Category: science publishing

More wokeness from the journal Nature, and a response from a reader

March 31, 2026 • 11:00 am

It’s hopeless: Nature, like nearly all prominent science journals, has been colonized by woke craziness.  Perhaps the word “craziness” for the present topic is a bit too strong, but the headline below suggests a degree of unhinged-ness that often comes with virtue-flaunting. And of course this isn’t the first such article in Nature.

Click the screenshot to below read the article, part of a series billed as “profiles [of] scientists with unusual career histories or outside interests”. This scientist, Dr. Anne Poelina, has the unusual habit of naming a river as the first author of her science papers:

An excerpt;

Conservationist Anne Poelina has a deep connection to the fresh water that runs through the dry red-rock landscape of the Kimberley region in Western Australia. Poelina identifies as a Nyikina Warrwa woman, and her people are the Traditional Custodians of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River. The river meanders through the region’s arid land, cutting a path of about 735 kilometres long through steep gorges, savannahs and flood plains before terminating at King Sound, a delta fringed by tidal mangroves by the Indian Ocean.

The Martuwarra Fitzroy River is one of Australia’s last-remaining relatively intact, undammed tropical river systems. For now.

The river faces many threats, for instance, from water use in agricultural irrigation. It’s also at risk from proposed plans to extract natural gas through fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, and to look for rare-earth elements and metals such as vanadium and titanium. Moreover, climate change is predicted to cause extreme floods and droughts.

. . .Poelina is connected to the river through her matrilineal heritage — her mother’s people are the Nyikina First Nation. The Nyikina’s traditional territory, or Country, lies in the river’s watershed, as do those of nine other Indigenous communities. (Country is the term that Aboriginal Australian people use to refer to their ancestral lands, its meaning is similar to the Western concept of nature.)

Poelina explains that “in terms of property rights, the river owns me. So, I have a duty of care and the fiduciary duty to protect this river’s right to life.” Because Poelina works with the river to produce fresh knowledge and assimilate ancient wisdom, she decided to recognize its contributions formally. In 2020, she started including the Martuwarra River of Life as the first author on her publications.

Poelina says, “Country is a first author for Indigenous people in the Northern Territory of Australia. So, I just did it.” Whether the journal to which she submitted her first paper assumed “that the name was human or not, I don’t know”, she adds.

Here’s a list of her papers on Google Scholar, and, sure enough, a few of them—but far from all—have “MRiverofLife” as first author, with “M” standing for “Martuwarra”. Here’s one (click to go to site):

Here’s a description of the river in northwest Australia (it’s called either “Martuwarra” or “Fitzroy”), and here’s a description of its place in local culture, where the river is called a “living ancestral being.”  It’s neither living nor an ancestral being: that is just lore. Still, the indigenous council of “river keepers” consults with the Australian government to keep the river in good shape, and that’s an admirable thing, But making a river a coauthor? Perhaps I should have made my Drosophila flies the first author of my papers, maybe disguised as “Dr. O. Sophila.”

At any rate, reader and professor Jente Ottenburghs (an evolutionary biologist who works on birds) couldn’t take it the Nature paper, and wrote me this: “This seems to be another case where a high-profile journal romanticizes indigenous knowledge (similar to the situations in New Zealand and Canada that you covered recently). I also decided to write a blog post about it, partly inspired by the book The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch which I am currently reading.”

Sure enough, his blog post is below, and you can access it for free by clicking the screenshot:

Two excerpts. First, on the ubiquity and sacralization of the “two-eyed seeing” trope and the sacralization of the oppressed (i.e., indigenous people). Note that yes, Australian indigenous people were badly treated by European colonists, but that is not what’s under consideration here.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in incorporating indigenous knowledge into scientific research. There are indeed nice examples where such knowledge has proven valuable. For instance, a recent study in Oryx combined ethnospecies lists from local communities with scientific datasets to reveal a consistent decline in bird body mass across three continents. Approaches like this study demonstrate that local knowledge can complement scientific inquiry, particularly in data collection and long-term ecological observation.

However, indigenous knowledge is often romanticized, sometimes being portrayed as inherently superior to scientific knowledge. This tendency is partly driven by a legitimate desire to correct historical injustices (such as colonialism and the marginalization of local communities) and to show greater respect for indigenous perspectives. While this shift is clearly necessary and overdue, it should not come at the expense of critical evaluation of indigenous knowledge.

Many elements of indigenous knowledge consist of local myths or context-bound explanations. As such, they are often parochial rather than universal, and therefore do not qualify as good scientific explanations. This does not diminish their cultural, historical, or philosophical value, but it does mean they should not automatically be treated as reliable sources of scientific insight.

Of authorship and the river:

There appears to be growing pressure within academia to signal the recognition of indigenous knowledge, sometimes in ways that blur the distinction between cultural respect and scientific rigor. A striking example appeared in Nature, where conservationist Anne Poelina listed the Martuwarra River of Life as a co-author on her publications.

Poelina explains that “in terms of property rights, the river owns me. So, I have a duty of care and the fiduciary duty to protect this river’s right to life.” Because Poelina works with the river to produce fresh knowledge and assimilate ancient wisdom, she decided to recognize its contributions formally. In 2020, she started including the Martuwarra River of Life as the first author on her publications.

When asked why the river should be listed as first author, she responded: “Because it’s the authority. It’s where I get my authority.” This reasoning stands in direct contrast with the scientific method, which explicitly rejects appeals to authority as a basis for truth. Science operates as a culture of criticism, where ideas must withstand scrutiny regardless of their source. As physicist Richard Feynman famously put it: “If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is … If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

Hence, attributing authorship to a river on the grounds of authority is not just unconventional; it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how knowledge is evaluated in science.

. . .A similar issue arises in arguments that emphasize the age of indigenous knowledge (or any other knowledge system). Poelina suggests that “if we have the oldest systems of thinking around science and law, shouldn’t the world be listening to what our people have to say?”. But age is not a marker of reliability. As discussed earlier, Greek myths are thousands of years old, but they obviously fail as scientific explanations because they are easily varied and lack universality.

