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Studies Suggest Massive Increase In Scientific Fraud
Titus Andronicus writes "Scientific fraud has always been with us. But as stated or suggested by some scientists, journal editors, and a few studies, the amount of scientific 'cheating' has far outpaced the expansion of science itself. According to some, the financial incentives to 'cut corners' have never been greater, resulting in record numbers of retractions from prestigious journals. From the article: 'For example, the journal Nature reported that published retractions had increased tenfold over the past decade, while the number of published papers had increased by just 44 percent.'"
There's more money in it now.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
I keep hearing that America is falling behind in the publishing wars as well, how do the numbers stack up as "Fraudulent Submissions" vrs. "Increase in Articles from Crappy Countries"?
That is old news. Research in many areas of academic science has been mostly unreproducible for some time. http://dissention.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/why-all-publicised-breakthroughs-are-lies/
retractions is a bad measurement.
More and more data is open and available, so when 1 person committed fraud, it impacts many papers that come after it. The paper aren't committing fraud, there the victim of the first guy.
So I could commit frauds, and after 10 year it could impact 100 papers.
So retraction is a very poor way to determine this.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The more scientists who commit fraud and outcompete honest scientists for funding, the higher the bar becomes for the honest scientists. With dwindling tenure positions (and far more scientists competing for those positions), in order to be considered for tenure you have to meet very high productivity standards : a large number of peer reviewed papers in high-impact journals.
Well, real research takes time, money, and if it's good research, it will FAIL most of the time. It HAS to fail...to find something truly new you have to leave the bounds of existing knowledge, and most solutions anyone attempts are going to fail. The only way to guarantee an experiment will succeed is to :
1. Research something you really already know the answer to. Hence the popularity of further research on the dangers of smoking. Throw a dart at a picture of a human body, check if someone else has researched it, if not, check. You will "discover" that cigarette smoke is quite harmful to or increases the prevalence of . This kind of research is not fraud, per say, but is really boring to high impact journals SO
2. Discover something marginal with real research, then use photoshop and obscure statistical methods to make it look like you have a real discovery. Make outlandish claims about the prospect of your discovery revolutionizing everything.
And so on. The problem is, there ARE real discoveries made, every now and then, that would be huge IF large sums of money were spent to develop the REAL advances. But, if you have 10 fakers for every legitimate discovery, and you try to fund them all equally, most of the money gets wasted and so we live in a society without effective treatments for cancer, without a cost effective way to reach low earth orbits, without any of the other things that technology theoretically could make possible.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
--Upton Sinclair
Money and science are an uneasy mix at the best of times, and it's downright poisonous when there are concerted, well-funded efforts to undermine science on multiple fronts.
Who isn't a scientist and doesn't publish in journals, so has nothing to retract from them. You might as well say "I've been saying this for years about Ron Jeremy".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So there's 196 papers retracted since 2001? That's far less than the number of papers published in my subfield (condensed matter physics) each day. It's simply easier to find the tiny fraction that do cheat now that everything is more readily available.
asia is real big on tech the test and cheating aka (copying others) / doing solo work as group.
But this is what you get when it's all about your test score and not about knowing what the test covers.
Now we need to have a LOT more classes based on real work with maybe even no test / finale or a finale that useing more a real work setting.
Also more tech / vol schools so college can take the load off and people can go to classes where they learn real skills and not loads of theory.
College for all just drags college down and most jobs should need some post high school learning but not just college and not 4 years of it. Even 2 years of pure classroom is pushing it as well.
In my experience as a scientist, what has increased is the pressure to publish quickly. So, people publish results that haven't been checked as much as they perhaps should be. But this is not fraud, and perhaps it's even healthy. Better to get crazy results out there than bury them in notebooks: sometimes they turn out to be major discoveries.
When the most corrupt people in America include so many of our most powerful politicians, corporate CEOs, and Wall Street barons it is unreasonable to expect any facet of American society to remain unaffected. The only and only thing you can be sure will "trickle-down" is corruption as the system has been rigged by the corrupt to ensure that it is corruption that pays the big bucks in America.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Has anyone thought of good ways of combating this? Is it possible to have every study "peer reviewed" by a completely independent, impartial party. And by that, I don't just mean the checking the paper itself, but overseeing the ENTIRE experiment from start to finish including the production of the data so that it can't be skewed.
We'll need double the amount of people, but in the end, science could grow 10x faster.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
You may want to start with http://sites.google.com/site/worlddump1/ and generally search for 'WORLDCOMP'. At least some people have been taking a scientific approach to address potential fraud...
College for all / Sports teams (football and baseball)
football and baseball players at least at some schools leads to cheating or them getting free passing at least at some schools. Now there should be some kind of minor league for baseball and football and players should not be forced to go classes it should be open to them but say some one who is real good at sports but not so much at learning should not have to take a full load of classes and vocational should be open to them as well. Why can't you be on the football team and being taking a vocational class load as well?
I'll have you know that Ron Jeremy has done breakthrough work in the field of Combinatorics.
Specifically, a paper published in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society titled An Application of the Pigeon Hole Principle in Double-Penetration Scenes.
You are welcome on my lawn.
By making a list a cheating points, and build a ranking of discredited scientists? Productivity points earned by being published in peer reviewd journals, would easily be lost by being published on the cheater's list. Would this be possible? If not, why?
Like those pesky vaccinations that kept you from dying before you turn 1.
Yeah, ok.
Perhaps the journals just don't do enough due-diligence anymore? The rush to publish in a world with 24-hour news and the internet...
Fraud isn't science, and I don't trust any study that suggests increasing it. I suggest a decrease in fraud.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Even good studies can have aberrant results that start with promising findings and end in retraction. The fact that retractions are up is not inherently indicative of more fraud, it could just as well be indicative of more pressure and more thorough peer review.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Why isn't medicine science? Testing of cures is pretty scientific.
Why isn't psychology science? Just because its subject of research is the mind doesn't mean it's not scientific.
There's more money in it now.
While more money is spent in science, the scientists themselves have in general not had a meaningful raise in some time. Anyone who goes in to science to make money is, to say the least, misguided. Scientific research is often the least profitable venture you can pursue with a PhD.
The additional money being spent in science is largely going to keep the lights on in the lab. Scientists need to pay for their utilities and consumables, all of which have risen in price while their wages generally have not.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
How am I supposed to trust the results of these studies anyway?
because we want kids to try. The football team may seem like a path, but for the vast, vast majority of them it will go no where.
If a child is in high school an displaying football, and is under 6 feet, the parents shouldn't be relying on a foot ball future.
Since kids a re lazy, and ignorance is a low energy state, we have to set goals for them.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
... Soulskill. Thank you. I hadn't been reading slashdot very closely this week and was wondering if I was going to miss out on the blatant conservative pandering that is a regular feature of slashdot's front page. Not to let me down, soulskill comes through.
Thank you, I guess. And yes, I know I will be moderated straight down to hell for this. But you can't say I'm not right on the matter.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
String theory!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
It's looking like those crazy conspiracy theorists that claim corporate scientists are less than honest are correct. While those that defend such scientists ("but they're scientists they have to be honest") are looking more like religious nuts that refuse to see the truth regarding their idols. As the litigious environment in many western nations demonstrates, a degree doesn't make a person decent. Whether the degree is in law or in a science.
Psychology isn't a proper science because it went off the deep end in the 20th century. Little work is ever done to reexamine the basics unlike, say, physics.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
I can say that you're wrong. Do you even know what "conservative" means?
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
...increase in transparency? I suspect that there was at least as much of this sort of stuff decades ago but most of it was handled behind closed doors.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
and i will be damned if some band of meddling kids and their ridiculous dog will foil my plans!
Some of medicine is pretty good, but a lot is based on judgement and seat of the pants decisions - more like an engineering discipline.
It's also possible that it's not that the amount of fraud has increased, its that we've gotten a lot better at catching it.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I've always wondered if 50% or more cheat on tests and papers in college, how does that fall to zero by PhD? Well I guess it does not.
So I made projections of when the number of retractions would equal the number of articles, but I found an error in my data set.
I had to retract it.
on this story. Asshats. Seriously? How many of those retracted papers dealt with the studies relating to climate change?
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
It might be interesting to think about the ways that increases in scientific fraud parallels the recent financial industry meltdown that resulted from the mortgage industry mess.
In the mortgage industry back in the old-old days, when you wanted to borrow money, you took your information (w2, bank account statements, etc,) down to the local bank which analyzed your finances and issued you a loan based on thier "gut" feeling on your credit worthiness. This was found to be a very non-scaleable, often discriminatory system, however the risk was localized therefore immediate feedback was available (banks that issued too many bad loans failed).
Then the industry evolved. Credit reporting agencies and credit scores were created to reduce discrimination, and automate decision processes and help quantify risk, and packaging was created to securitize loans which effectively aggregated and anonymized both borrowers and banks and attempted to present an abstract risk profile to folks investing in debt. The risk/return profile of this investment created a high demand for more securitized loans, creating a scarcity. What happens when demand exceeds supply? Either the price goes up (the yield of the debt investment goes down when the price goes up), or some risk takers will attempt to increase the supply by substituting marginal quality goods (loans that aren't well vetted). Then when others see their success with marginal quality goods, even the regular suppliers take the plunge and drop their quality to maintain their market share. Large coalitions enter the field and start to game the system. The lack of information available to the investors due to anonymization and aggregation amd increased leverage (firms started using derivatives and CDOs to invest in mortages) set us up for the financial industry fall. Then the cards all fell down.
Historically, scientific publishing when you wanted to get your paper published, you sent a pre-print to a journal and they attemped to referee the paper based on the "gut" feeling of their reviewers. This was fairly unscalable and often discriminatory system, but the risk of a poor quality paper was localized to the journal (basically journals that published too many bad papers would lose credibility).
We are in the midst of an evolution in scientific publishing. Now there are many mroe researchers and many more journals. Many journals don't have the staff to do a good job a vetting the papers, and the specialization, cost and expense of many research fields make peer-review "santity" checking across different research groups difficult. Ironically, as we have more information about science, we have less information about the quality of that information. Since published results attract scarce research dollars, the cost of doing good research that results in published papers go up (reducing the ROI on research dollars), or some risk takers will attempt to attract scarce research dollars with sub-quality work... and so on...
Let's hope that large coalitions don't enter to game the system, nor research grants are anonymized from author and institution as researchers move around and institutions do joint projects, nor that large research projects leverage questionable earlier research w/o information or verification or we may be building a similar house of cards with scientific research literature. Isn't scientific literature supposed to all be about leverage (standing on the shoulders of giants)? Aren't certain publication too-big-to-fail? Aren't large research coalitions monopolizing areas of grant money in certain fields and effectively owning the available peer-review resources? Maybe we've already set the table and just don't know it yet.
Some food for thought...
AGW research hasn't been impacted.
I'll answer that for him!
A conservative is a middle-aged white male strawman who hates Science, thinks the Earth is 6,000 years old, believes in every major religion, murders at least 5 black people a day, gets to vote 100 times in each election, is richer than Scrooge McDuck, has an IQ equal to their geographical latitude, and is secretly gay. This demographic composes 50% of the population of America.
More state funding. If you want your research to be taken seriously, use accredited universities and established, or at least untarnished private firms. And fund properly. If your quote is 2 million, sign a contract for 2, with a legitimate over-flow of 3 million. Maybe 50% is too high, but projects do run over budget and sloppy work gets done when cutting corners. Independent verification of costs should be a major consideration. No milking from the researchers end will be tolerated, or get scored bad. No underfunding by the grantor's end, or be blacklisted from major research firms. just like peer review, the financing should be brutally scrutinized and harsh punishment doled out. If you want to fund a project, expect to pay properly. If you want to get research money, expect to have your work analyzed and get kicked the f out if you dont pull your weight. Publishing papers look good until they are shown to be worthless.
> Do you even know what "conservative" means?
Of course he does. It means anyone who doesn't share each and every one of his standard-issue "liberal" opinions. In other words, it means exactly the same as "liberal" does to a "conservative".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I don't see how that works. When I publish some work, it's a collection of things I've done. Now maybe I discuss other peoples work in that context, and maybe draw some bad conclusions because of that, but that doesn't merit a retraction. Not at all. That is what eratta are for. Now, if a separate study is based predominantly on another's fraudulent work, wouldn't the researchers necessarily discover the original work was fraudulent as a mater of course? I just don't see how one fraudulent work would result in any other retractions - let alone one hundred. Maybe your field or the way you publish is different than mine. Clue me in.
