BishopBlog

I was recently asked to review a paper that piqued my curiosity.

Guest post by Matt Spick Photo: Parsadanov/Shutterstock.com From relative obscurity, paper mills have recently moved into the spotlight of academic attention.

On Friday I attended (virtually) a workshop organised by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine on Enhancing Scientific Integrity: Progress and Opportunities in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Exactly five months ago, I blogged about a program entitled Foundations of a Resilient Microbiome (FORM) that Wellcome LEAP was funding to the tune of $50 million.

Source: http://www.weblogcartoons.com/2008/11/23/ideas/ Those of you who follow this blog may have noticed a lack of thematic coherence.

Authors René Aquarius, Floris Schoeters, Alex Glynn, Guillaume Cabanac An update on stealth corrections Last year, we published an article describing stealth corrections, a phenomenon in which a publisher makes at least one post-publication change to a sc…

PubPeer is sometimes discussed as if it is some kind of cesspit where people smear honest scientists with specious allegations of fraud.

to: Editor in chief, Kamran Abbasi, kabbasi@bmj.com Executive editor, Theodora Bloom, tbloom@bmj.com Head of research, Elizabeth Loder, eloder@bmj.com Head of journalism, Rebecca Coombes, rcoombes@bmj.com Publication ethics and content integrity editor, B…

This week I attended a Webinar organised by Clarivate on the topic of “Eugene Garfield Centenary Celebration: Past, Present and Future of Scientometrics”.

My Norxin sting operation Guest post by Csaba Szabo Chair of Pharmacology, University of Fribourg, Switzerland After the limited success of my prior sting operation, I have decided to do a second one.

I was interested to receive an email from eLife last week, telling me that "As part of our commitment to open science, scientific rigour and transparency we now accept submissions of Replication Studies".

A few days ago, I saw this post on LinkedIn: How does the gut microbiome shape early brain development?

In my previous blogpost, I discussed why many scientists can't take seriously the lofty ideals expressed in Trump's plans for Gold Standard Science, even though the basic principles seem excellent.

In May, the White House produced a report called "Restoring Gold Standard Science", which was followed by an NIH plan to implement this policy.

Complaints about the broken academic publishing system have been around for years and are getting louder.

I guess many readers will have had peer reviews where the reviewer doesn't appear to have understood, or even properly read, the paper they are criticising.

by Csaba Szabo, Columbia University Press, 2025 This is a rollicking good read, written in an informal style, and enlivened by cartoons, which works as a scholarly and accessible account of the so-called reproducibility crisis in biomedical research.

Guest post by Solal Pirelli The IEEE, full name Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, is one of the main scientific publishers in domains related to its name.

Last November, I wrote a blogpost explaining why I had resigned as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).

Many publishers are getting nervous about infiltration by paper mills, who can torpedo a journal's reputation when they succeed in publishing papers that are obvious nonsense.

It's always interesting for a blogger to look back to see which posts have garnered most attention.

It's been an odd week for the academic publisher MDPI.

The Royal Society is a venerable institution founded in 1660, whose original members included such eminent men as Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.

There's been a fair bit of discussion about Clarivate's decision to pause inclusion of eLife publications on the Science Citation Index (e.g. on Research Professional).

Last week this blog focussed on problems affecting Scientific Reports, a mega-journal published by Springer Nature.