Slashdot Mirror
How Common Is Scientific Misconduct?
Hugh Pickens writes "The image of scientists as objective seekers of truth is periodically jeopardized by the discovery of a major scientific fraud. Recent scandals like Hwang Woo-Suk's fake stem-cell lines or Jan Hendrik Schön's duplicated graphs showed how easy it can be for a scientist to publish fabricated data in the most prestigious journals. Daniele Fanelli has an interesting paper on PLoS ONE where she performs a meta-analysis synthesizing previous surveys to determine the frequency with which scientists fabricate and falsify data, or commit other forms of scientific misconduct. A pooled, weighted average of 1.97% of scientists admitted to having fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once — a serious form of misconduct by any standard — and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behavior of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices. Misconduct was reported more frequently by medical/pharmacological researchers than others. 'Considering that these surveys ask sensitive questions and have other limitations, it appears likely that this is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct,' writes Fanelli. 'It is likely that, if on average 2% of scientists admit to have falsified research at least once and up to 34% admit other questionable research practices, the actual frequencies of misconduct could be higher than this.'"
Can we please put a stop to all these people citing peer review as a sort of wonder cure?
I peer review a lot of papers. And yes, it catches a lot of bad science. But most of that is just, bad experimental design, bad writing skills, wrong conclusions, uninteresting stuff, etc.
There is nothing I can do against some smart guy who makes up all the numbers, but knows enough of statistics to make it look plausible. It is often not feasible, or even impossible to redo the experiments. I never heard anybody do that anyway (maybe because you get 2-3 weeks to do your review, whereas the work would take half a year at least).
"Have you got any idea how difficult it is to refute an experimental outcome, at least in the less exact sciences?"
The inability to recreate the experiment is a basic method to refute the outcome.
If you can't get their procedure and/or their procedure doesn't work then the outcome is very questionable...