The week at Retraction Watch featured a discussion of why science has bigger problems than retractions, and a look at what happened when a journal decided to get tough on plagiarism. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Scientific fraud isn’t what keeps Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics at Columbia University in New York, up at night. Rather, it’s the sheer number of unreliable studies — uncorrected, unretracted — that have littered the literature. He tells us more, below. Whatever the vast majority of retractions are, they’re a tiny fraction of the number … Continue reading Retractions aren’t enough: Why science has bigger problems
The Open Science Framework (OSF) has pulled a dataset from 70,000 users of the online dating site OkCupid over copyright concerns, according to the study author. The release of the dataset generated concerns, by making personal information — including personality traits — publicly available. Emil Kirkegaard, a master’s student at Aarhus University in Denmark, told us that … Continue reading Publicly available data on thousands of OKCupid users pulled over copyright claim
Advocates of low-carbohydrate diet are voicing concern about a recent paper that suggested the diet could cause weight gain, contrary to previous research. One expert has even called for its retraction. The study, published in Nutrition & Diabetes in February, also found that the low-carb diet did little to prevent the progression of type 2 diabetes. … Continue reading Researchers decry study warning of low-carb diet risks
The week at Retraction Watch featured an economist being asked to review his own paper, and a new member of our leaderboard. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
A pair of stem cell researchers have earned two corrections, the result of images that were mislabeled, distorted, or compiled incorrectly, according to the notices. Kang Cheng prepared the gels when he was a research fellow in last author Sanjeev Gupta‘s lab at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Gupta told us he reviewed the original gels, and the errors didn’t affect the … Continue reading Stem cell researchers fix two papers following PubPeer comments
When a computer scientist approached a journal about editing a special issue, little did the journal know he — or she — was using a stolen identity. Before the jig was up, someone posing as a researcher named Xavier Delorme had edited three articles on optimization problems for The Scientific World Journal. The scammer used a fake email address, … Continue reading Imposter edits journal in latest peer review scam
When a paper is retracted, how many other papers in the same field — which either cite the finding or cite other papers that do — are affected? That’s the question examined by a study published in BioMed Central’s new journal, Research Integrity and Peer Review. Using the case of a paper retracted from Nature in 2014, the authors … Continue reading How much does a retracted result pollute the field?
This week at Retraction Watch featured a confession about research misconduct, and a debate over whether a paper should have been retracted. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
The week at Retraction Watch featured news that one in 25 papers in a massive screen includes inappropriate image manipulation, and of the eighth and ninth retractions for a neuroscience team. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: