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 […]
Robert Weinberg, Carlo Croce and Olivier Voinnet are extremely gifted scientists. They have spent long hours in the lab and their amazing drive and talent have turned them into towering figures in their respective fields. Their achievements are widely recognized and have earned them solid reputations in Cancer Genetics, Cancer Biology and Plant Biology, their […]
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 […]
It is widely felt that peer review in scientific publishing is failing and it seems journal editors and academic authorities have only themselves to blame. Nature started a debate on the subject but it is felt that the point was not made somehow. Every time a journal publishes an alert note or an expression of […]
_______________________________________ Public!, take note: There is fake science! And who will handle the crisis? Scientists’s peers let’s hope, or we slide into hysteria. ________________________________________ RELATED READING Nature June 2, 2015 editorial Misplaced Faith: The public trusts scientists much more than scientists think. But should it? New York Times June 1, 2015 editorial Scientists who cheat.
It is hard to justify the sheer existence of Retraction Watch, a blog run by people with no visible credentials in the sciences who are seeking notoriety in a context where anybody is basically allowed to say anything. The information that Retraction Watch provides is redundant at best. And this redundancy will now be multiplied, […]
Retraction Watch seems to be well on its way to leave a mark on the academic establishment and dictate policy on research ethics. Its posts so often tinged by anger and resentment have gained enormous traction on the web, exposing disturbing human traits. This should not come as a surprise, after all, one man’s sorrow […]
A few days back Adam Marcus, the main blogger at Retraction Watch together with Ivan Oransky, published a post informing their readers that Dr. Diederik Stapel, the Dutch professor who allegedly admitted to fraudulent activity, has landed on a job in the Netherlands. As expected, the angry commentators poured their vitriol in outrage as they […]
Scientific papers have been challenged since the early days of the Acta Eruditorum and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. For hundreds of years, the rules of fair play and transparency dictate that the challenger must seek publication of his/her adverse comments which must be granted pursuant to a favorable peer review conducted by […]
Science is undeniably hard. First you come to grips with failure in the lab and when you finally believe you got it right, another front opens up: the quest to pass peer review and get your findings published in a good journal. These days, a new cloud looms over the embattled researcher right at the end […]