Many Scientists Admit Unethical Practices

jangobongo writes "A surprising number of scientists engage in questionable research practices says a story at the Washington Post. According to a large-scale survey of scientific misbehavior, 15% admit to changing a study under pressure from a funding source. Other reasons for altering data include dropping data from a study based on a gut feeling and failing to include data that contradicts one's own research. This chart gives a quick rundown of the percentage of U.S. based scientists who reported having engaged in questionable research practices according to the survey."

Comments

Ethics

[PhotoJim]

Next they'll be telling us that politicians aren't ethical either. :) People are always tempted to take the easy route...

Re:Ethics

[kfg]

I think about a quarter of the people on my "freaks" list got there because of my stating this point. Bear in mind that this only the percentage of scientist that will admit on a survey. My experience and observations suggest that the percentage is far, far higher. Many how do it aren't even conciously aware enough to know they do. It's just what they do, without even thinking about it.

Yes, science is by nature self-correcting, but when the errors are endemically embedded in the existing systems it can take a lot of time and convict a lot of Gallileos before it gets around to it.

In the meantime time, money and even lives are lost over bullcrap.

The practice of "science," as she is spoke, has become just another job undertaken by people who happened to go for a science degree instead of an MBA or joining the plumbers union.

I have come to empathize with Heinlein, who, through the mouth of Lazarus Long, said something along the lines of "I stopped calling myself doctor when they started handing out PhDs to anyone."

KFG

I've got one thing going for me!

[turtledawn]

When I did my last research project, I had no clue what my results meant and made that clear in my paper!

This was an undergraduate ornithology project that was supposed to take six weeks, according to my advisor. Every professor I've told about it since then has said, that's graduate level at least...

I for one

[Microsift]

Don't trust the science behind this story!

Fortunately...

[khelms]

unlike religion, science is self-correcting over the long term. If someone fudges the data and comes up with a wrong conclusion eventually someone else will discover that and get it right.

Re:Fortunately...

[stlhawkeye]

unlike religion, science is self-correcting over the long term. If someone fudges the data and comes up with a wrong conclusion eventually someone else will discover that and get it right.

Yes. Religion never reviews its own practices, views, and procedures, and changes them. That's why Catholic masses are still spoken in Latin, women must wear hats in church, women can't be deacons or altar servers, diabetics are forced not to eat on Fridays, the church condemns homosexuality as an abberation (actually, some Christian churches do this, but Catholic Canon Law states that homosexuality is not chosen by the individual, the causes of it are unknown, and a man cannot be condemned for being something that is not of his choosing).

I'd posit that religion is much slower to change than science, but no less capable of it.

For the record, I am not a practicing religious person of any kind and generally distrust organized religion in general. I did, however, think your post was predictable backlash against what you believe to be Christian hegemony.

Yay, lots of science isn't.

[Colin Smith]

This is why we have peer review, independant repetition of studies, randomised double blind trials etc. It all comes out in the wash.

Re:Yay, lots of science isn't.

[borroff]

When I was an undergrad, I worked at a campus observatory giving tours, since it wasn't a working research site anymore. It did, however, hold offices for two astrophysics grad students. Since I had taken some graduate classes with one of them, they deigned to speak to me.

One of them was doing his dissertation on stellar pressure gradients. He was having this huge block writing his thesis, because his results contradicted a previously published paper's conclusions, and he couldn't figure out where he went wrong. After some digging and calculating, he realized that the prior paper's data contradicted their conclusion as well, and they had just faked the diagrams to match their predicted result.

So much for peer review...

Already covered

[benploni]

That's why the Scientific Method requires reproducibility. It's not just to weed out confirmation bias or experimental error, but to double check against fraud.

Don't listen to this.

[kjeldor]

The person who wrote conducted this research lied about the results. There are actually no researches whatsoever who falsify data.

The study used loaded questions

[Jimmy_B]

I saw this earlier in the print edition, and it's not really what it sounds like. The question to which 15% said yes was whether you'd ever changed the procedure, methodology, or results of an experiment in response to pressure from a funding source. Well, changing the results would be very, very bad, but they actually asked a separate question on that one and only 0.3% (a statistically insignificant number) said yes. Changing methodology is not necessarily illegitimate; if your funding source says "give me X precision", or "measure Y too while you're at it", then the procedure's going to change to reflect that. It doesn't mean there's bias, it means the question was asked incorrectly.