Peer review

From Real ClearScience: Recently, my colleagues and I published research in Mayo Clinic Proceedings that examined dietary data from almost 50 years of nutrition studies. What we found was astounding; these data were physiologically implausible and incompatible with survival. In other words, the diets from these studies could not support human life if consumed on a daily basis. The reason for this is simple; the memory-based data collection methods (M-BMs) used by nutrition researchers are unscientific because they rely on both the truthfulness of the study participant and the accuracy of his or her memory. Stated more simply, these methods collect nothing more than uncorroborated anecdotal estimates of food and beverage consumption. Importantly, vast amounts of taxpayer dollars are directed Read More ›

So thinks Dr. 24hours: The “Creator” paper, Post-pub Peer Review, and Racism Among Scientists. So by now you probably know that PLOSONE retracted a paper about the mechanics of the hand for including phrases about “the mystery of the creator’s design”. Which sounds like an intelligent design argument sneaking into a scientific publication. Except it wasn’t. It was a poor translation of a Chinese idiom, which the author states would have been better translated as “nature”. The paper explicitly and accurately referenced evolution and the real timescale on which evolution occurs. But that didn’t matter. First the outspoken atheist PZ Myers, without apparently doing any investigation, blogged about it credulously asserting it was creationism in a scientific journal. Then twitter Read More ›

The retraction of a PLoS ONE paper on the hand that made repeated reference to a Creator shows that biologists are “very hostile to those who invoke the supernatural in their science,” writes Professor Jerry Coyne. But it turns out that the paper’s authors weren’t referring to God, but Nature. One of the paper’s authors, Ming-Jin Liu, explains: We are sorry for drawing the debates about creationism. Our study has no relationship with creationism. English is not our native language. Our understanding of the word “Creator” was not actually as a native English speaker expected. Now we realized that we had misunderstood the word “Creator.” What we would like to express is that the biomechanical characteristic of tendi[n]ous connective architecture Read More ›

From Retraction Watch: Author with seven retractions makes Thomson Reuters list of top scientists — plus another twist A cancer researcher who recently retired from MD Anderson Cancer Center — and also recently lost seven papers from one journal following a multi-year investigation — is one of the world’s top scientists, according to a new ranking. … We have a long history with Aggarwal — after he told us in 2012 that MD Anderson was investigating his work, he later threatened to sue us for reporting on the case. But there’s another twist to the story, and that’s the identity of the person stepping into Aggarwal’s endowed chair position (the Ransom Horne, Jr. Professorship for Cancer Research) at MD Anderson. Read More ›

Extending our arts and culture moment, from Retraction Watch: Death camp dog satire retracted when German journal wasn’t in on joke Totalitarianism and Democracy has removed a paper claiming that German Shepherds belonging to guards at the Berlin Wall descended from dogs used at concentration camps, after learning that the paper was a work of satire, The Guardian reports. The paper, and its author, are the creation of the anonymous group “Christiane Schulte and friends.” This isn’t the first hoax we’ve seen in publishing: Don’t forget journalist John Bohannon, who submitted hundreds of fake papers to open access journals, and more recently conjured up a studythat showed chocolate helps you lose weight. (And, of course, a paper in a Romanian Read More ›

From David Morrison at Phylonetworks: Some of you may have noticed the recent publication of the following book: Dan Graur (2016) Molecular and Genome Evolution. Sinauer Associates. Chapter 6 is of interest to the readers of this blog, being entitled “Reticulate evolution and phylogenetic networks”. Unfortunately, as originally published, not all of the figures in that chapter acknowledge the source of the illustration. Of personal interest to me, Figure 6.4 [which can be viewed here] is a direct copy of the first part of my Primer of Phylogenetic Networks. Needless to say, Graur’s figure prominently claims to be the copyright of the publisher rather than myself. Neither the author not the publisher has provided a satisfactory explanation, and have made Read More ›

If you live under the sort of enlightened regime that funds high education. From Prospect: Six years ago I submitted a paper for a panel, “On the Absence of Absences” that was to be part of an academic conference later that year—in August 2010. Then, and now, I had no idea what the phrase “absence of absences” meant. The description provided by the panel organizers, printed below, did not help. The summary, or abstract of the proposed paper—was pure gibberish, as you can see below. I tried, as best I could within the limits of my own vocabulary, to write something that had many big words but which made no sense whatsoever. I not only wanted to see if I Read More ›

