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 […]
Contributed by Dr. Ariel Fernandez Stigliano Virtually everybody recognizes that science is facing a reproducibility crisis. Whenever a result elicits attention, be it because it is published in a high-impact journal, or better still because it is important, there is a high likelihood that others will attempt to reproduce it. They often fail, disturbingly often. […]
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 […]
In a striking analysis published in Nature, Stanford University researcher John Ioannidis, the expert on metadata investigation at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, has seriously questioned the way the National Institutes of Health fund research proposals. He and his colleague Joshua Nicholson have argued in what seems like a rousing condemnation of the status quo that peer-review, the process by which study sections […]
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 […]
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 […]