The same principle applies more broadly: all knowledge claims (whether scientific or indigenous) must be evaluated using the same standards. Some elements of indigenous knowledge may indeed prove robust and valuable under scrutiny, while other elements may not. We still need to separate the trustworthy wheat from the superstitious chaff. And the scientific method is the best approach to do just that.

There’s a preliminary section of Ottenburghs’ paper, inspired by his reading of Deutsch, about how science works and how scientific explanations are evaluated, which fed into the post (or riposte) above.  This whole thing may seem trivial, but if we don’t keep calling out the creeping sacralization of indigenous knowledge, and the intrusion into science of myth, storytelling, and superstition, it will become stuck in science like a tick on your leg, with the potential to cause the scientific equivalent of Lyme disease.

The erosion of medical journals

October 28, 2025 • 11:30 am

Of all the papers in the special issue of the Journal of Controversial Ideas on censorship in science, the one below is perhaps the most important, as the censorship being imposed can cause permanent damage to humans. I’ve described this censorship before: it involves papers on or critiques of extreme claims of gender ideologues, especially those touting the benefits of what’s called “affirmative care” (adolescent dysphoria—> doctor on board prescribes puberty blockers almost immediately—> hormones, surgery, and gender transition). The recent history of the field, documented in the first paper below, involves repeated attempts to allow questionable claims to stand in the literature. Two examples of this are the unsupported claim that affirmative care prevents suicide, and the release of the paper by Johanna Olson-Kennedy et al, which was held back because the results (puberty blockers did not improve mental health) were not in line with what author thought gender activists wanted to see.  The paper by Cohn below (click to read), summarizes many of these forms of censorship or distortion.

Here’s the abstract:

The integrity of the gender medicine research literature has been compromised, not only by censorship of correct articles, but also by censorship of critiques of articles with unsupported (for instance exaggerated), misleading or erroneous statements. Many such statements concern the evidence base, which can be evaluated rigorously using a key component of evidence-based medicine, systematic reviews of the evidence. These reviews currently find there is limited to very little confidence that estimates of benefit from (and sometimes harm from) medical gender intervention, that is, puberty blockers, hormones and/or surgeries, are likely to match true outcomes. Several medical societies and articles in medical journals have been claiming otherwise, misrepresenting the evidence base as a whole and/or relying upon unsupported or non-representative individual study findings or conclusions. For example, high likelihood of benefit and low risk of adverse outcomes from medical gender interventions are often claimed, while less invasive alternative treatment options are either omitted or mischaracterized. Other unsupported, erroneous or misleading statements occur when studies minimize or omit mention of significant limitations, or report findings or conclusions not supported by their own data; these are then sometimes quoted by others as well. In addition, correctly reported studies are sometimes misrepresented. Critiques which attempt to rectify such statements are frequently rejected. Some examples are presented here. Such rejections have stifled scientific debate, interfering with the continual scrutiny and cross checks needed to maintain accuracy in the research literature. Currently, erroneous and unsupported statements circulate and repeat between journals and medical society guidelines and statements, misinforming researchers, clinicians, patients and the general public.

If you want a three-page summary of the paper above, which you really should read in toto if you’re interested in gender medicine, read the article below (click headline to read) gives a terse summary.

I can’t summarize the first paper in detail, and you really should read it for yourself. I can, however, give a few quotes from Linehan’s summary on his Substack, which is a bit choppy (quotes indented below). Linehan begins by citing the paper above:

‘Censorship of Essential Debate in Gender Medicine Research’ has the dullest possible title for what it reveals. In yet another example of trans ideology destroying everything it touches, the most prestigious journals in medicine are refusing to publish corrections to papers that contain demonstrably false claims about gender medicine.

The author, J. Cohn, didn’t set out to write about censorship. She tried to correct errors in published papers. When that didn’t work, she described what happened. She found that multiple systematic reviews (the gold standard in evidence-based medicine) have found low or very low-certainty evidence for the benefits of medical gender interventions. This includes puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery. ‘Low certainty’ means there’s limited confidence the estimated effects will match what actually happens to patients.

The Cass Review, published in 2024, found the evidence for paediatric interventions “remarkably weak.” Several other systematic reviews found the same for patients under 21 and under 26.

None have found that these interventions reduce suicide risk.

Meanwhile, major medical journals keep publishing papers claiming the opposite.

Papers in JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Pediatrics have variously claimed that gender-affirming medical interventions are:

  • “Widely recognised as essential, evidence based, and often lifesaving”
  • Known to “clearly improve health outcomes”
  • Associated with “demonstrated health and well-being benefits”
  • Linked to regret rates “less than 1%” or “exceedingly rare”

The regret claim is particularly bold given that the studies cited have major flaws. The often-quoted Bustos review included 27 studies, of which 23 had moderate-to-high risk of bias. All included studies suffered from premature follow-up, significant loss to follow-up, or both.

And one more bit:

Medical guidelines are supposed to work like this: researchers conduct systematic reviews of all available evidence, assess its quality, and make recommendations that match the strength of that evidence. Strong evidence gets strong recommendations. Weak evidence gets weak recommendations or no recommendation at all.

That’s not what happened here.

The American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement recommending gender-affirming care wasn’t based on systematic reviews. A subsequent analysis found its cited references “repeatedly said the very opposite of what AAP attributed to them.”

The Endocrine Society guidelines make strong recommendations based on evidence they themselves rate as low or very low certainty. They don’t explain why.

WPATH commissioned systematic reviews, then interfered with them. After publication, they dropped all but one minimum age recommendation (for phalloplasty) under pressure from the Biden administration and the AAP.

This whole field is rife with a form of advocacy so extreme that researchers not only hesitate to publish results that go against the preferred ideological narrative, but also repeatedly distort studies that criticize affirmative care.

