Have you ever met a top scientist who is also an active journal editor? After years of patent litigation this question keeps coming up when seeking for technical help. The answer is: only seldom, since great minds usually have little interest in getting distracted. The consequences of this inverted selection are immediately apparent: deep […]
Frances Arnold won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018. She also retracted a paper in January, 2020. The paper was authored by Inha Cho, Zhi-Jun Jia and Arnold, all from Arnold’s research group at the California Institute of Technology and involved a study that was published in the journal Science in May of 2019. The retraction statement published by Science […]
The New York Times wants to make us aware there is a reproducibility crisis in science. This is hardly news at all. There surely is a problem and has been there ever since science began to be run like a business, with its system of gratification and punishment, with the explosion in the number of […]
When a scientist submits a paper for publication to a journal, he entrusts the journal editor with the task of finding peers would be able to review the paper and are knowledgeable enough to assess its scientific merit. The names of the reviewers are typically concealed to the author. The intent is to grant the […]
It is well known that Chinese people have a practical and pragmatic bent. I recall having asked a successful professor what it would take to publish in Nature. He replied: “You need to do very good work, make a lot of friends in your field and, above all, make sure to befriend the editors. To […]
The blog Retraction Watch plays a game both dangerous and revolting. By making a travesty of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, Retraction Watch has allegedly managed to generate and propagate slander while protecting the anonymity of their tipsters. A recent Court order indicates that this allegedly venal practice will eventually come to an […]
“Residents and interns worked a lot of hours, and I wrote honestly about what it was like to be an intern. One of the deans wasn’t crazy about that. It reminded me that my core identity is as a journalist, constantly challenging things…Blogs are powerful and lower the publishing barrier.” Ivan Oransky This post constitutes […]