From RetractionWatch: Last Friday, WIRED editor Adam Rogers got a direct message on Twitter that no journalist wants to see. Christina Larson, a freelance writer in China, told him she had seen overlap with her own work in a few WIRED stories, and included links to the relevant pieces. “She was gracious, just asking for a link back in the future, said she loved WIRED,” Rogers told Retraction Watch by phone this afternoon. It was early morning in San Francisco, so Rogers thanked her for bringing the issue to his attention, and said he’d look at it more closely when he arrived at his desk some 45 minutes later. It was the start of an episode that would lead to Read More ›

From Phys.org: The study, presented at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., surveyed nearly 500 astronomers, biologists, chemists, physicists and earth scientists to identify the core traits of exemplary scientists. “If you’re not curious, you’re probably not a real scientist,” he said. “The goal that you have is to find out something true about the world, regardless of what your preferred hypothesis might be. Your real drive is to find what is revealed by the data. This is absolutely essential in being a scientist.” Actually, if you’re not curious, you’re not a real thinker of any kind or for that matter a real science news writer. Far too much science news today Read More ›

Salt deniers. Who knew? From Science Daily: In the debate over salt’s health effects, scientists have effectively split into two camps and are talking past each other, according to a new study. … … you might’ve started hearing some skepticism recently about whether salt is really that bad for you. The critics say health recommendations for cutting salt intake in half are lacking solid evidence. “Either it’s useless, which means it’s an expensive strategy, or it could well be harmful, which is worse,” cardiovascular disease expert Salim Yusuf told the European Heart Journal. There’s been a sharp response from salt-averse health organizations like the American Heart Association, which says sodium skeptics rely on flawed data and poorly-designed studies. The AHA Read More ›

Well, at least those who think it isn’t are making their views clearer. From science writer Michael Brooks at New Scientist: Ah, the naivety of the older generation. Nearly 500 eminent astronomers, biologists, chemists, physicists and earth scientists have been surveyed to identify the “core traits of exemplary scientists”. Their answer? Honesty is critical, second only to curiosity, and we ought to do more to instil it in those considering science careers. Why dishonesty anyway? Because it gets the job done. Raymond De Vries at the University of Michigan and colleagues have argued that data manipulation based on intuition of what a result should look like is “normal misbehaviour”. They see such common misbehaviours as having “a useful and irreplaceable Read More ›

From Motherboard: Why Are So Many Scientists Harassing Their Students? In the past few months, there have been four separate cases of high-profile scientists accused of harassment, a first-person account of harassment published in the science journal Nature, and multiple cries for greater awareness and reform. There have also been a handful of alarming studies and surveys published in the last few months and years, outlining the extent of the problem. Late last year, preliminary results from a survey by the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy found 82 percent of respondents (men and women) had heard sexist comments on the job, while 57 percent said they had been personally harassed—9 percent physically so. A survey published in Read More ›

By biotech giant AmGen. From Nature News: A biotechnology firm is releasing data on three failed efforts to confirm findings in high-profile scientific journals — details that the industry usually keeps secret. … The idea emerged from discussions at a meeting focused on improving scientific integrity, hosted by the US National Academy of Sciences in 2015. Sasha Kamb, who leads research discovery at Amgen, said that his company’s scientists have in many instances tried and failed to reproduce academic studies, but that it takes too much time and effort to publish these accounts through conventional peer-review procedures. This problem has been around forever, but recently, its seriousness has begun to attract attention. For example, In 2012, Amgen researchers made headlines Read More ›

From The Scientist: Many patients with genetic variations linked to cardiac disorders do not exhibit any symptoms, raising concerns about the validity of incidental findings of genetic tests. … “Over the last decade, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified hundreds of new genetic variations, largely single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that might serve as biomarkers for many common conditions,” Maine physician William Gregory Feero, an associate editor at JAMA, wrote in an accompanying editorial. “In general, these account for little in the variance of disease, and the predictive value of such SNPs has been largely disappointing.” More. See also: There’s a gene for that… or is there? Follow UD News at Twitter!

Aw, maybe it keeps social scientists off the streets. From Protein Wisdom: Dr Adam Perkins, a lecturer in the neurobiology of personality at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. Like Chagnon, Perkins is a social scientist whose research findings pose a direct challenge to one of the central planks of left-wing ideology. Over the past five years, he has accumulated a mass of evidence about the personalities of welfare claimants and concluded that individuals with aggressive, rule-breaking and anti-social tendencies — what he calls the ‘employment–resistant personality profile’ — are over-represented among benefit recipients. He also found that their children are likely to share those traits, which helps explain why poverty has a tendency to Read More ›