This is not the way science is supposed to be done, but it’s what happens when ideology begins to erode the norms of science. This of course is not new: it’s what happened with the Lysenko affair in Soviet Russia (documented in our paper, Jussim et al.), when ideological distortion (and outright cheating) ultimately killed millions of people.  Nobody’s claiming that kind of toll for gender medicine, but there is still a palpable human cost to sloppy research.

h/t: Joolz

A new issue of J. Controversial Ideas on censorship in the sciences

October 28, 2025 • 9:30 am

For several years a group of us have been working on a paper on censorship in the sciences, and it’s finally come out in the Journal of Controversial Ideas (go here to access all the papers ever published). This “heterodox” journal founded in November 2018 by moral philosophers Francesca Minerva, Jeff McMahan, and Peter Singer. It’s peer-reviewed and open access, but believe me, the reviews are every bit as stringent as those for a science “journal of noncontroversial ideas.”

At any rate, our paper came out, but I didn’t realize that it was part of a special issue on censorship in the sciences until Heterodox at USC posted an announcement. Here’s part of it:

A special issue of the Journal of Controversial Ideas published today explores the serious problem of censorship plaguing the sciences, from the classroom to the research lab to scientific journals. The special issue contains 9 peer-reviewed papers including:

●     From Worriers to Warriors: The Cultural Rise of Women by Cory Clark, Executive Director of the Adversarial Project at the University of Pennsylvania

●     Fire the Censors! It’s the Only Way to Restore Free Inquiry by Robert Maranto, 21st Century Chair in Leadership at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas

●     Silencing Science at MIT: MIT Shows that Cancel Culture Causes Self-Censorship at STEM Universities by Wayne Stargardt, President of the MIT Free Speech Alliance

●     With Friends Like These: On the Role of Presupposition in Pseudo-Defenses of Free Speech on Campus by Mike Veber, Associate Professor of Philosophy at East Carolina University

The collection expands upon subjects discussed at the Censorship in the Sciences conference held at the University of Southern California in January 2025. Over 100 academics gathered for three days to discuss what constitutes censorship, how this problem impacts scientific research and teaching, and how to combat its spread.

The collection also includes an introduction highlighting the themes discussed at the conference.

Contrary to the popular belief that censorship emanates mostly from authoritarian governments or religious mandates, this conference and follow-up publications, including this special issue, revealed that self-censorship and censorship attempts led by academics against their peers form the majority of “cancellations” occurring within the academy today.

Moreover, such censoring of science originates largely from the progressive left. This is unsurprising, given that the academy is now overwhelmingly dominated by faculty who self-identify as liberal or progressive.

Such intra-academic censorship is a serious problem, as the introduction to the special issue makes clear: “Academic jobs and promotions require letters of recommendation from colleagues. Grants necessitate approval from other academics, as do publications. Thus, control over the careers of scientists from within academia influences what subjects are researched and what scientific information is disseminated. In short, it is academics who are the gatekeepers of knowledge production and dissemination. They have the means to block publication, funding, and even employment of their peers.”

 

You can peruse the contents, and choose which papers you want to read, if any, by clicking on the screenshot below.  You can get our paper, which puts present instances of censorship in historical context (including censorship in Soviet Russia), by clicking below.

And the abstract:

The 20th century witnessed unimaginable atrocities perpetrated in the name of ideologies that stifled dissent in favour of political narratives, with numerous examples of resulting long-term societal harm. Despite clear historical precedents, calls to deal with dissent through censorship have risen dramatically. Most alarmingly, politically motivated censorship has risen in the academic community, where pluralism is most needed to seek truth and generate knowledge. Recent calls for censorship have come under the name of “consequences culture”, a culture structured around the inclusion of those sharing a particular narrative while imposing adverse consequences on those who dissent. Here, we place “consequences culture” in the historical context of totalitarian societies, focusing on the fate suffered by academics in those societies. We support our arguments with extensive references, many of which are not widely known in the West. We invite the broader scientific community to consider yet again what are timeless subjects: the importance of freely exchanging views and ideas; the freedom to do so without fear of intimidation; the folly of undermining such exchanges with distortions; and the peril of attempting to eliminate exchanges by purging published documents from the official record. We conclude with suggestions on where to go from here.

It’s a cry in the wilderness. . . ,.

“Citation justice”: turning science into social engineering

October 21, 2025 • 10:30 am

This proposal promoted by “progressive” scientists on how to change the scientific literature is not new. But it may hang around for decades, as it’s also being pushed on young people by scientific societies. It may even persist in the coming years when we have a Democratic President and Congress (fingers crossed).

Up until recently, the normal way to write a paper is this: when you make a statement of known fact, or refer to previous literature, you cite the most important, comprehensive, or relevant papers in parentheses after your assertion An example: “Humans are animals” (Sanders 1856; Jones and Kirkman 1940; Cel-Ray and Tonic, 1956).

The “progressive” scientific ideologues want that changed, as the first article below (just published by the Heterodox Academy and written by Erin Shaw, a woman researcher for the Academy) describes. Instead of citing papers you think best support your statement, one is supposed to cite papers written by people from marginalized groups (usually people of color or women) as a way of bringing equity to the field. This practice is called “citation justice”.

But there are several problems with this practice. Here are a few:

1.) “Citation justice” does not advance science, but is a form of social engineering, turning the scientific literature into a form of affirmative action. It values ethnicity or gender above merit or readers’ knowledge of the field. As Shaw says at the end of her piece:

Engaging with a variety of ideas, texts, and research from an array of scholars across the field is essential to the spirit of the academy and scholarship itself—not to mention necessary for knowledge production. It should be second nature for academics to wade deeply into the literature of their disciplines. As Erec Smith observed last year regarding Nature Reviews Bioengineering’s reasoning for requesting citation diversity statements, “… thoughtfully choosing references and giving sufficient time to survey an entire field is already considered a significant part of scientific research, academic discourse, and critical thinking in general. If scientists are not doing this, the problem isn’t that they are biased; it’s that they are bad scientists.” References should be included in an article because of the ideas within them, not because of the skin color or gender identity of the writers.

