Jeff Offutt, a professor of software engineering at George Mason University, has some stories to tell. He says that when one of his students wrote his first paper, the student reused four paragraphs from another source, not knowing he couldn’t do that. And then he tells of attending a PhD thesis defense where the student … Continue reading Meet the scientist whose ideas were stolen at least three times
Three years after receiving a complaint about extensive plagiarism and major errors in an anti-global warming paper, Elsevier says it’s still reviewing the allegations. In 2014, readers complained to the Elsevier journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews about plagiarism and technical flaws in a 2013 paper questioning mainstream climate change science. When we first began … Continue reading Accusations of ”false claims” in anti-global warming paper unresolved after three years
In March 2017, Christopher Blanford received an email from an editor at the Journal of Crystal Growth. Blanford had been named as a suggested reviewer for a manuscript, and the editor, Arnab Bhattacharya, wanted to verify that the Gmail account the authors provided was legitimate. It was not. Blanford—a senior lecturer in biomaterials at the … Continue reading After Elsevier knew an author faked reviews, it kept accepting his papers for more than a year
The week at Retraction Watch featured commentary on yet another paper claiming a link between autism and vaccines, a welcome useful retraction notice, and a rewrite of a paper that influenced car seat guidelines. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Last year, a professor brought a suit against his former university after it forced him to retire. Now, he’s adding defamation to his list of allegations. In a lawsuit filed July 14, 2016, Ishwarlal “Kenny” Jialal, a cardiovascular researcher who worked at the University of California, Davis Medical Center from 2002 to 2016, alleges the … Continue reading Professor sues UC Davis over forced retirement following misconduct inquiry
The U.S. National Institutes of Health has noticed something: More of the research it’s funding is ending up in questionable journals. Recently, the agency issued a statement highlighting some qualities of these journals — aggressively soliciting submissions, failing to provide clear information about pricing — and urging researchers to avoid them. The NIH’s goal: to … Continue reading NIH to researchers: Don’t publish in bad journals, please
After more than 30 years working with scholarly journals, Irene Hames has some thoughts on how to improve peer review. She even wrote a book about it. As the first recipient of the Publons Sentinel Award, Hames spoke to us about the most pressing issues she believes are facing the peer review system — and … Continue reading Make reviews public, says peer review expert
A $10 million defamation suit filed by a Stanford University professor against a critic and a journal may be an assault on free speech, according to one lawyer, but at least it’s “well written.” Kenneth White, a lawyer at Southern California firm Brown White & Osborn who frequently blogs about legal issues related to free … Continue reading Lawyers call libel suit against journal and critic “lawless” but “well written”
When a publisher rolls out image screening on its journals over an eight-year-period, some surprising things happen. For one, researchers whose papers were flagged are less likely to make the same mistake again. That’s according to new findings presented by the American Physiological Society (APS), which began increasingly checking images in accepted papers for splicing and other … Continue reading To catch a fraudster: Publisher’s image screening cuts down errata, “repeat offenders”
Although most researchers realize too many are using misidentified cell lines in their work, they may be shocked to see the scope of the problem: Approximately 32,755 articles report on research that relied on misidentified cells, according to a new report in PLoS ONE. And even though more people may be aware of the problem, it … Continue reading Estimate: Nearly 33,000 papers include misidentified cell lines. Experts talk ways to combat growing problem