46 & 2
China is loaded with it due to lack of morals. And as we see more and more chinese occupying American universities, we will see more and more positions based on cheating. Kind of funny that China is destroying American academia by basing theirs on fraud and lies. And yet, we continue to allow it to happen. So sad.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If you think that "new money" coming in to fund those research is the culprit, think again
Back 2 or 3 decades ago a lot of so-called "studies" or "research findings" had already come into questions regarding their validity
For example:
A "study" financed by "Dairy Farmer Association" would definitely come up with the result that "Milk is good for you"
A "research paper" backed by "Pork Industry" would show you how pork is "another white meat" ... and so on ... and so forth
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Whatever he hates. Just like how "liberal" is whatever a republican hates.
When someone says something like "e.g replace global warming with, say, climate change", I can never tell if they're making a lame attempt at humor or are just tremendously ignorant. Global warming and climate change came into use at about the same time (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate_by_any_other_name.html) and they're respective meanings have never changed: global warming remains a subset of climate change. Given how widely this is known, you must remain willfully ignorant to not be aware of that. I always take comments like yours to mean "I don't care about the damn facts, they must be wrong". But I'm sure yours was just a lame attempt at humor, right? ;)
Nuff said.
none
Not being able to repeat an experiment because 'Its already been done' is the mantra of most psychology departments I've heard of.
I can say that you're wrong. Do you even know what "conservative" means?
In this country the conservatives are often looking for excuses to further decimate the already very lean scientific research budget. This article provides another one of those excuses.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
One might almost call that An Inconvenient Truth.
-Styopa
There are a lot of comments indicating that retractions and poor research must always be the result of fraud. Another explanation is just flat-out bad science performed by scientists who are not being held to rigorous standards. I had the privilege of learning how to critically review scientific literature from a well-regarded epidemiologist with no tolerance for bullshit and decades of experience on a variety of review boards critiquing medical literature. I learned that if you look closely, you'll find at least one suspicious element in probably 90% of the papers you read. In many cases (perhaps most), these suspicious elements are just missing things that should have been present (such as how randomization was done in a trial, or what method was used to blind participants) but were probably done adequately anyways (just poor authorship, but a decent study). In other cases, missing elements are missing because required steps weren't done or there is an effort to hide negative results (fraud). One of the tell-tale signs that you are reading a crappy paper is when any statistical tests are only briefly discussed and only p-values are reported (or, even worse, they just tell you whether or not the statistics supported their hypothesis). If I were developing a product or doing research that depended on other scientific research, I would read it very carefully before applying it. Any scientific journal worth reading will require contact information for a corresponding author, whom you can contact with any questions. If that author won't answer questions or provide their dataset for verification (whenever applicable and legal to do so), you should throw the study away and write the journal about the flaws in the study and the author's failure to appropriately respond. There ARE mechanisms in place for weeding this crap out, but part of the problem with the scientific literature right now is the lack of critical ability in the general readership. A lack of funding for - and unwillingness to publish - research that merely confirms or conflicts with existing research is another issue. I would say both of these issues, and the fact that most types of studies don't have accepted standards which define a high-quality study (randomized trials in medicine and the CONSORT statement are a notable exception) are larger than the issue of blatant fraud, since academic fraud is one of the reasons many universities can use to revoke tenure (the ultimate goal of most academics).
I'll have you know that Ron Jeremy has done breakthrough work in the field of Combinatorics.
Specifically, a paper published in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society titled An Application of the Pigeon Hole Principle in Double-Penetration Scenes.
Not to mention his breakthrough work, Organic Approaches to the Traveling Salesman Scenario in Odd-Numbered Orgy Scenes.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
It should be different.
Science/Math/Engineering are supposed to be the areas that relatively pure knowledge reign. I know, Academic backbiting and all, but 30 years ago (maybe?) Science was all about "Geeks, eew, who wants to talk to them?" but if they wheeled off "Calculations" they weren't far off. Your classic fun example was Doc Brown from Back to the Future. You called the Theory Total Bonkers, but you wrote that off as Mad-Science-Crazy, NOT Cheating.