Much like DEI statements in faculty hiring, citation diversity statements function as another ideological filter that forces academics to contort themselves and their professional pursuits into ideologically palatable shapes. In explicitly asking authors and reviewers to consider the demographic characteristics of cited sources (and tally them up for presentation), these journals jeopardize the scholarly rigor of scholars and of the journals themselves, which, for better or worse, are the cornerstone of scholarly dissemination.

2.) This practice is often justified, as noted in Shaw’s piece, by saying that minoritized groups are under-cited relative to the quality of their published work.  Well, one can’t dismiss that out of hand, but before you go changing the practice of citation, you need to document your claim (this is, after all, science). And I can’t find any evidence that published research by minority groups is cited less than it should be. Also, undercitation is supposed to reflect bigoty, but that too has not been demonstrated and, as those of us in science know, departments are falling all over themselves to hire women and minority scientists and accept them as grad students. If you are indicting “structural racism” as the cause of this phenomenon, which is implicitly the case, then you must show that.

3.) Even if you are committed to this practice, how do you know which authors are to be moved up the citation scale? Well, women may be told apart by their names, though authors are often listed by initials.  And imagine what you’d have to do to show undercitation: determine whether a paper should be cited but was not. I haven’t found any literature supporting that (I may have missed some), but without that data one has little empirical justification for initiating “citation justice”. One can’t just show that minoritized authors are under-cited relative to these authors’ publication rate; rather, one has to show that their papers are as good as or better than papers that ARE cited. This becomes even more difficult when one realizes that most scientific papers are never cited at all, or cited maybe once or twice, regardless of authorship.

4.) How do you determine whether a paper is by someone in a minority group? Shaw notes the problem:

Prompting scholars to consider author demographics as they develop their reference lists threatens scholarly rigor. Instead of grappling with the complexity of arguments, theories, and data presented by fellow researchers, academics may find themselves Googling photos of scholars they might cite to see if they can (literally) get more diversity tallies in their reference list to appease the journal. Consequently, the actual accomplishments of scholars, many of whom may have indeed worked very hard to overcome obstacles, risk being tokenized by identitarian orthodoxies.

5.) Inequities in citations may reflect inequities of output, perhaps caused by discrimination in the past that has prevented minorities or women from going into science. But the tweet below shows that a paucity of publication may be more to blame than bigotry:

But of course citation justice is supposed to remedy citation inequities, whatever their cause.

6.)  There are other groups that are said to be oppressed, like people who are disabled or “neurodiverse”.  How would one ever find these? Or is the search limited only to women and scholars of color? Shaw’s conclusion is this:

In theory, citation diversity aims to broaden representation; in practice, it reduces scholarship to a superficial numbers game. True intellectual diversity emerges when scholars engage deeply with the best ideas, wherever they originate—not when journals ask researchers to audit the demographics of their bibliographies. If the goal is to advance science, then intellectual rigor, not ideological conformity, must be the guiding principle.

Again, click the screenshot to read:

I’ve given above some of the problems with “citation justice”.  But the article above also documents journals that recommend it. I’ll give a few quotes:

Nature Reviews Psychology editors ask authors to describe how they “explore[d] relevant studies from a diverse group of researchers (including but not limited to diversity in gender, race, career stage and geographical location) before writing their first draft.” The editors suggest these optional citation diversity statements are a way that “scientists can demonstrate their commitment to DEI through actions that are not mandated by institutions or subject to institutional control.” In other words, authors are expected to remain steadfastly committed to the same principles that the federal government is attempting to aggressively quash within universities.

Nature Reviews Psychology’s decisionto encourage citation diversity statements appears to be the latest in a small yet noteworthy movement to embed equity goals explicitly in the scientific publishing process. Several papers have advocated for the practice, and a small number of journals have adopted optional citation diversity statement requests as a part of their article submission processes. Nature Reviews Bioengineering, a sister publication of Nature Reviews Psychology, may have served as an early pilot of the citation diversity statement with Nature after it adopted such a policy in 2023.

The Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) was an early adopter of citation diversity when, in 2021, editors integrated an optional citation diversity statement into the article submission process for its four journals, Annals of Biomedical Engineering, Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering, Cardiovascular Engineering and Technology, and Biomedical Engineering Education.

BMES editors followed the suggestions of citation diversity advocates to straightforwardly ask authors to tally up diversity points. Authors opting into the diversity statement are asked specifically for “the proportion of citations by gender and race/ethnicity for the first and last authors” and “the method used to determine those proportions and its limitations.”

BMES even provides detailed instructions on how proportions should be presented: “The proportions of authors by gender should be divided into four categories based on first/last author combinations: woman/woman, man/woman, woman/man, and man/man. Race and ethnicity proportions should similarly be divided into four categories based on first/last author combinations: author of color/author of color, white author/author of color, author of color/white author, white author/white author.” This numeric scheme raises many unanswered questions about target proportions, cross-cutting identities, and whether authors are deciding which scholars to reference based on perceived demographics rather than scholarly ideas and data presented in their papers.

The practice is spreading into other scientific areas, most distressingly into my own field of evolutionary biology. An article in The College Fix describes an entire session on citation justice at a (2024) Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology in late July, which brought together the American Society of Naturalists, European Society for Evolutionary Biology, Society of Systematic Biologists, and Society for the Study of Evolution:

“We recognize that we have the responsibility to engage critically with the ideologies and guiding ethics behind our theory and our research and we strive to engage with decolonial practices and methods that have been put forward by indigenous scholars,” said Queen’s University graduate student and self-described “settler” scientist Mia Akbar in her introduction of a symposium she co-organized on “The Politics of Citation in Evolutionary Biology.”

