At a time when the U.S. government is contemplating changes to federal guidelines governing research with humans, serious questions are being raised about the role of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) in overseeing such research. Particularly, vocal critics have cited lost time, money and even lives under a system that they claim consumes scarce resources and stifles academic freedom.

Male scientists are far more likely to commit fraud than females and the fraud occurs across the career spectrum, from trainees to senior faculty. The analysis of professional misconduct was co-led by a researcher at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and was published today in the online journal mBio.

A science-inclined audience and wide array of communications tools make the Internet an excellent opportunity for scientists hoping to share their research with the world. But that opportunity is fraught with unintended consequences, according to a pair of University of Wisconsin–Madison life sciences communication professors.

Psychological science has come of age. But the rights of a mature discipline carry with them responsibilities, among them the responsibility to maximize confidence in our findings through good data practices and replication.

The most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in the world, such as Cell, Nature, Science, and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), have less and less influence amongst scientists, according to a paper co-authored by Vincent Larivière, a professor at the University of Montreal's School of Library and Information Sciences.

Both male and female scientists view gender discrimination as a major reason women choose to pursue careers in biology rather than physics, according to new research from Rice University.

A large-scale survey of the process for submitting research papers to scientific journals has revealed a surprising pattern: manuscripts that were turned down by one journal and published in another received significantly more citations than those that were published by the first journal to receive them.

In sharp contrast to previous studies suggesting that errors account for the majority of retracted scientific papers, a new analysis—the most comprehensive of its kind—has found that misconduct is responsible for two-thirds of all retractions. In the paper, misconduct included fraud or suspected fraud, duplicate publication and plagiarism. The paper's findings show

Press releases and news stories reporting the results of randomized controlled trials often contain "spin"—specific reporting strategies (intentional or unintentional) emphasizing the beneficial effect of the experimental treatment—but such "spin" frequently comes from the abstract (summary) of the actual study published in a scientific journal, rather than being related to misinterpretation by th

Fewer women than men are asked to write in the leading scientific journals. That is established by two researchers from Lund University in Sweden, who criticise the gender bias.