I feel the difference today - blatantly biased reports, ludicrous sample sizes, all kinds of Semi Science (maybe good ideas in there) being smashed out for 1 day blog article news.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I like a sensationalistic study and article as much as the next guy. It makes me tingle and wakes up my flight or fight response.
But I am wondering how to interpret such findings.
Is the classification of retractions based on when the retraction came or when the paper was published? Such a dramatic rise in such a short time is really amazing. Also, how do the numbers compare relative to the number of publications? How are the numbers distributed by source (academia or industry)?
Is this high number of retractions a good thing or a bad thing? Are we getting better at identifying bad papers and papers getting more honest at retracting them, or are the retractions the tip of an even faster growing iceberg of fraud?
How will this affect academic research (tenure, grants, status)? How should students be evaluated (as opposed to "publish or perish")? Should researchers be more cautious when they take a dependency on a prior result, as the volume and quality of publications is shifting?
https://xkcd.com/882/
No attempt at humor. I'm not going to be offended by you calling me willfully ignorant, because I didn't give you enough information. I've just noticed there seems to be an editorial bias on slashdot towards stories that deny anthropogenic global warming. I'd seen the science paper retraction story on another site. It is indeed disturbing, but it does show that the process of science still works. If those bad papers weren't being retracted then we'd be in a much worse situation. As soon as I saw the globalwarming tag, I knew the asshats who put them there were still trying to cast doubt on that humans were changing the climate. I'm not seeing anything in the article about retractions of papers on global warming, or rather about the study of ice cores, of tree rings, of sediment cores, of analysis of weather records over time--all the disciplines that are studied to form a picture of our climate and to predict what is happening.
The rise in retractions seems to have almost become exponential over the past 6 years. That we knew and had predicted humans were causing climate change by increasing the warming of the climate was pretty well understood by the late 1980's. In fact many of the predictions have been born out since then. We aren't seeing retractions of papers from the 1980's, but the late 2000's.
Anyway, here is an excellent resource called The Discovery of Global Warming (See the timeline: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/timeline.htm). It's also a book. I hope that clarifies where I stand on the issue and why I called them asshats. Because only an asshat would try to make a connection. And I'm still waiting for that list of retracted papers about global warming.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Which scientific theory has been in the media for over a decade... and has been the subject of dozens of high level and consistent retractions?
And yet retains unwavering support despite no disclosure of methodology, no disclosure of raw data, and no ability to predict future or even past conditions using the model...
It's a problem. This happens when the science isn't put first. When anything else involves itself... be it money or power or sex or ideology or religion it all goes to hell. The science has to come first. Scientists have to be detached and disinterested in what results they get so long as they're accurate.
Personally, I think the biggest thing they could do is make data collection a more prestigious position within the scientific community. Currently, it seems like all the status goes to the people that theorize on the data. But without the data there can be no theory. And without really accurate data even a good theorist will come to wrong conclusions.
Possibly divide up the scientific community much as a hospital is divided. Diagnosticians are divided from surgeons. Some of them are really good at working things out and some are really good at literally fixing people. By the same token, accurate data collection is not easy. It often requires a lot of leg work or exposure to uncomfortable conditions. Maybe you're playing with really nasty chemicals. Maybe you're crawling around in deep caves. Whatever. Make data collection an end unto itself. Possibly even subdivide the scientists further by tasking a third branch with sorting, storing, and providing the information for the theorists. In this way, the data should be collected without any bias as to what it should prove. People will just be collecting it to collect it rather then collecting it specifically to prove their pet theory. And then the librarians will offer that data to all the theorists on request. It will be very hard for scientists to bias results given that the raw data is freely available.
This would sort of be like a blind survey. If theorists want a given type of data, they put in an official request for someone to collect it... Scientists elsewhere collect that data and upload it to the librarians. The librarians then make it available to all the theorists. This separation between A B and C would make fraud more difficult.