“We’re very committed to trying to make space for voices and perspectives that have been erased by dominant science,” she added.

Haley Branch, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, while giving a presentation titled “Ableism as foundation for evolutionary biology,” voiced concern over how the “axiological assumptions” of evolutionary biology are built off of a “white, heteronormative, Christian, Western, male framework.”

I now see that ableism has made it into the list of factors to be considered when citing papers.  But Christianity and “heteronormativity”?  Are we supposed to cite more non-Christian and gay authors? And how would you know? This suggestion is invidious.

At any rate, here’s the Nature Reviews Psychology paper, which you can access by clicking on the screenshot below:

A quote:

. . . . scientists can demonstrate their commitment to DEI through actions that are not mandated by institutions or subject to institutional control. For example, in a Comment in this issue, Carolyn Quam and Teresa Roberts describe how researchers can move scholarship away from narratives that perpetuate societal biases by writing inclusively. Inclusive writing is an iterative, multi-step process that aims to ensure that scientific writing (including review articles, grant applications and literature-review portions of original research reports) does not centre privileged identities as optimal and normative. Quam and Roberts provide an example of an inclusive writing process for a paper they wrote about language development, illustrating that inclusive writing need not be limited to research that is explicitly about marginalized groups or diversity. Importantly, although inclusive writing is an individual act, it can inform systemic change by influencing scientific norms.

At Nature Reviews Psychology, we are now explicitly encouraging authors to take up one of the steps involved in inclusive writing discussed by Quam and Roberts: diversifying citation practices.

The number of citations a paper receives does not necessarily reflect the quality of its research. However, citations can influence a researcher’s career through speaking invitations, grants, awards and promotions. Thus, representation in reference lists has important consequences for representation in science: if citations are systematically biased against, for example, female authors, then female authors will have CVs or grant applications that are less competitive than those of their male counterparts. Moreover, a systematic citation bias against women means that the field is not properly benefiting from their scientific contributions.

To address such citation biases, we are encouraging authors to explore relevant studies from a diverse group of researchers (including but not limited to diversity in gender, race, career stage and geographical location) before writing their first draft. We are further encouraging them to include a citation diversity statement in the article to acknowledge these efforts (see here for an example from one of our sister journals) and to make others aware of citation imbalances.

Note that they add geography and career stage to the list as well as gender and ethnicity. It’s hard enough to write a paper when you know your research area, much less having to look up the age, ethnicity, gender, geographical location, and able-ness of an author.

And the Nature paper gives this as a peroration:

Part of the stated mission of Nature Reviews Psychology is to represent the diversity of psychological science and all those who consider themselves psychological scientists. We act with this mission in mind when we consider who we invite to write and review for us. We are now asking authors to participate in our mission by actively thinking about who they are citing, which will ultimately improve the diversity and quality of the science we publish.

The last paragraph explicitly equates (citation) diversity with quality of the papers that employ citation diversity. That is an assertion with absolutely no evidence to back it up. But it doesn’t need evidence because the editors are dissimulating here: they are not interesting in increasing the quality of science, but in promoting “equity” among scientists.

Science is best served not by using it as a tool to advance DEI, but as a tool to advance our understanding of nature.  If you want to engage in DEI, by all means do so on your own time, not in your scientific publications.

Further, it’s stuff like this endeavor that may have contributed to America’s declining trust in both academia and science. I have no proof for the causation of these phenomena, but I doubt that people would trust science more if they knew it was being used for social engineering in a “progressive” way, not to help us understand nature.

h/t: Luana

Science finally retracts the 2010 “arsenic life” paper by Felisa Wolfe-Simon et al.

July 25, 2025 • 11:30 am

Fifteen years ago (!) a group of authors headed by Felisa Wolfe-Simon published a paper in Science heard ’round the world, a paper that garnered huge publicity. (If you can’t get it by clicking the second link, since the paper has largely been vanished, try this archived link.)

Why the problem? I explained this in February of this year:

A remarkable discovery appeared in the journal Science in 2010.  Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues reported finding, in California’s salty Mono Lake, a bacterium that could [in the lab] substitute arsenic for phosphorus in its metabolism.  This was stunning, as phosphorus was thought to be an essential constituent of many biological macromolecules, including proteins and DNA—the latter using phosphorus as part of its backbone.  (The bacterium was, by the way, named GFAJ-1, standing for “Give Felisa a job,” as she was apparently looking for a permanent academic position.)

At any rate, this was huge news, and implied, to many, including hype-promoting journalists, that if life could thrive on arsenic, perhaps the chances of life on other planets was higher than we thought. Wolfe-Simon herself implied that perhaps there was a “shadow biosphere,” on Earth, including organisms that we didn’t know of because their biochemistry was so different from that of life we knew.

The publicity attending this discovery was huge: NASA held a press conference in which Simon was the only one of the dozen authors to appear. Simon also gave a TED talk on this subject, and in 2011 Time Magazine named her one of “Time’s 100 people,” supposedly the most influential group in the world.

The problem, which emerged pretty rapidly, is that this discovery was wrong. The research was sloppy, the reviewers apparently didn’t have the proper expertise to review the paper, and researchers who did have the expertise began pointing out the discovery’s flaws, first online and then in a series of eight critiques published in Science.

You can see my four posts on this paper here, including the original publication plush simultaneous pushback, along with a more recent New York Times article that more or less whitewashed the paper by painting Wolfe-Simon as a victim (see Greg Mayer’s take in the same post). I wonder if the NYT will finally give a more balanced view of the controversy in which Wolfe-Simon fought like a honey badger for the accuracy of the paper’s results. She was far from being a victim.

