The story is at Retraction Watch: Erick Jones, the dean of engineering at the University of Nevada in Reno, appears to have engaged in extensive plagiarism in the final report he submitted to the National Science Foundation for a grant, … Continue reading →
The above figures come from this article which is listed on this Orcid page (with further background here): Horrifying as all this is, at least from the standpoint of students and faculty at the University of Nevada, not to mention … Continue reading →
“As we look to sleep and neuroscience for answers we can study flies specifically the Drosophila melanogaster we highlight in our research.” 1. The story Someone writes: I recently read a paper of yours in the Chronicle about how academic … Continue reading →
The post below addresses a bunch of specifics about Harvard, but for the key point, jump to the last paragraph of the post. Problems about Harvard A colleague pointed me to this post by Christopher Brunet, “The Curious Case of … Continue reading →
Brandon Del Pozo writes: Born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in the 1970’s, I came to public health research by way of 23 years as a police officer, including 19 years in the NYPD and four as a chief of police in … Continue reading →
Ethan Ludwin-Peery writes: I was reading this paper today, Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain (here, PDF attached), and the numbers they reported immediately struck me as very suspicious. I went over it with a collaborator, and … Continue reading →
From the past few weeks at Retraction Watch: University of Washington (professor in the dentistry school attempting to dismiss a scandal involving conflict of interest in a promotion of homeopathic treatment) Stanford University (professor of engineering who sued a journal … Continue reading →
Wow—this one would fit right into Retraction Watch: Text messages entered Monday into the state’s ongoing civil lawsuit over the welfare scandal reveal that former Gov. Phil Bryant pushed to make NFL legend Brett Favre’s volleyball idea a reality. The … Continue reading →
From a recent post at Retraction Watch: Authors should be very much aware of all aspects of publication ethics, which, despite their importance and career-threatening consequences, are rarely taught in any depth at even the most research-intensive universities. However, even … Continue reading →
In May 2021 we reported on a controversy: Does ocean acidification alter fish behavior? Fraud allegations create a sea of doubt . . . [Biologist Philip] Munday has co-authored more than 250 papers and drawn scores of aspiring scientists to … Continue reading →
Retraction Watch links to this post by Phil Davis, who writes: Even a casual reader of the scientific literature understands that there is an abundance of papers that link some minor detail with article publishing — say, the presence of … Continue reading →
I remember the Watergate thing happening when I was a kid, and I asked my dad, “So, when did you realize that Nixon was a crook?” My dad replied, “1946.” He wasn’t kidding. Nixon being an opportunistic liar was all … Continue reading →
This is a story that puzzles me: it’s a case where seemingly everyone agrees there was research fraud, but for some reason nobody wants to identify who did it. Just business as usual in the War on Cancer? Ellie Kincaid … Continue reading →
A few days ago we discussed a meta-analysis that was published on nudge interventions. The most obvious problem of that analysis was that included 11 papers by Brian Wansink and 1 paper by Dan Ariely, and for good reasons we … Continue reading →
When talking about junk science, or bad research, or fraud, or mixtures of these things (recall Clarke’s Law), we often talk about the role of scientific journals in promoting bad work (with Psychological Science and PNAS being notorious examples), being … Continue reading →
In a story in Retraction Watch entitled “Rejection overruled, retraction ensues when annoyed reviewer does deep dive into data,” Adam Marcus reports: As a prominent criminologist, Kim Rossmo often gets asked to review manuscripts. So it was that he found … Continue reading →
Statistics and Machine Learning Christian Robert Error Statistics Philosophy [Deborah Mayo] Observational Epidemiology [Mark Palko and Joseph Delaney] R bloggers Sharon Lohr Statistical Thinking [Frank Harrell] The Endeavour [John Cook] Thomas Lumley Visualization The Functional Art [Alberto Cairo] Junk Charts … Continue reading →
About 80 people pointed me to this post by Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, and Leif Nelson about a 2012 article, “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end.” Apparently some … Continue reading →
They don’t admit their mistakes. In particular, they don’t admit when they’ve been conned. 1. Freakonomics from 2009: A Headline That Will Make Global-Warming Activists Apoplectic The BBC is responsible. The article, by the climate correspondent Paul Hudson, is called … Continue reading →
Commenter Carlos pointed us to this story (update here) of some scientists—Florin Moldoveanu, Richard Gill, and five others—all of whom seem to know what they’re talking about and who are indignant that the famous Royal Society of London published a … Continue reading →