One journal’s trash is another’s treasure – until a former peer reviewer stumbles across it and sounds an alarm. In April, communications professor Jacqueline Ewart got a Google Scholar notification about a paper published in the World of Media she had reviewed, and recommended rejecting, for another journal several months earlier. At the time, she […]

In the name of open science, the multinational scientific collaboration COSMOS on Thursday released the data behind the largest map of the universe. Called the COSMOS-Web field, the project, built with data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), consists of all the imaging and a catalog of nearly 800,000 galaxies spanning nearly all […]

The Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent nonprofit of Retraction Watch, has launched a new initiative to investigate and rapidly disseminate problems in the medical literature that directly affect human health. Thanks to a $900,000 grant from Open Philanthropy, the Medical Evidence Project will leverage the tools of forensic metascience — using visual and computational […]

When I pull into the boat ramp parking lot, it’s just after midnight. It should be deserted. Nobody goes night boating. But my headlights illuminate a red sedan parked hood to the woods. I can’t tell if it’s occupied. The windows are dark. My brain tries to make it make sense. You can’t pull a […]

A new international study led by researchers at Tulane University shows that the El Niño and La Niña climate patterns affect nearly half of the world’s mangrove forests, underscoring the vulnerability of these vital coastal ecosystems to climatic shifts. Mangroves are shrubs or trees that grow in dense thickets mainly in coastal saline or brackish […]

Psychologists have been measuring reaction times since before psychology existed, and they are still a staple of cognitive psychology experiments today. Typically psychologists look for a difference in the time it takes participants to respond to stimuli under different conditions as evidence of differences in how cognitive processing occurs in those conditions. Galton, the famous […]

Elsevier has removed a journal from its Scopus database after Retraction Watch inquired about its review process for the journal, whose editorial board lists fake names and digital fingerprint shows other red flags. Scientific sleuth Anna Abalkina uncovered several issues with Science of Law, which she details in a post published today. Besides editors and […]

Picture this: it’s April 2020, you’re between Zoom meetings, and scrolling through your social media newsfeed. Headlines like “Death toll continues to rise”, “COVID-19 may cause long-term health implications” and “Health-care systems overwhelmed” flash across your screen. Your mood takes a dive, but you can’t stop scrolling. If this scenario rings true for you, you’re […]

A new study uses metabolic profiling to uncover ancient knowledge systems behind therapeutic and psychoactive plant use in ancient Arabia. New research published in Communications Biology has uncovered the earliest known use of the medicinal and psychoactive plant Peganum harmala, commonly known as Syrian rue or harmal, in fumigation practices and inhaled as smoke. The […]