Perfect. From Quirin Schiermeier at Nature: Monument to peer review unveiled in Moscow: Cornerstone of modern science immortalized in concrete. Last year, the director of the HSE’s Institute of Education, Isak Froumin, had asked his faculty for ideas about how to turn a useless block of concrete outside the university into something attractive and meaningful. More. Unfortunately, the way things are going, peer review is more likely to be the tombstone of science than the cornerstone and one can only hope that the debate about the problem is as vigorous in Moscow as here. Keep up to date with Retraction Watch See also: Breaking: National Academy of Sciences notices research integrity problem Hat tip:Pos-Darwinista

H’mm, pretty devastating — if true. But, is it true? I doubt it. Let us start with this response to a certain objector who keeps providing lists of typical objector talking points (and who evidently wishes to be able to do so on UD’s nickel, without effective response). Not on our watch, gentilhombre: >>13 kairosfocus May 30, 2017 at 1:17 am F/N: DI’s opening remarks on the annotated list of ID professional literature updated to March 2017: BIBLIOGRAPHIC AND ANNOTATED LIST OF PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS SUPPORTING INTELLIGENT DESIGN UPDATED MARCH, 2017 PART I: INTRODUCTION While intelligent design (ID) research is a new scientific field, recent years have been a period of encouraging growth, producing a strong record of peer-reviewed scientific publications. In 2011, Read More ›

From Matt Ridley/Donna Laframboise at Science New/The Times: The latest university prank is embarrassing to academia and hilarious for the rest of us. Yes. The conceptual penis. And before that: This happened last year, too, when Professor Mark Carey published an even more absurd paper arguing that “a critical but overlooked aspect of the human dimensions of glaciers and global change research is the relationship between gender and glaciers” and introducing “feminist glaciology”. In that case, however, the professor continues to insist, against all evidence, that he was serious. Science magazine gave him a lengthy, softball interview to justify his work after it was laughed at on the internet. I still think he’s a joker in deep cover.More. Yeah. We Read More ›

From Religious Beliefs, Evolutionary Psychiatry, and Mental Health in America, Volume 1 of the series Religion, Spirituality and Health: A Social Scientific Approach pp 49-54 at Springer: Reactions to Darwin’s Origin of Species by Kevin J. Flannelly, Abstract: The chapter describes the initial reaction of the British general public to the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, the immediate and later reactions of the scientific community, and the 20th Century response of Conservative Christians in the U.S. The British public had a generally favorable reaction to Origin of Species when it was first published, and it has been said that the British public widely accepted that the theory of evolution was true within a decade of the book’s publication. Read More ›

From Jacob Grier at Slate: We Used Terrible Science to Justify Smoking Bans For three anti-smoking advocates—local physicians Richard Sargent and Robert Shepard, and activist and researcher Stanton Glantz from the University of California at San Francisco—this sudden drop in heart attacks was proof that smoking bans usher in extraordinary benefits for public health. “This striking finding suggests that protecting people from the toxins in secondhand smoke not only makes life more pleasant; it immediately starts saving lives,” said Glantz in a press release sent out by UCSF. Newspapers ran with the story, credulously assuming that the correlation had been truly caused by the smoking ban. “The bottom line of Helena’s plummeting, then soaring, heart attack rate is painfully obvious,” Read More ›

Yes, 20 years old: The hoax journal paper genre was started, as Dreier explains, by New York University physicist Alan Sokal in 1996. Sokal aimed to skewer the postmodern dogma that facts, even in mathematics and physics, are merely a social construct. He submitted an article to Social Text, a postmodern cultural studies journal, that, “shorn of its intentionally outrageous jargon, essentially made the claim that gravity was in the mind of the beholder.” From Jennifer Ruark at Chronicle of Higher Education: How the physicist Alan Sokal hoodwinked a group of humanists and why, 20 years later, it still matters. (paywall) But do Sokal hoaxes still matter? Are we not now in the age of post-fact science? (“I’m a factual Read More ›

No sorry, Tricia, the peer review system is dead. Skinny: Tricia Serio’s  op-ed demonstrated the fact unwittingly at The Scientist: Peer Review is in Crisis, But Should Be Fixed, Not Abolished This year three Nobel Prize-winning biologists broke with tradition and published their research directly on the Internet as so-called preprints. Their motivation? Saving time. Gosh. Why would that matter to them? How did things get so bad? It’s all about competition, supply, and demand. Modern science is done in the context of a tournament mentality, with a large number of competitors (scientists) vying for a small number of prizes (jobs, tenure, funding). To be competitive, scientists must prove their “worth” through publications, and this pressure has created unanticipated challenges in Read More ›

