This week at Retraction Watch featured a big new study of retractions, another that looked at scientist productivity over time, and a new statement on how to use p values properly. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
There’s a new paper about retractions, and it’s chock-full of the kind of data that we love to geek out on. Enjoy. The new paper, “A Multi-dimensional Investigation of the Effects of Publication Retraction on Scholarly Impact,” appears on the preprint server arXiv — meaning it has yet to be peer-reviewed — and is co-authored … Continue reading Ready to geek out on retraction data? Read this new preprint
Pernille Rørth is not your typical novelist. She was a scientist for 25 years and was also editor-in-chief of the EMBO Journal for five years. But now, she’s written a novel – Raw Data – about an incident of misconduct that forces a top lab in Boston to retract a prominent Nature paper. The novel … Continue reading When misconduct strikes: A fictional tale
Ben Goldacre has been a busy man. In the last six weeks, the author and medical doctor’s Compare Project has evaluated 67 clinical trials published in the top five medical journals, looking for any “switched outcomes,” meaning the authors didn’t report something they said they would, or included additional outcomes in the published paper, with … Continue reading Top journals give mixed response to learning published trials didn’t proceed as planned
Mike Rossner has made a name for himself in academic publishing as somewhat of a “manipulation detective.” As the editor of The Journal of Cell Biology, in 2002 he initiated a policy of screening all images in accepted manuscripts, causing the journal to reject roughly 1% of papers that had already passed peer review. Other … Continue reading Don’t trust an image in a scientific paper? Manipulation detective’s company wants to help.
The week at Retraction Watch featured two high-profile resignations linked to the Paolo Macchiarini case, as well as a Q&A with a long-frustrated — and now vindicated — whistleblower. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
An investigation at the University of New South Wales in Australia has led to a fifth retraction for a cancer researcher long accused of misconduct, due to “unresolvable concerns” with some images. As we reported in December, UNSW cleared Levon Khachigian of misconduct, concluding that his previous issues stemmed from “genuine error or honest oversight.” Now, Circulation Research is retracting one … Continue reading Investigation prompts 5th retraction for cancer researcher for “unresolvable concerns”
Remember when we recently found PLOS ONE had published two papers with “substantial overlap” from two different groups, that were edited around the same time? Well, we have discovered another similarly perplexing case of plagiarism in two studies published only months apart. But in this instance, we have a possible explanation for how two groups of … Continue reading Another case of plagiarism in papers published only months apart
Prominent plant biologist Olivier Voinnet has issued three more corrections in this week’s issue of Science. Collectively, the papers have earned more than 1400 citations, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. By our count, he’s now at 21 corrections and seven retractions, following months of questions about his work. He’s been the subject of an investigation that found he “breached his … Continue reading Science publishes Voinnet’s 19th, 20th, and 21st corrections
An analysis of more than 50,000 papers submitted to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that those published using its “contributed track” — in which academy members can fast-track their own papers by coordinating the peer-review process themselves — have been cited less often than regular submissions, but that gap is shrinking. … Continue reading Fast-tracked PNAS papers are cited less often — but gap is shrinking