Click below to read the editorial retraction, but I’ve reproduced it below:

Here’s what Thorp said:

 The Research Article “A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus” by F. Wolfe-Simon et al. (1) has been the subject of discussion and critique since its online publication in 2010. In 2011, Science published the print version of the paper accompanied by eight Technical Comments (2–9) and a Technical Response from Wolfe-Simon et al. (10), along with an Editor’s Note (11). In 2012, Science published two papers that failed to reproduce the finding that the GFAJ-1 bacterium can grow using arsenic instead of phosphorus (12, 13). 

Science did not retract the paper in 2012 because at that time, Retractions were reserved for the Editor-in-Chief to alert readers about data manipulation or for authors to provide information about postpublication issues. Our decision then was based on the editors’ view that there was no deliberate fraud or misconduct on the part of the authors. We maintain this view, but Science’s standards for retracting papers have expanded. If the editors determine that a paper’s reported experiments do not support its key conclusions, even if no fraud or manipulation occurred, a Retraction is considered appropriate. 

Over the years, Science has continued to receive media inquiries about the Wolfe-Simon Research Article, highlighting the extent to which the paper is still part of scientific discussions. On the basis of the 2011 Technical Comments and 2012 papers, Science has decided that this Research Article meets the criteria for retraction by today’s standards. Therefore, we are retracting the paper. Author Ronald S. Oremland is deceased. Author Peter K. Weber disagrees with the Retraction. Authors Felisa Wolfe-Simon, Jodi Switzer Blum, Thomas R. Kulp, Gwyneth W. Gordon, Shelley (Hoeft) McCann, Jennifer Pett-Ridge, John F. Stolz, Samuel M. Webb, Paul C. W. Davies, and Ariel D. Anbar also disagree with the decision to retract and have posted an online letter  explaining their objections, available at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu5488#elettersSection, explaining their objections. 

H. Holden Thorp, Editor-in-Chief, Science 

Well, now, Thorp brings up an interesting point: should papers be retracted if their data don’t support the conclusions? In my view, no.  There are tons of papers published in which authors make claims that go beyond the data but in which there is no fraud.  A famous example, and one which I criticized in two papers in Evolution, was Sewall Wright’s famous “shifting balance” theory of evolution.  By combining several real phenomena like genetic drift with speculations about possible phenomena like adaptive peak shifts, Wright confected a grand overarching theory of evolution” (SBT) that was unsupported by the data. But most evolutionists bought the SBT and it appeared in all the textbooks.

But our criticisms were on the mark.  Even Jim Crow, Wright’s colleague and friend at Wisconsin, admitted that we (Michael Turelli, Nick Barton and I) were right. Likewise, many of Theodosius Dobzhansky’s papers have conclusions unsupported by the data.  But they stand unretracted in the literature. And, indeed, even though the conclusions may have been overstated, the data are still valuable, and should not be retracted.  Retraction should be reserved for papers containing fraud or misconduct, not papers whose data don’t support the conclusions, for those papers have still gone through peer review and they have data that might be useful. The main culprits should be the reviewers who let shoddy data into the literature.

And, as Thorp noted above, the authors were given a chance to reply to the retraction. Here’s their response (references can be seen at the links):

Ariel Anbar
Paul Davies
Gwyneth Gordon
Tom Kulp
Shelley (Hoeft) McCann
Jennifer Pett-Ridge
John Stolz
Jodi Switzer Blum
Samuel Webb
Felisa Wolfe-Simon 

In 2011, we published a manuscript in Science proposing that an extremophilic microbe isolated from arsenic-rich Mono Lake, CA (GFAJ-1) utilized arsenic (As) in place of phosphorus (P) in its biochemistry (1). This provocative hypothesis was based on our interpretation of data from growth experiments and compositional studies of key biomolecules. The high-profile nature of the publication’s release focused attention on its interpretations of As-substitution in DNA, drawing widespread attention, criticism, and follow-up research (e.g., 2-5, but see also 6). In the years since, an alternative interpretation emerged that GFAJ-1 is an extremely As-resistant bacterium that remains dependent on P but uses several novel tactics to grow under P-starved conditions (2, 3). 

Nearly 15 years later, the editors of Science have retracted our publication. We do not support this retraction. While our work could have been written and discussed more carefully, we stand by the data as reported. These data were peer-reviewed, openly debated in the literature, and stimulated productive research. 

The editors’ basis for retraction is that the “paper’s reported experiments do not support its key conclusions”. No misconduct or error is alleged. This represents a major shift from the standards Science adhered to in the past, which aligned with those of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). COPE guidelines state that “Retraction might be warranted if there is clear evidence of major errors, data fabrication, or falsification that compromise the reliability of the research findings” (7). In going beyond COPE, the editors of Science explain that “standards for retracting papers have expanded”. 

We disagree with this standard, which extends beyond matters of research integrity. Disputes about the conclusions of papers, including how well they are supported by the available evidence, are a normal part of the process of science. Scientific understanding evolves through that process, often unexpectedly, sometimes over decades. Claims should be made, tested, challenged, and ultimately judged on the scientific merits by the scientific community itself. 

I agree with the authors’ point here, though they are a bit disingenuous, not admitting that a passel of other scientists could not reproduce their data, and therefore they no longer stand by it. Instead, they dug in their heels.  Their point is right but they are not being fully honest about what happened. My solution: Science can put a disclaimer beside with the original paper saying that the results could not be reproduced, but no—no retraction.

But wait! There’s more! Thorp, a man for whom I don’t have a huge amount of respect, had to have the last word, and published the attached along with Valda Vinson, the executive editor of Science.  Again, click on the headline to read, but I’ve put Vinson and Thorp’s response to the authors’ response below:

The text of Vinson and Thorp:

On 2 December 2010, Science published online the Report “A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic Instead of phosphorus” by F. Wolfe-Simon et al., which caused a media sensation and a firestorm in the scientific community that has continued for years. Today, Science is retracting the paper.