From Kerry Grens at The Scientist: Researchers continue to fail in reproducing a new gene-editing technique called NgAgo, for Natronobacterium gregoryi Argonaute, an endonuclease. In a report published last week (November 15) in Protein & Cell, scientists from the U.S. and China working independently found no evidence that NgAgo could manipulate DNA sequences.“Some of us have even sent visiting researchers to [Chunyu] Han’s laboratory but they were not allowed to perform genome editing experiments involving mammalian cells when they were there,” the authors, led by Shawn Burgess of the National Human Genome Research Institute, wrote in their report. … More. The publisher is said to be investigating. The good news is that recent serious interest in replicability is making it Read More ›

From Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus at Stat News: As it stands now, according to a new study, the pool of peer reviewers is able to keep up with the massive number of new papers published each year in biomedicine — more than 1 million, and climbing. … As we and others have argued, peer review is a deeply flawed system, but one that deserves fixing, not scrapping. The latest study does nothing to change that view. It does, however, point to a few simple changes that could go a long way toward shoring up the structure. More. They recommend paying reviewers for their time, fewer papers, and different forms of peer review, for example, sites like PubPeer.com and PubMed Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A new study suggests probable scientific misconduct in at least some of 33 bone health trials published in various medical journals. The study used statistical methods to detect scientific misconduct or research fraud and calls into question the validity of a body of research work led mainly by one researcher in Japan. The study is published in the November 9, 2016, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. … For the analysis of the 33 trials, 26 of which Sato was lead author, Bolland’s team conducted a rigorous review and found reported results that differed markedly from what could be expected statistically; further, the results were remarkably positive. The characteristics of the Read More ›

 We’ve written a lot lately about the problems with peer review. So has Nature. The good news is that a number of innovative approaches are being tried. There is doubtless a winner or two entering the field; best clock ’em all. PeerJ offers peer reviewer matching. Its aims & scope: 1 PeerJ is an Open Access, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal. It considers articles in the Biological Sciences, Medical Sciences, and Health Sciences. 2 PeerJ does not publish in the Physical Sciences, the Mathematical Sciences, the Social Sciences, or the Humanities (except where articles in those areas have clear applicability to the core areas of Biological, Medical or Health sciences). 3 PeerJ only considers Research Articles. It does not accept Literature Review Articles, Hypothesis Papers, Read More ›

Well, Ben Andrew Henry is saying this at The Scientist: When a manuscript goes out for peer review, most medical journals inform their reviewers of the authors’ identities and affiliations, in what’s called a single-blind review. But new research suggests that concealing the identities of authors—double-blind review—could help reduce reviewer bias. In a study published in JAMA this week (September 27), Kanu Okike of Kaiser Moanalua Medical Center in Honolulu and colleagues assigned the same mock manuscript to 119 reviewers for an orthopedic journal. Half of the reviewers were not given the names of the authors, while the other half were told that the paper was written by two past presidents of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons from prestigious Read More ›

Here. Said to be based on the “Oregon Trail” video game graphics.

From Climate Audit: n 2012, the then much ballyhoo-ed Australian temperature reconstruction of Gergis et al 2012 mysteriously disappeared from Journal of Climate after being criticized at Climate Audit. Now, more than four years later, a successor article has finally been published. Gergis says that the only problem with the original article was a “typo” in a single word. Rather than “taking the easy way out” and simply correcting the “typo”, Gergis instead embarked on a program that ultimately involved nine rounds of revision, 21 individual reviews, two editors and took longer than the American involvement in World War II. However, rather than Gergis et al 2016 being an improvement on or confirmation of Gergis et al 2012, it is Read More ›

In an article on the question of bias in policing, from Slate: In practice, though, “peer review” refers to a bewildering array of methods and procedures. At least 1 million peer-reviewed articles are published every year, in at least 25,000 journals. At the narrow, top tier of this ecosystem, where prestigious journals filter out all but the best and most important papers, peer review screens for breakthrough work with airtight methodology and well-founded conclusions. At the bulbous bottom, peer review is less discerning. It’s also amenable to all sorts of chicanery—like rings of scientists who rubber-stamp each other’s work or researchers who invent reviews. The use of peer review varies from one publication to another and between different fields of Read More ›