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This week, we received a press release that caught our attention: A company is releasing software it claims will write manuscripts using researchers’ data. 

The program, dubbed “Manuscript Writer,” uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate papers, according to the company that created it, sciNote LLC. A spokesperson explained the software generates a first draft the scientist should revise, and won’t write the Discussion, “the most creative and original part of the scientific article.” But can it provide any coherent text?  

According the release from sciNote, Manuscript Writer (an add-on to the company’s Electronic Lab Notebook, or ELN):

Continue reading Newly released AI software writes papers for you — what could go wrong?

We’ve all heard horror stories of lab disputes that can quickly spin out of control. (Such as a graduate student obtaining a restraining order against his supervisor, which we covered earlier this year for Science.) Naturally, prospective students want to do their homework before committing to a particular laboratory or supervisor. A new website, QCist, is trying to make that process easier, by letting students rate labs. It’s still new – only several dozen lab heads have been rated so far, mostly from the U.S. – but founder and Executive Director Qian-Chen Yong has plans for it to grow much bigger. We spoke with Yong, currently a research fellow at the Cancer Research Institute, Baylor Scott & White Health in Texas — who completed a postdoc at Texas A&M Health Science Center and a PhD at the National University of Singapore — about the plan to keep the site from becoming a place to smear a tough boss’s reputation.  

Retraction Watch: What inspired you to create this site?

Continue reading Looking to avoid a bad lab? A new site wants to help

The week at Retraction Watch featured revelations about a case of misconduct at the University of Colorado Denver, and the case of a do-over that led to a retraction. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Continue reading Weekend reads: Death penalty for scientific fraud?; Why criticism is good; Cash for publishing

Last week, Emily Putnam-Hornstein, an associate professor at the University of Southern California, was reading what seemed like a noteworthy new report from the RAND Corporation on the child welfare system. But then she realized that some of the key estimates were off. When she sent the report to some colleagues, they agreed.

Curious, Putnam-Hornstein and some of her colleagues tuned into a RAND webinar on Thursday, May 25, to discuss the report, Improving Child Welfare Outcomes: Balancing Investments in Prevention and Treatment, which had been released two days earlier. They asked the report’s lead author, Jeanne Ringel, about the numbers, and Ringel responded by saying they were on-target. (Ringel recalls acknowledging that the numbers were conservative, but that revised inputs would not change the overall results substantially.) The Pritzker Foundation, which had funded the study, also dismissed the concerns.

Ringel, however, contacted Putnam-Hornstein to suggest a phone call. The Memorial Day holiday weekend was just about underway, so the call was scheduled for Wednesday, the 31st. In the meantime, Putnam-Hornstein and other researchers drafted a letter explaining their concerns. A conference call happened on the 31st, during which the critics shared their concerns, and also said that they’d publish the letter online if the report was not retracted swiftly.

Apparently, the critics were persuasive:

Continue reading RAND withdraws report on child welfare reform for further analysis

The week at Retraction Watch featured a look at a school where everyone has published in possibly predatory journals, and doubts about a study of doing math unconsciously. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Prison for sharing an article?; which country has most fake peer review retractions; counterfeit reagents

The week at Retraction Watch featured a look at how long journals take to respond to retraction requests, and news of a $10 million settlement for research misconduct allegations. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: New calls for retraction; more on fake peer review; how long does peer review take?

A group of publishing experts have proposed a somewhat radical idea: Instead of retracting papers, or issuing corrections that address problems, authors should amend published articles. Here’s how it would work – any post-publication changes would be added as amendments labeled “insubstantial,” “substantial,” or “complete” (equivalent to a retraction). Is this a better way? We spoke with authors of a preprint in BioRxiv — Virginia Barbour, chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE); Theodora Bloom, executive editor of The BMJ; Jennifer Lin, director of product management at Crossref; and Elizabeth Moylan, senior editor of research integrity at BioMed Central.

Retraction Watch: Why do you think it’s a good idea to amend articles, rather than issue formal retractions or corrections?

Continue reading For problematic papers, don’t retract or correct, say publishing experts: Amend

We receive our fair share of tips, and most are well-intentioned attempts to clean up the scientific literature. However, sometimes would-be critics can veer into personal attacks. As chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics, Virginia Barbour has seen a lot. But nothing quite prepared her for being cyberbullied by someone the organisation had agreed to listen to when they raised a complaint about a published paper. In this guest post, Barbour tells the story of how COPE’s attempts to assist led to hundreds of harassing emails and unfounded accusations of a cover-up, which the complainant spread indiscriminately.

By its very nature, publication and research ethics often includes issues that are hard to resolve and it’s not uncommon for journals to receive  concerns from individuals about specific papers. COPE has guidance for its members on what to do when they are contacted by such individuals. We urge and support editors and publishers in taking issues raised seriously. Nonetheless, such individuals (whether anonymous or not) can experience difficulties in getting their cases heard and, in rare and unusual cases, face extreme measures to silence them.

At COPE, we therefore also have a mechanism whereby readers can raise concerns about an issue in a COPE member journal, if the journal and publisher have not been able to resolve the issue. We have devoted increasing resources to this mechanism, even though is not the primary reason for which COPE was set up. As a membership organisation, COPE does not have regulatory authority over journals or publishers, but we can review the process the journal or publisher followed to determine if best practice was followed.

Therefore, when we received an email in 2015 from a reader with a complaint about a published paper, we reviewed the initial correspondence and, as it appeared to be a legitimate issue, opened a file on the case and assigned council members to work on it according to our procedures.

Continue reading They agreed to listen to a complaint about a paper. Then the harassment began.

Jeffrey Beall, the University of Colorado Denver librarian who has since 2008 chronicled “potential, possible, or probable” predatory publishers, has — at least for now — pulled the plug on his influential, and at times controversial, site.

The decision to take down the site — and Beall’s faculty page at the Auraria Library, where he remains a tenured associate professor — was his own, the University of Colorado Denver tells Retraction Watch.

The site, scholarlyoa.com, which just earlier this month included a list of more than 1,000 such publishers, now contains no information. The sudden change was noted Sunday on Twitter, where questions about the move — catalogued, along with some answers, by Emil Karlsson — swirled for two days. Beall’s faculty page was also taken down. Continue reading Why did Beall’s List of potential predatory publishers go dark?