Tag: Scientific research

Cleaning the scientific house: Rebuilding trust in science requires confronting the harms of ghostwriting

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Author: Oreskes, N Description: “Consider the problem of ghostwriting in science. Recently, a colleague and I published a paper analyzing the impacts of a peer-reviewed paper, published in 2000, that purported to be an independent, objective, and comprehensive review of the safety of the pesticide, glyphosate. The paper found no convincing evidence for toxicity, genotoxicity, carcinogenicity, or endocrine disruption. However, documents made public through legal proceedings in 2017 showed that the paper was not, in fact, independent, but had been conceptualized and largely written by Monsanto employees. We wanted to…

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What should be done to tackle ghostwriting in the medical literature?

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Author: Gotzsche, PC; Kassirer, JP; Woolley, KL; Wager, E; Jacobs, A; Gertel, A; Hamilton, C Description: Ghostwriting occurs when someone makes substantial contributions to a manuscript without attribution or disclosure. It is considered bad publication practice in the medical sciences, and some argue it is scientific misconduct. At its extreme, medical ghostwriting involves pharmaceutical companies hiring professional writers to produce papers promoting their products but hiding those contributions and instead naming academic physicians or scientists as the authors. To improve transparency, many editors’ associations and journals allow professional medical writers…

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Protection of the human gene research literature from contract cheating organizations known as research paper mills

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Author: Byrne, Jennifer A.; Park, Yasunori; Richardson, Reese A. K.; Pathmendra, Pranujan; Sun, Mengyi; Stoeger, Thomas Description: Human gene research generates new biology insights with translational potential, yet few studies have considered the health of the human gene literature. The accessibility of human genes for targeted research, combined with unreasonable publication pressures and recent developments in scholarly publishing, may have created a market for low-quality or fraudulent human gene research articles, including articles produced by contract cheating organizations known as paper mills. This review summarises the evidence that paper mills…

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Timeliness and content of retraction notices for publications by a single research group

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Author: Grey, Andrew; Avenell, Alison; Bolland, Mark Description: Publications of expressions of concern and retractions should be timely, accurate and comprehensive. We assessed these characteristics for 292 publications by a research group about which we submitted concerns about publication integrity to 77 journals and 29 publishers between March 2013 and February 2020. By October 2020, 115 publications were corrected (3), had expressions of concern (18), or were retracted (94). The median (95% CI) time from submission of concerns to the first journal correction was 22.1 (18.2-26.9) months: this did not…

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Prevalence of nonsensical algorithmically generated papers in the scientific literature

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Author: Cabanac, Guillaume; Labbe, Cyril Description: In 2014 leading publishers withdrew more than 120 nonsensical publications automatically generated with the SCIgen program. Casual observations suggested that similar problematic papers are still published and sold, without follow-up retractions. No systematic screening has been performed and the prevalence of such nonsensical publications in the scientific literature is unknown. Our contribution is 2-fold. First, we designed a detector that combs the scientific literature for grammar-based computer-generated papers. Applied to SCIgen, it has a 83.6% precision. Second, we performed a scientometric study of the…

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The Transformation of the Scientific Paper: From Knowledge to Accounting Unit

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Author: Gingras, Yves Description: Since the mid-1990s, observers and actors in the scientific field—as defined in Bourdieu as a structured space of agents and institutions in competition for the accumulation of credit or “symbolic capital”—have commented on the many facets of an ongoing major transformation in the structural conditions of scientific practice: massification of research, mounting pressure to publish, relative decline of government investments, and the arrival into the research system of the ideology of “knowledge management” with its insistence on quantitative evaluation measures of productivity and “impact” of academic…

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