Unintended consequences: How authorship guidelines destroyed a relationship

It started as a simple email exchange over authorship. But it angered one researcher so much that it ended a 20-year collaboration. In January 2017, a chemist based in Mexico had finished writing a paper describing the structure of a molecule. Sylvain Bernès, at the Instituto de Física Luis Rivera Terrazas, asked his co-author—the head […]

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How much does a retracted result pollute the field?

When a paper is retracted, how many other papers in the same field — which either cite the finding or cite other papers that do — are affected? That’s the question examined by a study published in BioMed Central’s new journal, Research Integrity and Peer Review. Using the case of a paper retracted from Nature in 2014, the authors […]

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Do interventions to reduce misconduct actually work? Maybe not, says new report

Can we teach good behavior in the lab? That’s the premise behind a number of interventions aimed at improving research integrity, invested in by universities across the world and even private companies. Trouble is, a new review from the Cochrane Library shows that there is little good evidence to show these interventions work. We spoke […]

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Sharing data is a good thing. But we need to consider the costs.

Last week, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors proposed requiring authors to share deidentified patient data underlying the published results of clinical trials within six months of publication. The proposal has earned much support but also some concerns – for example that other scientists might poach the findings, acting as the New England Journal of […]

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Boldt’s retraction count upped to 94, co-author takes legal action to prevent 95th

We’ve found two recent retractions and an expression of concern for Joachim Boldt, former prominent anesthesiologist and currently Retraction Watch leaderboard’s 2nd place titleholder. He now has 94 retractions. One of the retracted articles contains falsified data, along with a researcher who didn’t agree to be a co-author, according to an investigation by the Justus Liebig University Giessen, where Boldt […]

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