Journals forced to change editorial review processes to combat organised fraud
Journal editors know that if they reject manuscripts they suspect to be fabricated, that might not kill the paper forever. Fraudulent manuscripts can be submitted to multiple journals at the same time: so even if an editor rejects it during peer review, they might see it published elsewhere. This has...
Volume of ‘junk science’ wreaking havoc on credibility of Chinese research – editors
In 2013, Science reported on a market for authorships on research papers in China. In 2017, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology said it would crack down on misconduct after a scandal in which 107 papers were retracted at the journal Tumor Biology. The peer reviews of the papers had...
Research-integrity sleuths warn Chinese scientists buy papers to boost careers
When Laura Fisher noticed striking similarities between research papers submitted to RSC Advances, she grew suspicious. None of the papers had authors or institutions in common, but their charts and titles looked alarmingly similar, says Fisher, the executive editor at the journal. “I was determined to try to get to...
Scientists awed after bonobos in Congo Forest adopt infants outside their group
Attentive parenting appears across the animal world, but adoption is rarer, especially when youngsters taken in are not kin. Now researchers have witnessed bonobos adopting infants from outside of their own communities. Two females, each from a different bonobo group, in the Luo Scientific Reserve in Congo took charge of...
How to understand and manage emotions, build flourishing connections
The cognitive-intelligence quotient, known as IQ, is an important factor in determining your reasoning ability, but a high IQ score is not the whole story when it comes to thriving professionally and personally. Another dimension of human intelligence, known as the emotional intelligence quotient, or EQ, has also been linked...
Bingeing: Has Covid-19 got the world drinking more than before?
Sourdough and baking helped many people cope with 2020 and many have found solace in family Zoom calls. But for millions around the world, the stress of the pandemic and tedium of lockdown life saw them seek the comforting embrace of another, fickle friend: alcohol. Like most social behaviours, drinking...
Black tigress: Toni Morrison made Memory sit down at the table with her audience
She did not look away. When Toni Morrison’s clear imagining gaze met uncomfortable things, she faced them down. A poisoned dog jerking round the yard like a toy. Human placenta in a field. The transparent underskin of a bobcat gutted on a kitchen table. The greyish panties, still round her...
Covid clustering: Herd immunity will be game of ‘whack-a-mole’ with outbreaks
Previous vaccination efforts suggest that uptake of Covid-19 vaccine will tend to cluster geographically, herd immunity experts explain. In the past, localised resistance to measles vaccination, for example, resulted in small pockets of disease resurgence. “Geographic clustering is going to make the path to herd immunity a lot less of...
Coronavirus vaccine hesitancy starting to make ‘herd immunity’ a remote possibility
As Covid-19 vaccination rates pick up around the world, people have reasonably begun to ask: how much longer will this pandemic last? It’s an issue surrounded with uncertainties. But the once-popular idea that enough people will eventually gain immunity to Covid-19 to block most transmission – a ‘herd-immunity threshold’ –...
‘Unregulated efforts that create ‘trade-offs’ harmful to global afforestation’
Ongoing research shows that most deforestation is man-made and that an effective global policy response is needed to address the disappearance of the world’s forests. The main problem is that there are currently too many uncoordinated regulatory processes that are creating trade-offs, conflicts, leakage effects and loopholes resulting in complexity...