The Wolfe-Simon et al. Report described a bacterium, GFAJ-1, that purportedly not only grew in the presence of arsenate, which is normally highly toxic, but grew “by using” the arsenic atoms and incorporating them into nucleic acids. The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which contributed authors to the paper and provided funding, held a press conference announcing the findings as proof of “arsenic life,” a breakthrough in astrobiology. The scientific community immediately expressed skepticism, raising serious questions about both the plausibility of arsenic-containing nucleic acids and the way the experiments were conducted.

Science was flooded with commentary on the problems with the paper and held off publishing it in print. Eventually, the paper was published in the 3 June 2011 issue, along with eight Technical Comments, a Technical Response from the authors, and a note from Editor-in-Chief Bruce Alberts explaining the decision and timing. The authors agreed to make the bacterium available, and in July 2012, Science published two papers showing that the bacterium was resistant to arsenate and did not incorporate it into biomolecules. One of the Technical Comments had pointed out that the nucleic acids that were analyzed were not sufficiently purified before the acquisition of spectra that suggested the presence of arsenic. Given the evidence that the results were based on contamination, Science believes that the key conclusion of the paper is based on flawed data.

At no point has there been any discussion or suggestion at Science of research misconduct or fraud by any of the authors. Nonetheless, the response of many in the scientific community, especially on social media, went beyond technical criticism and instead verbally abused the authors, especially the first author. Science emphatically rejects and condemns all ad hominem attacks that have been directed toward the authors.

In his 2011 Editor’s Note, Alberts explained that the publication of the Technical Comments was “only a step in a much longer process.” We are ending that process today by retracting the paper. We have made this decision after an extensive set of deliberations and discussions among the editors. We have consulted with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and are confident that our decision aligns with their guidelines for research integrity.

Over the years since the paper was published, and especially in the past 5 years, as research integrity has become an even more important topic, Science has moved to retract papers more frequently for reasons other than fraud and misconduct. In this case, a number of factors led to the publication of a paper with seriously flawed content, including the peer review process and editorial decisions that we made. With this retraction—and with all retractions and corrections—we acknowledge and take responsibility for the role that we played in the paper’s publication.

The authors of the paper all disagree with our decision, as noted in the Retraction. All but one of the authors have signed an eLetter explaining their disagreement. In their eLetter, the authors state that Science “went beyond COPE” in our decision. We disagree. COPE guidelines have for some time allowed for editorial retraction due to honest error or naïve mistakes.

Despite our disagreement with the authors, we hope this decision brings the story to a close. We also hope that the scientific community will engage graciously and with professionalism in this resolution.

Valda Vinson is the Executive Editor of the Science journals. vvinson@aaas.org

H. Holden Thorp is the Editor-in-Chief of the Science journals. hthorp@aaas.org

This would have sufficed as the explanation for the original retraction, even though there should have been no retraction. Instead, what’s right above could have been the editors’ first word, not their last: an explanation of the problems with the paper. The editors simply had to have the last word, publishing two notes instead of one.

Now the government is trying to police scientific journals for “viewpoint diversity”

April 25, 2025 • 9:30 am

The article below from MedpageToday (click headline below to read, or find it archived here) reports that the government has begun policing at least three scientific journals, asking them if they enforce viewpoint diversity and how their vet their manuscripts, especially those with “competing viewpoints.” In other words, the Trump administration is now doing to scientific journals (well, at least a few) what it’s doing to American colleges and universities. The only difference is that the letter to the journals doesn’t have an explicit threat, though there’s an implicit one since the letter is from a U.S. Attorney and requests a response.

An excerpt from MedpageToday:

A federal prosecutor sent a letter to a medical journal editor, probing whether the publication is “partisan” when it comes to “various scientific debates.”

Edward R. Martin Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a list of questions to CHEST Editor-in-Chief Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH, of the Cleveland Clinic, asking how the journal handles “misinformation” and “competing viewpoints,” among other things.

MedPage Today has learned that at least two other journals have received similar letters.

“It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” the letter stated.

Martin’s letter asks five questions, including how the journal assesses its “responsibilities to protect the public from misinformation,” and how it “clearly articulate[s] to the public when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others.”

It also asks whether the journal accepts manuscripts from “competing viewpoints” as well as how it assesses the role of “funding organizations like the National Institutes of Health in the development of submitted articles.”

Finally, it asks how the journal handles allegations that authors “may have misled their readers.”

“I am also interested to know if publishers, journals, and organizations with which you work are adjusting their method of acceptance of competing viewpoints,” Martin wrote. “Are there new norms being developed and offered?”

Martin requested a response by May 2.

The letter to CHEST was dated April 14 and was originally posted on Xopens in a new tab or window by Eric Reinhart, MD, of Chicago.

These of course are not only unethical but probably illegal attempts at censorship—trying to chill science, and for reasons I can’t quite discern.

The article has a few responses, including one from FIRE:

Adam Gaffney, MD, MPH, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts, said the letter “should send a chill down the spine of scientists and physicians.”

“It is yet another example of the Trump administration’s effort to control academic inquiry and stifle scientific discourse — an administration, it warrants mentioning, that has embraced medical misinformation and pseudoscience to reckless effect,” Gaffney said in an email to MedPage Today. “Journal editors should join together and publicly renounce this as yet more thinly guised anti-science political blackmail.”

JT Morris, a senior supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, noted that in a First Amendment case such as this, the law is clear: “A publication’s editorial decisions are none of the government’s business, whether it’s a newspaper or a medical journal.”

“When a United States Attorney wields the power of his office to target medical journals because of their content and editorial processes, he isn’t doing his job, let alone upholding his constitutional oath,” Morris said in an email to MedPage Today. “He’s abusing his authority to try to chill protected speech.”

CHEST is, according to Wikipedia, “a peer-reviewed medical journal covering chest diseases and related issues, including pulmonology, cardiology, thoracic surgery, transplantation, breathing, airway diseases, and emergency medicine. The journal was established in 1935 and is published by the American College of Chest Physicians.”  It’s not a predatory journal, as far as I can see, but a reputable one of value to the relevant group of doctors.
You can see the contents of the latest issue of the journal here; there doesn’t seem to be anything amiss. And here’s the letter to Chest from (gulp) the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Sounds official and scary, no? (Click to enlarge or go to the link just given.)

