This week, we discuss the recent controversy surrounding a Nature Communications paper that looks at informal mentorship, the gender of mentee/mentors, and subsequent scientific impact of the mentees. There has a been a call from the Twitter science community for the retraction of the paper.
Edit: Smriti mentions that someone had tweeted and asked people to email the first author, but it was actually the EIC of Nature Comm:
https://twitter.com/pollyp1/status/1329414989032157185
Paper:
AlShebli, B., Makovi, K. & Rahwan, T. (2020). The association between early career informal mentorship in academic collaborations and junior author performance. Nat Commun 11, 5855. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19723-8
Reviewer Comments:
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-020-19723-8/MediaObjects/41467_2020_19723_MOESM2_ESM.pdf
Some relevant twitter threads:
Open letter to Nature Comm editor-in-chief: https://twitter.com/pollyp1/status/1329455882481131524
https://twitter.com/NAChristakis/status/1329471888180072452
https://twitter.com/MGalvanPsych/status/1329798225331703811
https://twitter.com/DaniSBassett/status/1329417981353467907
https://twitter.com/tage_rai/status/1329475077071626240
https://twitter.com/psmaldino/status/1329520846054989825
https://twitter.com/daniela_witten/status/1329444294877384706
https://twitter.com/DrBFreeman/status/1329559143884091392
Ali G (Borat) at Cambridge University: https://youtu.be/-93MpfS5ptc?t=43