Peer review

From Reason: Epidemiology Makes Astrology Look Respectable Earlier this year, a review article in the Annals of Internal Medicine reported that among other bad outcomes found in a bunch of mostly case-control studies that sitting all day at a desk job increased your risk of dying with a hazard ratio of 1.22 and 95 percent confidence interval of 1.090 to 1.410. Time to get a desk with an attached treadmill. Well, maybe not. Last week, a new study in the International Journal of Epidemiology that took into account the sitting habits of a cohort of British subjects for 16 years reported: Sitting time was not associated with all-cause mortality risk. The results of this study suggest that policy makers and Read More ›

Here, with Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen, a co-founder of the Public Library of Science (PLOS): Yesterday the Gina Kolata published a story in the New York Times about the fact that many clinical studies are not published. This is a serious problem and it’s a good thing that it is being brought to light. But her article contains a weird section in which a researcher at the University of Florida explains why she hadn’t published the results of one of her studies: … “It was a small study and our hypothesis was not proven,” Dr. Cooper-DeHoff said. “That’s like three strikes against me for publication.” Her only option, she reasoned, would be to turn to an open-access journal that charges Read More ›

When you just have to say something, but don’t want to be slow-roasted alive by desperate and unprincipled colleagues: So you want to be a whistleblower? A lawyer explains the process One obvious way to report research misconduct is to follow internal institutional procedures. Most research institutions have a genuine interest in promoting good science and addressing misconduct. In some instances, however, a potential whistleblower may have legitimate reasons to believe that the institution will not address his/her concerns. This may be for a number of reasons, including institutional apathy, the professional standing of the individuals involved, or a desire to avoid bad publicity. In such cases, a whistleblower may need to consider other ways to report the research misconduct. Read More ›

From Nature: How scientists fool themselves – and how they can stop This is the big problem in science that no one is talking about: even an honest person is a master of self-deception. Our brains evolved long ago on the African savannah, where jumping to plausible conclusions about the location of ripe fruit or the presence of a predator was a matter of survival. But a smart strategy for evading lions does not necessarily translate well to a modern laboratory, where tenure may be riding on the analysis of terabytes of multidimensional data. In today’s environment, our talent for jumping to conclusions makes it all too easy to find false patterns in randomness, to ignore alternative explanations for a Read More ›

From Scientific American, we learn that we mustn’t be too hasty: How Do We Fix the Liberal Slant in Social Psychology? Not by adding more conservative voices, but by subtracting out bias Ah, how convenient. One does not need to add voices that might provide a check/balance effect. There is no way of “subtracting out bias”; bias is where people stand when they gather information. The normal way of ensuring fairness is to add more voices to the discussion, something author Piercarlo Valdesolo is clearly not anxious to do. Fine. The smelly little social psych clique will continue to brew more scandals. When people start fancy-dancing like this—when we ask them to just be honest—we know something is up. Let’s Read More ›

Here: Pioneer behind controversial PubPeer site reveals his identity Since launching in 2012, the website PubPeer has become a hub for post-publication peer review — often via anonymous posts. More than 35,000 comments have been posted so far and in the process the site has become a vehicle for making allegations of misconduct, and has even attracted a lawsuit. One of the site’s previously anonymous founders has now revealed his identity — Brandon Stell, a neuroscientist at the French national science organization CNRS in Paris. … Will you ever require commenters to be open about their identities? I can’t see that ever happening, but I don’t want to talk in definitives. In an ideal world, we would all be very Read More ›

First, only one-third of published psychology research is reliable. How do we respond? We sort of knew that but, from the Conversation: What does it mean if the majority of what’s published in journals can’t be reproduced? Publishing together as the Open Science Collaboration and coordinated by social psychologist Brian Nosek from the Center for Open Science, research teams from around the world each ran a replication of a study published in three top psychology journals – Psychological Science; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. To ensure the replication was as exact as possible, research teams obtained study materials from the original authors, and worked closely with these authors whenever they Read More ›

From CBS News: HARTFORD, Conn. – A University of Connecticut researcher known for his work on the benefits of red wine to heart health falsified his data in more than 100 instances, and nearly a dozen scientific journals are being warned of the potential problems after publishing his studies in recent years, officials said Wednesday. UConn officials said their internal review found 145 instances over seven years in which Dr. Dipak Das fabricated and falsified data, and the U.S. Office of Research Integrity has launched an independent investigation of his work. Is nothing sacred? Eleven scientific research journals that have published Das’ work are being notified of the problems, which came to light after a three-year review sparked by an Read More ›