Access to the librarians data might be conditional on your university providing data to the librarians. So, if someone at your university collects data on the mating habits of butterflies you would be download data on the concentrations of dark matter in the milkyway. Some sort of quid pro quo systems that makes data collection a requirement so you don't get a whole university of theorists that never collect any data and just analyze other people's data.
Maybe I'm full of crap... I think that would helpl
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
When I was doing my psych undergrad degree I saw many just amazingly shitty studies that were presented not as examples as what not to do, but as perfectly normal studies. Never did I see a study where the conclusion didn't support the hypothesis. It was never a case of "Our data was inconclusive, we can neither falsify nor support the hypothesis," (which you'd expect to see a lot with something as complex and varied as the mind) or "This data clearly falsifies our hypothesis, revision is required." Nope, always it was "Look! We proved we were right! Yay us!"
Two that I remember the most:
One was a study that "proved" (author's words) that violent video games caused violence. For this the author had one group of people play Unreal Tournament and another group play Myst. They then measured things like heart rate, "aggressive behaviour" and so on. Well in addition to the games being rather out of date at the time the problem I saw was that they were totally different. I mean shit they are lucky the people playing Myst had a pulse at all afterwards. It is a slow, slow game.
I e-mailed them suggesting that they had at least one confounding variable, the intensity of the game, and that they should redo the study with that controlled. I said go ahead and still use the UT platform, but upgrade to UT2004 since it was newer, however have one group play the regular version with rockets n' lazars n' shit and another group play the freeze tag mod. That is still an intense, competitive, game but there's no violence. You just have a freeze ray that freezes opponents, or thaws friends.
No response. They weren't interested in doing anything that could show they were wrong.
The other was a study on our campus about Internet addiction. Most study "volunteers" for psych studies are undergrads that have to do it for course credit. So I decided to do that one. As soon as I started filling out the survey, there was trouble. It started off with things like "How long do you spend logged in to the Internet each day?" and "How long do you stay logged in on average each time?" Well this was mid 2000s. Like many people, particularly geeks, I had what we almost all have now: Always on Internet. I had DSL at home, and worked on campus. My computers were ALWAYS on the Internet. It was just a seamless part of my experience. I didn't log in and out, I just used it along with other shit.
So I tried to tell the researcher that. She just couldn't understand the concept. She kept trying to say "Well ya ok but still, how much do you log in to it for?" and I kept trying to explain that there was no logging in, it was just there. Tried to use her computer, which was on the campus network, as an example. The problem was in her view running IE -was- logging in because it took like 30 seconds to launch on account of the system being so old and slow. She only did one thing at a time with the computer, and the Internet was a separate thing. She could not understand that many people, an increasing number every day, didn't work like that and the question wasn't valid.
She pressed on with the study, unchanged, anyhow (without my data, I left).
There was just this culture of "Come up with a theory, do a study, do whatever it takes to bash the data in to 'supporting' your theory, publish a paper that shows it as a success."
But many results are *not* reproducible with a reasonable effort. Who is to double-check the results of the LHC, where decades have been spent on detectors alone?
My theoretical PhD work in condensed matter science took roughly twenty years of (single-) CPU hours. To *independently* reproduce my results you would have to
-find a code that uses the same or similar approximations as my code does (easy)
-Modify that code so that it has the same capabilities (theoretically easy - not that easy in reality, most codes are spaghetti Fortran code that has evolved for 20 years)
-Do the same calculations (hope no one else wants to use the compute cluster)
-Rewrite or at least double-check my analysis program(s) (5k lines of rather complicated Fortran code - at least it is somewhat readable (I think, after working with it for four years))
Of course, I could just hand in my code and my data - and then the reviewer would see that the black box reproduces the numbers printed in my thesis and publications. However, it would be really, really easy to obfuscate my code and insert a little ...guarantee that this happens.
Long story short, the only bulwark against fraud is the personal integrity of the scientist.
this is the 2nd or 3rd similar article i've seen in recent months.
it's starting to smell a lot like a publicity campaign to discredit science in general. ...wonder if these studies are being funded by oil companies or their shills, or neo-liberal think tanks with a vested interest in discrediting science in general and climate science in particular.
