Blog Comments

Kinetica Online is pleased to provide direct links to commentaries from our senior editor Dr. Steven Pelech has posted on other blogs sites. Most of these comments appear on the GenomeWeb Daily Scan website, which in turn highlight interesting blogs that have been posted at numerous sites in the blogosphere since the beginning of 2010. A wide variety of topical subjects are covered ranging from the latest scientific breakthroughs, research trends, politics and career advice. The original blogs and Dr. Pelech’s comments are summarized here under the title of the original blog. Should viewers wish to add to these discussions, they should add their comments at the original blog sites.

The views expressed by Dr. Pelech do not necessarily reflect those of the other management and staff at Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation. However, we wish to encourage healthy debate that might spur improvements in how biomedical research is supported and conducted.

Retraction

Are You Sure?

Daniel MacArthur at Massachusetts General Hospital suggests that false positives are a given in genomic research, especially due to the large size of genomes and errors from high-throughput sequencing. Ann Buchanan at Penn State University also notes for these and a variety of other reasons there many sequence errors in genomics manuscripts and online databases and a higher rate of retractions. S. Pelech argues that the increased rate of retraction of scientific research results in publications in general actually reflects a wide variety of confounding factors beside greater error rates from higher throughput technologies. These include amongst others premature submission for publication due to financial and continuing employment requirements, poorer peer-review, and a proliferation of new journals eager to acquire manuscripts, which can result in outright plagiarism and even fraudulent data. Read More...

Take That Back

Blogger Derek Lowe at the Pipeline described what appears to be seems to be a dramatic increase in the frequency of retracted papers based on data from Thomson Reuters, which reported that the number of papers published has risen 44 percent since 2001, while the retraction rate has risen 15-fold. A chart of PubMed retractions shows many of them are from top journals. S. Pelech comments that with over a million new scientific manuscripts published annually, the actual increase in retracted publications over the last decade is actually pretty inconsequential. Read More...

Nothing Is Sacred

Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky at Nature, Retraction Watch wrote that the increase in retractions of scientific papers isn't necessarily a bad thing, and that journal editors and researchers should embrace the idea of post-publication peer review. They stated that "in the new system, a fleshed-out addendum, or correction, could suffice if the paper included some of the post-publication discussion." S. Pelech comments that with around a million scientific papers published annually, the overall numbers of flagged publications are still relatively miniscule. He agrees that needs to be the wide spread implementation of post-publication peer review that is directly linked to the original scientific work. Read More...