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 […]
To make progress, science requires peer review. But the type of peer review that has assisted scientific research for centuries is a far cry from the self-appointed data police organization named Retraction Watch (RW). With its complete lack of accountability and nonexistent scientific credentials, RW only encourages unfiltered denigration. To quote Susan T. Fiske, chaired […]
We often hear that life is too short. I would add: Too short for what? Clearly, it all depends on what you choose to do. If you are trying to unravel the secrets of the universe, then life is surely too short. Ars lunga vita brevis, said the Romans. On the other hand, if you […]
We love science, we also know that getting and keeping our scientific work published in a good venue can be an arduous task. This is true now more than ever due to a lack of leadership in the scientific establishment and to the advent in 2010 of a new player in the game: the angry […]
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 […]
Hilda Bastian is an NIH contractor for PubMed Health and PubMed Commons at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). She also seems to be a prolific science writer. Bastian recently informed the blog Retraction Watch that the NLM is planning a prominent display of Expressions of Concern (EoC) published by […]
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 […]
On Tuesday October 4 at 10AM, a Michigan Court in Detroit conducted a hearing on case 326691 “Fazlul Sarkar vs John Doe”. As you may recall from our coverage at Science Transparency, Prof. Sarkar is a scientist anonymously accused of misconduct through a blog named PubPeer. Whether his data is valid or invalid is something we are […]