 

 

The best response to such a stupid letter is no response: were I the editor, I wouldn’t respond, and then if the government pulls out the heavy artillery, sue them. As the reader who sent me this link noted, “This request is simple to address.  If the DOJ were shown the rigor and vigor with which  scientific viewpoints are attacked and defended during the review process, they would be disabused quickly of any suspicion that competing, non-frivolous  viewpoints are underrepresented in the journals.”

But of course the government doesn’t care about that. It’s more concerned with bullying and chilling science. I hope this doesn’t go to every journal, because you’d see an outcry bigger than the one accompanying the administration’s threat to universities.  In the case of journals, which I don’t believe get federal funding, it’s a case of attempted censorship, pure and simple, and although the government may have some rationale for trying to control the behavior of universities, there is none for censorship of scientific publications. The only censors of such publications are scientists or the journals themselves.

 

h/t: Edwin

Nature Human Behavior is back, this time touting “allyship”

February 24, 2025 • 12:15 pm

In the summer of 2022, the journal Nature Human Behavior put out a notice that it could reject articles that were “stigmatizing” or “harmful” to different groups, regardless of the scientific content. The problems with this stand, which were immediately called out by Steve Pinker, Michael Shermer, and others, is that what is seen as stigmatizing or harmful is pretty much a subjective matter, and, as Pinker tweeted:

I think the journal and its editor were taken aback by this and similar reactions to their statements, and on Day 2 of our USC conference on Science and Ideology in January, the Chief Editor of the journal, Stavroula Kousta, walked back their statement a bit in here 24-minute talk (go here to here her talk; it’s the first one on the video).

But the walking-back didn’t mean that Nature Human Behavior was becoming less woke. Indeed, it just published a ridiculously repetitive and trite paper about how science needs “allyship” to produce a “diverse, equitable, and inclusive academia.” It’s not that STEM isn’t seeking a diversity of groups and viewpoints—though, inevitably, “diversity” in their sense means “diversity of race or sex”—but that this article says absolutely nothing new about the issue. What the journal published now is a prime example of virtue-flaunting that, in the end accomplish nothing.  You can read it by clicking on the screenshot below (it should be free with the legal Unpaywall app), and you can get the pdf here.

The piece begins with the usual claim of “harm”: the same issue that the same journal discussed before:

In academia, despite recent progress towards diversity, biases and microaggressions can still exclude and harm members of disadvantaged social groups.

The person who sent me this article wrote “No citations are given for this claim about bigotry and discrimination at the most liberal, open, welcoming institutions that have ever existed in human history. Amazing.”

The article then gives these figures, which are baffling because one would expect younger women to drop out more rather than less frequently. But they may be correct; I am just not sure that they reflect misogyny:

Such patterns of marginalization are not specific to students. Among US faculty members, for example, women are 6%, 10% and 19% more likely to leave each year than their men counterparts as assistant, associate and full professors, respectively.

I suspect that these departures have little to do with ongoing “structural bias” against women academics, not only because no instances of inbuilt structural bias are actually given, but also, at least for women, a big and recent review by Ceci et al. found either no bias against women’s achievements in academic science or a female advantage—save for teaching evaluations and a slight difference in salary, about 3.6% lower salary for women.   However, the authors do not dismiss the possibility and importance of bias against women.

At any rate, if you haven’t heard come across this advice about “allyship” before, and are an academic, you must be blind and deaf. I’m not going to reprise the paper for you, as you’ve heard it all before.

I’m assuming that well-meaning people agree with me that marginalized scientists should be treated just like everyone else.  But how many times do we need to hear that? At any rate, this paper rings the chimes again, singling out six areas where we’re told how to behave. These are direct quotes.

1.) Listen to and centre marginalized voices.

2.) Reflect on and challenge your own biases (I guess you determine them by taking an “implicit bias” test, a procedure that’s been severely criticized

3.)  Speak up to include and support disadvantaged groups

4.)  Speak out against bias when it happens

5.)  Advocate for institutional initiatives to promote equity and inclusion

6.)  Dismantle institutional policies and procedures of exclusion

#4 and #6 are no-brainers, though, speaking personally, I don’t know of any institutional policies and procedures of exclusion in biology.  The rest are ideological statements assuming that everyone except for the marginalized is biased, and that the way to achieve inclusion is to promote “equity” (do they even know what “equity” means?) And, of course, the entire program reflects the tenets of DEI, which are on the chopping block in the U.S.

Now this article isn’t as bad as ones on feminist glaciology or ones maintaining that Einstein’s principle of covariance supports the view that minorities have an equal claim to objectivity..  No, it’s just superfluous, a farrago of what decent human beings already do, misleading assertions about bias, mixed with patronizing advice that we already follow. It accomplishes nothing save further erode the credibility of editor Kousta.

Here’s the conclusion:

For allyship to be effective in academia, it must be grounded in a deep commitment to DEI. This means recognizing that allyship is not a one-time event, but an ongoing process of learning, reflection and action. Moreover, it needs to go above and beyond symbolic or superficial acts (performative allyship) to demonstrate substantial and meaningful support that is recognized as beneficial by those it is meant to serve (substantive allyship). It is noteworthy to understand and accept that we will make mistakes along the way. No one is perfect, and as explained above, allyship requires a willingness to engage in humility and self-reflection. When mistakes are made, it is important to listen to feedback from disadvantaged groups, take responsibility for any harm caused, and commit to doing better in the future.

In conclusion, everyone can engage in allyship and work to challenge and dismantle systemic bias, creating a more just, equitable and inclusive academic community for all.

At least they used “equitable” properly, meaning “treating people fairly.”  But couldn’t the whole article have consisted of just that sentence?