and others that prompted us to write our most recent column for Lab Times with a title mirrored in the headline of this post. As we note in our column, there are a lot of great lawyers out there, some of whom — for example, those at WordPress — have helped us

fight the good fight. We also believe strongly in the ability of prosecutors to punish – and, ideally, deter – scientific misconduct, particularly in cases involving fraud using taxpayer dollars.

Still, as we write: Continue reading Are lawyers ruining science?

There’s a new journal in town.

Inference’s first issue includes a lengthy review of a laboratory by a tennis instructor, a set of caricatures, and an exchange of emails from 1996 that is “perhaps, less remarkable for what it says than for the fact that it took place at all.”

In short, its editors — who “would prefer to remain anonymous” — seem to share a sense of humor with the editors of the Journal of Universal Rejection or the Proceedings of the Natural Institute of Science: Continue reading “Editors are pleased to receive death threats on the third Thursday of the month:” A new journal launches

The title of this post is the headline of our most recent column in LabTimes, which begins:

As we write this in mid-August, Nature has already retracted seven papers in 2014. That’s not yet a record – for that, you’d have to go back to 2003’s ten retractions, in the midst of the Jan Hendrik Schön fiasco – but if you add up all of the citations to those seven papers, the figure is in excess of 500.

That’s an average of more than 70 citations per paper. What effect would removing those citations from calculations of Nature’s impact factor – currently 42 – have?

Science would lose 197 citations based on this year’s two retractions. And Cell would lose 315 citations to two now-retracted papers.

In other words, what if journals were penalised for retractions, putting their money where their mouth is when they talk about how good their peer review is? Clearly, if a paper is retracted, no matter what excuses journals make, peer review didn’t work as well as it could have.

We explore what this might mean for top journals. But there are some nuances here. We wouldn’t want to further discourage retractions of papers that deserved it. One solution: Continue reading Is it time for a retraction penalty?

Last week, we announced a new partnership with PRE (Peer Review Evaluation) “to improve access to information about retraction policies.” The first step, we and PRE said, was that Retraction Watch would create guidelines for retraction notices, to which PRE’s flagship product, PRE-val, would link.

Well, it turns out that great minds think alike, or along similar lines, anyway. Today we learned that next week, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) will be discussing a standard retraction form proposed by friend of Retraction Watch Hervé Maisonneuve, who has published several papers on retractions.  According to a writeup: Continue reading What should an ideal retraction notice look like? We (and COPE) want your input

We’re very pleased to announce that we’ve partnered with PRE (Peer Review Evaluation) to improve access to information about retraction policies.

In the coming months, we’ll be publishing guidelines for what we think should be included in retraction notices, and on how those notices should be publicized. As a release describing the new partnership notes: Continue reading A new partner for Retraction Watch: PRE (Peer Review Evaluation)

The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is taking a look at innovation and scientific research, and issues of reproducibility have made it onto its radar.

Here’s the description of the project from the Federal Register: Continue reading White House takes notice of reproducibility in science, and wants your opinion

The suicide earlier this week of Yoshiki Sasai, one of the scientists who worked on the now-discredited STAP stem cell work, was a startling and sobering reminder to the research community and the public that misconduct can take a heavy human toll – even on people like Sasai, whom by all accounts only had the misfortune of working with a dishonest colleague.

The tension surrounding this case and others was well-captured by University of California, Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen, who himself lost his father, also a scientist, to suicide in 1987 in a case that he said had haunting parallels to Sasai’s:

Obviously, fraud is a terrible thing. Nothing provides as deep an existential threat to the scientific enterprise than making up data. But as bad as it is, there is something deeply ugly about the way the scientific community responds to misconduct. We need to deal swiftly with fraud when it is identified. But time after time I have watched the way not only the accused, but everyone around them, is treated with such sanctimonious disdain it is frankly not surprising that some of them respond in tragic ways.

Some of the commenters on Eisen’s post, as well as here on Retraction Watch, have had questions like this: Continue reading On vigorous scientific debates, witch hunts, and the tragedy of suicide

 

A lovely birthday gift from reader Leonid Schneider, who also contributes cartoons to Lab Times, where we have a column.

Bonus: The world’s first art critic.

 

Yesterday was our fourth birthday. We published our first post, “Why write a blog about retractions?” on August 3, 2010, and the anniversary seems as good a time as any to review where we’ve been.

Here were some highlights of the past twelve months: Continue reading Happy fourth anniversary, Retraction Watch