The week at Retraction Watch featured an unusual warning from the New England Journal of Medicine, and the withdrawal of a paper over a fear of legal threats. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Philosopher Michael Dougherty doesn’t take plagiarism sitting down. Over the years, the researcher at Ohio Dominican University has tipped us off to numerous instances of plagiarism he’s spotted. And it turns out, he’s done the same thing for publishers, as well. In a new paper in Metaphilosophy, Dougherty describes his experience contacting publishers over an … Continue reading Does the philosophy literature have a plagiarism problem?
Could a scientific paper ever be considered an advertisement? That was the question posed to a Tokyo court, in a criminal case where prosecutors argued — at the behest of Japan’s ministry of health — that a peer-reviewed paper containing faked data should be considered “fraudulent or exaggerated advertising” under that country’s laws. In that case, … Continue reading Could bogus scientific results be considered false advertising?
A journal has temporarily removed a paper showing the dramatic differences in the cost of providing emergency care that caught national attention (and some criticism from emergency care providers), despite the first author’s claims that the results are valid. The paper, published online in February by the Annals of Emergency Medicine, showed that it can cost … Continue reading Despite author’s protest, journal removes paper on emergency department prices
Predatory journals – which charge high fees and often offer little-to-no vetting of research quality – are a problem, and lately an easy target for authors eager to spoof the problems of the publishing system. Although many researchers try to steer clear, not all do – a recent paper showed that some top economists publish … Continue reading When most faculty publish in predatory journals, does the school become “complicit?”
In 2012, news media were abuzz with a new finding from PNAS: Authors based in Israel had found evidence that our brains can unconsciously process more than we thought — including basic math and reading. In other words, the authors claimed people could read and do math without even knowing what they were doing. With … Continue reading Can we do math unconsciously? Replicators of a prominent 2012 study have some doubts
A top federal U.S. court has confirmed a decision by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to deny federal whistleblower protection to an ecologist who was fired after accusing a colleague of fraud. After initially forcing NSF to more clearly explain its decision, the Denver-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit has agreed with the conclusions of … Continue reading Ecologist loses appeal for whistleblower protection
Recently, at the end of a tutorial, a student asked Ann Rogerson a question she’d never heard before: Was it okay to use paraphrasing tools to write up assignments? Rogerson, a senior lecturer in the faculty of business at the University of Wollongong in Australia, was stumped — she’d never heard of these tools before. It turns … Continue reading A troubling new way to evade plagiarism detection software. (And how to tell if it’s been used.)
Some types of misconduct are obvious – most researchers would agree cooking data and plagiarizing someone’s work are clear no-nos. But what about overhyping your findings? Using funding allocated to an unrelated project, if it keeps a promising young student afloat? On these so-called “gray” areas of research behavior, people aren’t so clear what to … Continue reading “Ethical ambiguity:” When scientific misconduct isn’t black and white
A new report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences panel urges the creation of a new, independent group to help tackle research misconduct and other practices that hurt the enterprise. The report also renames those problematic practices — such as “misleading statistical analysis that falls short of falsification,” awarding authorship to researchers who don’t deserve … Continue reading U.S. panel sounds alarm on “detrimental” research practices, calls for new body to help tackle misconduct