Science Integrity Digest, August 2024

Your monthly digest of science integrity news.

General Science Integrity News

• The staggering death toll of scientific lies. Scientific fraud kills people. Should it be illegal? – Kelsey Piper – Vox
• What’s in a picture? Two decades of image manipulation awareness and action – Mike Rossner – Retraction Watch
• He was a rising star of academia with multiple papers. He was also a cat
• Researcher creates fake profile for pet to expose flaws in Google Scholar website that allow scientists to fraudulently boost their credibility – Rhys Blakely – The Times
• The Academic Culture of Fraud. The trustees maintain that the fraud arose from “lab culture and management,” and therefore implicitly that there is no single individual who bears moral or procedural responsibility for actually falsifying the data. – Ben Landau-Taylor – Palladium
• Retracted Alzheimer’s Paper Reshapes Research Landscape, but Progress Continues – Science Blog
• Optimizing research integrity investigations: the need for evidence – Dorothy Bishop – The Bishop Blog

Sleuthing

• Journal of Molecular Liquids vs One-Man Papermills – Mu Yang catches two crooks, Ayman Atta and S Muthu, who flooded one Elsevier journal (and several others) with ridiculous hand-drawn fraud. Whom to believe, the peer review, or your own eyes? – Leonid Schneider – For Better Science
• With Random Precision. Papermills continue to appear on the scene (or rather, they have been there all along, waiting to be noticed) and once again we find ourselves with shovels and brooms, cleaning up after the performing elephants. – Smut Clyde – For Better Science
• Scientific whistleblowers can be compensated for their service. To help correct the incentives, Ben Laundau-Taylor suggests that science could borrow an idea from the US financial system, where an SEC bounty program pays whistleblowers 10-30% of the fines imposed by the government. – Chris Said
• The citation black market: schemes selling fake references alarm scientists – The ways in which researchers can artificially inflate their reference counts are growing – Dalmeet Singh Chawla – Nature News
• Oxford Brookes professor awarded for academic integrity work – Professor Mary Davis has been given a National Teaching Fellowship, which celebrates individuals who have made an outstanding impact on student outcomes and teaching in higher education. – OxfordMail
• Mandyam Srinivasan of bee studies fame faces misconduct allegations. Based on his work on bees, Srinivasan received an award from IISc in 2009 among other honours, but two biologists have now called 10 of his papers into question – T V Padma – The Hindu

Legal threats for science critics

• Exclusive: Kavli prize winner threatens to sue critic for defamation. One of the winners of the 2024 Kavli Prize in nanoscience has threatened to sue a longtime critic, Retraction Watch has learned.  – Ellie Kincaid – Retraction Watch
• Award-winning chemist threatens to sue critic – Dalmeet Singh Chawla – Chemistry World
• PNAS corrects article by Kavli prize winner who threatened to sue critic – Retraction Watch
• Whistleblowing in science: this physician faced ostracization after standing up to pharma – Physician scientist Nancy Olivieri describes hard-won lessons from decades of fighting for scientific integrity – Nature News

Federal and institutional investigations

• Former Maryland dept. chair with $19 million in grants faked data in 13 papers, feds say. A former department chair engaged in research misconduct in work funded by 19 grants from the National Institutes of Health, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity. – Ellie Kincaid – Retraction Watch
• Senior biochemist made up data in 13 studies – US Office of Research Integrity report aligns with investigation by the University of Maryland, Baltimore -Dalmeet Singh Chawla, special to C&EN
• Case Summary: Eckert, Richard L – Office of Research Integrity
• Faked heart papers retracted following Ohio State investigation – Dawn Attride – Retraction Watch
• NOAA agrees to restore ‘scientific integrity’ in its influential $1 billion climate disaster tally – In response to the study by Roger Pielke Jr., NOAA said it will take steps to address the flaws in its methodology in its “billion dollar disaster” tally, used as a touchstone by media and policymakers. – Kevin Killough – Just The News
• Data integrity is ‘biggest issue’ for drug, API firms during inspections, FDA official says – Jeff Craven – Regulatory Focus

