This week at Retraction Watch featured two Office of Research Integrity findings, and retractions in the Voinnet and Hanna cases. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Onward State, an alternative student news website for Penn State University, has pulled an article about a student psychic for promoting “one of the most fraudulent, predatory practices around.” The psychic has been given her own reality TV show on ABC Family (an oxymoron if ever there was one). The newspaper had reported the news … Continue reading Unhappy medium: Penn State website retracts article touting student psychic
How should scientists think about papers that have undergone what appears to be a cursory peer review? Perhaps the papers were reviewed in a day — or less — or simply green-lighted by an editor, without an outside look. That’s a question Dorothy Bishop, an Oxford University autism researcher, asked herself when she noticed some … Continue reading Poll: What to do when peer review feels inadequate?
We are pleased to present the first in a series of articles by John R. Thomas, Jr., a lawyer at Gentry Locke [Editor’s note, 3/26/19: He has since moved to Haley, Hafemann, Magee and Thomas] who represents whistleblowers in a variety of False Claims Act cases. He writes about how whistleblowers can do the right … Continue reading So you want to be a whistleblower? A lawyer explains the process
Springer has put a cell biology journal on hold, “effective immediately,” after finding a “pattern of inappropriate and compromised peer review.” Here’s the brief statement from the publisher:
This week at Retraction Watch featured a hotly debated guest post from Leonid Schneider and two ORI findings. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
2014 was quite a year for Retraction Watch. We reported on hundreds of retractions — here are our top 10 — but we also took some big steps in our development. Some highlights:
Fake peer reviews: They’re all the rage. Sixteen papers are being retracted across three Elsevier journals after the publisher discovered that one of the authors, Khalid Zaman, orchestrated fake peer reviews by submitting false contact information for his suggested reviewers. This particular kind of scam has been haunting online peer review for a few years now, as loyal Retraction … Continue reading Elsevier retracting 16 papers for faked peer review
And now, one from the archives. In 1989, then MIT grad student Lance Fortnow (he’s now chair of the computer science department at Georgia Tech) wrote a mathematical proof and published it as conference proceedings. He later went to publish the proof in a journal. But he then discovered “unexpected technical challenges” and published a retraction … Continue reading “You don’t retract a paper, you retract the results within:” Why one scientist still displays one of his mistakes
News elsewhere about scientific integrity, publishing, and related issues abounded this week: