In case you didn’t get the memo, the presidents of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) want you to stop talking about sex already.
Or at least they want anthropologists to stop.
Continue reading How a canceled panel on sex plays into censorship by the right: A guest post
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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
We also added The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List.
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to well over 350. There are more than 43,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains over 200 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
Continue reading Weekend reads: ‘The band of debunkers’; a superconductor retraction request; ‘the banality of bad-faith science’
The editor in chief, managing editors, and entire editorial board of a mathematics journal all resigned earlier this year following a dispute with their publisher over special issues and article volume.
Changes the publisher wanted to make to the journal “would have the effect of jeopardizing scientific integrity for the sake of financial gain,” the editors wrote in their announcement of their resignations, which took place on January 11.
The mass resignation at the Journal of Geometric Mechanics, previously published by the American Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), is one of at least five such collective actions journal editors took in 2023, according to a list Retraction Watch has compiled.
The former editors have started a new journal named Geometric Mechanics with World Scientific.
Continue reading After resigning en masse, math journal editors launch new publication
Two anthropology organizations co-hosting a conference this fall have removed from the program a panel presentation entitled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology.”
The panel had been slated for the joint annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), to be held in Toronto in November.
In a letter informing the panelists of the decision, Ramona Pérez and Monica Heller, presidents of the AAA and CASCA, respectively, wrote that the executive boards of the two groups had reviewed the submission “at the request of numerous members” and decided to remove it from the conference program. They wrote:
Continue reading Anthropology groups cancel conference panel on why biological sex is “necessary” for research
A new editor’s note in Nature highlights concerns about a paper by Google researchers who claimed computer chips designed in just a few hours using artificial intelligence beat chip plans that human experts took months to develop.
In the note, published September 20, the journal stated:
Continue reading Nature flags doubts over Google AI study, pulls commentaryReaders are alerted that the performance claims in this article have been called into question. The Editors are investigating these concerns, and, if appropriate, editorial action will be taken once this investigation is complete.
The first book of a Yale professor of Chinese history contains a “multitude of problems,” according to a no-holds-barred review published last month.
Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State appeared last August from Harvard University Press. Its author, Maura Dykstra, is now an assistant professor of history at Yale.
In an extensive review that appeared in the Journal of Chinese History on August 31, George Qiao, an assistant professor of history and Asian languages and civilizations at Amherst College in Massachusetts, wrote that Dykstra’s book “fails to meet basic academic standards” and is “filled with misinformation.”
The book’s problems, according to Qiao, include typos, as well as:
Continue reading Yale professor’s book ‘systematically misrepresents’ sources, review claimsWould you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to well over 350. There are now nearly 43,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains 200 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
Continue reading Weekend reads: Who should pay for sleuthing?; the Gino retraction requests; university ‘halts projects over fraud investigation’
Surveys show spreadsheets are the most widely used analytical tool in academic research. But they are prone to errors. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Public Health England lost 16,000 test results after using an old Excel file format to handle data. Whether this mix-up hampered local infection control is anybody’s guess, but it certainly could have.
The software is causing trouble for other lines of research, too, as our team and others have shown: Genomics studies that rely on Excel spreadsheets to manage data turn out to be riddled with erroneous gene names, or gene-name errors, and the issue is affecting more and more journals.
Continue reading Guest post: Genomics has a spreadsheet problemIt was that rarest of things: a sliver of good news about climate change.
According to calculations published last year in Nature, our planet was keeping pace, and then some, with rising emissions from tropical forest clearance by gobbling up more and more atmospheric carbon.
“What we can mainly prove is that the worst nightmare scenarios of an impaired carbon sink have not yet materialised and that the news is not quite as bad,” Guido van der Werf, a professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said in a press release at the time.
His coauthor Dave van Wees added:
Continue reading Nature pulls study that found climate fears were overblown
A prominent physician-scientist in South Korea may soon be facing his fourth retraction. Last month, Hui-Nam Pak of Yonsei University was found guilty of duplicate publication, a form of academic misconduct, according to a report from the school’s committee on research integrity Retraction Watch has obtained.
Pak, a cardiologist, has had dozens of papers flagged on PubPeer. As we reported in February, journals pulled two of his papers the previous month after a whistleblower pointed out problems with the articles. One was retracted for “a number of issues related to scientific misconduct,” while the other was a duplicate publication. A third paper by Pak was retracted years earlier after mistakenly being published twice by the same journal.
Our February story triggered a flood of comments, many of them malicious. Some likened whistleblowing to “academic vandalism.” Others asserted that “whistleblowers deserve strong legal penalties” and that “immoral whistleblowers” seemed bent on ruining Pak’s “outstanding career.” Many comments were rejected for not adhering to our commenting policies, in particular making unsubstantiated claims.
The September 12 report from Yonsei University (in Korean) explains that an “informant” reported two of Pak’s papers to the school’s Research Ethics Integrity Committee on March 7.
Continue reading Exclusive: Probe suggests new retraction awaiting embattled Korean heart doctor