Publishers taking action

• Exclusive: Publisher retracts more than 450 papers from journal it acquired last year. Sage has retracted 467 articles from the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems, a title it took on when it acquired IOS Press last November for an undisclosed sum. – Retraction Watch
• Sleuths spur cleanup at journal with nearly 140 retractions and counting. The mass retractions began over a year after sleuths Alexander Magazinov and Guillaume Cabanac first raised concerns about the presence of suspicious citations, tortured phrases and undisclosed use of AI in the journal’s articles. – Avery Orrall – Retraction Watch
• Three MDMA therapy papers retracted over ethics violations – Meghana Keshavan – STAT News

Games

• The Publish or Perish Game – A Game Where We Embrace Plagiarism and The Reviewer 2 In Us
• UOW Age of Integrity – Game-based learning on Academic Integrity – European Network for Academic Integrity / University of Wollongong

Artificial intelligence and science

• Flood of ‘junk’: How AI is changing scientific publishing. Several experts who track down problems in studies told AFP that the rise of AI has turbocharged the existing problems in the multi-billion-dollar sector. – Daniel Lawler – AFP/Yahoo News
• AI scientists have a problem: AI bots are reviewing their work – ChatGPT is wreaking chaos in the field that birthed it – Stephanie M Lee – The Chronicle of Higher Education
• Has your paper been used to train an AI model? Almost certainly. Artificial-intelligence developers are buying access to valuable data sets that contain research papers — raising uncomfortable questions about copyright – Elizabeth Gibney – Nature
• Is ChatGPT a Reliable Ghostwriter? Irène Buvat and Wolfgang A. Weber – The Journal of Nuclear Medicine
• Is AI my co-author? The ethics of using artificial intelligence in scientific publishing – Barton Moffatt and Alicia Hall – Accountability in Research
• A new ‘AI scientist’ can write science papers without any human input. Here’s why that’s a problem – Karin Verspoor – The Conversation
• Three ways to promote critical engagement with GenAI – However much we fear its impact or despise its outputs, when teaching humanities, the best response is to encourage students to engage with it critically – Neville Morley – Times Higher Education
• Colloquium explores ethical dilemmas arising from the use of AI and Big Data in research – University of the Witwatersrand
• Statement on Harnessing Science and Technology to Address the Challenges of Today and Open Doors to the Future – Chief Science Advisors representing Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States – The Whitehouse

New Publication and Editorials

• Prevalence of plagiarism in hijacked journals: A text similarity analysis. These findings suggest a tendency for fraudulent journals to attract authors who do not uphold scientific integrity principles.  – Anna Abalkina – Accountability in Research
• The PubPeer conundrum: Administrative challenges in research misconduct proceedings – Minal M Caron et al. – Accountability in Research
• Anxiety in Academia: The Impact of Predatory Journals on Researchers and Scientific Integrity [published in a predatory journal?] – Chad G Pettee and Briac Halbou – Journal of Biomedical Research & Environmental Sciences
• Should We Publish Fewer Papers? By this proposition, I am not advocating that we all “slack off”, but rather that we work harder to make sure we publish fewer but higher quality papers with new and significant scientific insights instead of reporting routine or incremental studies in large numbers of papers.- Song Jin – ACS Energy Letters
• Preserving Academic Integrity: Combating the Proliferation of Paper Mills in Scholarly Publishing – Poonam Singh Deo and P. Hangsing – Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries
• It Takes a Village! Editorship, Advocacy, and Research in Running an Open Access Data Journal – Mandy Wigdorowitz et al. – Publications

Retraction Watch’s Weekend Reads:

• August 3: Weekend reads: Happy birthday, Retraction Watch!; a mysterious conference; extreme publishing; research parasites revisited
• August 10: Weekend reads: Publish or perish, the card game; revisiting fraud in anesthesiology; the Hindawi mass retraction timeline
• August 17: Weekend reads: MDMA papers retracted; COVID-19 vaccine paper retracted for the second time; who gets cited more?
• August 24: Weekend reads: Why scientist rankings should be ignored; misconduct claims in court; mining company demands retraction
• August 31: Weekend reads: When retracted work is cited; another retraction for a Nobelist; should scientific fraud be illegal?