Further to Wikipedia is a reliable source. – yrs, Easter Bunny (“Controversial,” we repeatedly find, means only that some powerful lobby doesn’t like the information presented. It often has nothing to do with whether the information was accurately or adequately sourced), From ScienceDaily: On Wikipedia, politically controversial science topics vulnerable to information sabotage As society turns to Wikipedia for answers, students, educators, and citizens should understand its limitations when researching scientific topics that are politically charged. On entries subject to edit-wars, like acid rain, evolution, and global change, one can obtain — within seconds — diametrically different information on the same topic, say authors of a new report. Thank lazy students and lazier teachers. The authors note that as Wikipedia Read More ›

For fake reviews. Oops. Retraction Watch reports: This is officially becoming a trend: Springer is pulling another 64 articles from 10 journals after finding evidence of faked peer reviews, bringing the total number of retractions from the phenomenon north of 230. Given that there have been about 1,500 papers retracted overall since 2012, when we first reported on the phenomenon, faked reviews have been responsible for about 15% of all retractions in the past three years. This isn’t the first time Springer has faced the issue. As owner of the BioMed Central journals, it issued 43 retractions for faked reviews earlier this year. In a statement, the publisher explains how the latest round of retractions came to light:More. Is this, Read More ›

From Nature: A 1997 US law mandated the registry’s creation, requiring researchers from 2000 to record their trial methods and outcome measures before collecting data. The study found that in a sample of 55 large trials testing heart-disease treatments, 57% of those published before 2000 reported positive effects from the treatments. But that figure plunged to just 8% in studies that were conducted after 2000. Study author Veronica Irvin, a health scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, says this suggests that registering clinical studies is leading to more rigorous research. Writing on his NeuroLogica Blog, neurologist Steven Novella of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, called the study “encouraging” but also “a bit frightening” because it casts doubt on Read More ›

From Chronicle Review: The Case Against Scholarly Consensus In July, the former federal prosecutor David Hoffman released a report<http://www.apa.org/independent-review/APA-FINAL-Report-7.2.15.pdf> on allegations that the American Psychological Association had colluded with the Department of Defense to change the APA’s ethics code, giving psychologists cover to participate in torturous interrogations. Hoffman had been commissioned by the association itself, following allegations by the New York Times reporter James Risen. When Risen made the assertions, in October 2014, the APA put out a press release<http://www.apa.org/news/press/response/risen-book.aspx> denying wrongdoing and, in effect, calling Risen a hack. But the Hoffman report substantiated Risen’s contentions. The APA created ethics tasks forces composed of members who had interests that would incline them to back the military’s interrogation practices. Critics of Read More ›

Here: ‘I don’t know if you want to call it a crisis,’ says Alex Holcombe, associate professor of psychology at the University of Sydney. ‘But, we do know that of the efforts to try to systematically reproduce the findings, whether they be in cancer biology, whether they be in psychology, the success rate has not been impressive.’ In 2011, a paper from Bayer Pharmaceuticals reported that the company could only reproduce the findings of a quarter of studies published about particular drug candidates. Another company, Amgen Corporation, could only reproduce 11 per cent of the cancer and blood studies they looked at. ‘This was a shocking result,’ wrote the authors of the Amgen paper. ‘All the efforts that I’ve seen, Read More ›

But that’s a big improvement, says Retraction Watch: Here: One hundred forty-seven journals (74%) responded to a request for information. Of these, 95 (65%) had a retraction policy. Of journals with a retraction policy, 94% had a policy that allows the editors to retract articles without authors’ consent. Why it isn’t simple: Retracting scientific papers can pose ethical and legal challenges for journal editors and publishers [1, 2]. The easiest cases occur when the authors all agree that the paper should be retracted due to serious error or misconduct. In harder cases, the authors do not all agree that a paper should be retracted. For example, one author may oppose retraction, believing that a serious flaw identified in the paper Read More ›

Anyone remember Stapel?: Some readers will recall the case of the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel, former dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Tilburg University, who was publicly exposed in 2011 for faking his data in several dozen published papers about human behavior that had made him famous – and who, after being caught, decided to publish a book about his con, detailing how and why he’d done it. Uncommon Descent ran a story about the case (see here), and another story about how it was exposed (see here), while James Barham discussed it at further length over on his blog, TheBestSchools.org, in an article entitled, More Scientists Behaving Badly. A story about the case appeared in Read More ›