Illinois Nazis. I hate those guys.
http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/210/119/+_2acc5a8841f8752904d37f90a8014829.png I think this is related to the biggest problem in science, i.e, the HUGE NUMBER of persons working in this field and consequently, the total number of publications.
There is plenty of well meaning, but naïve suggestions that assume we have a perfect world here. Collecting all scientific articles is a perfect-world solution that is very difficult to actually achieve. Furthermore, most of the actual fraud is driven by impact factor. An expected result that breaks little or no scientific ground will have little impact. A surprising result, or one that can drive a huge amount of future research, will have a very large impact factor. Many scientists will do anything for that, including fraud. One solution to this is to make impact factor just one of many means of evaluating scientists. It would be best for the scientific community to finally recognize that not all worthwhile research would be cited numerous times over just the single following year.
And they wonder why conservatives say they distrust science more than they used to. When you see stories like this, it makes conservatives seem a lot smarter and more informed than the people who belief everything any scientist says... And the people who mock conservatives for having a very valid distrust of a lot of modern science.
What do you expect when student cheating at universities is not only prevalent but accepted as the norm?
If they cheat in school they will cheat at work.
This is just the macroparasitic elites of wealth and power identifying and converting still another asset source. The infection continues worldwide. Who do these corrupt researchers work for? There is the real problem.
E Proelio Veritas.
Clearly this study will get a lot more interest if they come up with the incendiary result that scientific studies are increasingly fraudulent. With such obvious self-interest how can we possibly trust this study?
These studies are fraud !!!
Calling this cheating is kind of complimentary - it suggests the same result is ultimately reached, fraud is much more fitting because it reaches a false result.
Has not been paying attention over the last twenty years.
Also, these are just the papers that have been retracted by the journals because the errors have been so grievous and obvious.
Now, what about all the papers that have been intentionally written to be just wrong enough to pass ?
Put it all together, and you have more than a cancelling-out of the increase in published papers. What we have is journals publishing what amounts to as being mostly noise.
From 1994: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face. (from David Goostein, Vice Provost, Caltech, who testified to Congress back then about this)"
One solution would be a graduate-student level stipend of a "basic income" for *everyone* in the country, so those who were inclined to research could do that, or those who wanted to write free software could do that, or those who wanted to volunteer with local Emergency Medical Services could do that, and others could raise children, and so on. A gift economy could accomplish that too, as could advanced 3D printing, or also better government planning to create free or cheap life-support services related to housing and food. We'll probably see a mix of all that going forward, and there already are aspects of all of those already.
We also need to move beyond this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
"Disciplined Minds is a book by physicist Jeff Schmidt,[1] published in 2000. The book describes how professionals are made; the methods of professional and graduate schools that turn eager entering students into disciplined managerial and intellectual workers that correctly perceive and apply the employer's doctrine and outlook. Schmidt uses the examples of law, medicine, and physics, and describes methods that students and professional workers can use to preserve their personalities and independent thought."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
That doesn't help. Sometimes corporate funding biases research, at other times, corporations have better quality control than fellow researchers. Many "peers" in peer reviews of grants and publications have their own axes to grind; they want research that supports their results and interests to be funded, and they will punish research and researchers whose work contradicts theirs.
And who is going to waste their time reproducing other people's results? You still won't get tenure for that, or the recognition of your peers. For a lot of research, reproduction also doesn't make sense. How are you going to "reproduce" the hockey stick or climate models? Either you believe their assumptions or not, but you won't get any more results or data.
Access to publications just isn't a problem these days. The problem is that many people don't even bother to read the literature, or often aren't even capable of understanding anything outside a really narrow area.
It's not clear that that's needed or helpful. A lot of "negative results" are negative because the experimenter screwed up. And results that contradict existing results already have an easy time getting published.
That, on the other hand, doesn't matter. Nobody cares whether journals complain or not.
Funding agencies, like scientists, face enormously complex tasks and have few people really qualified to deal with it.
Your proposals are based on the false assumption that people are doing their job badly and that if you only do something different, peer reviews, funding agencies, etc. will behave better. But that's wrong. Funding agencies, peer reviews, and science is done by the smartest people you can find for the job, and they work hard and generally with the best of intentions. They just can't do any better.
If you want to change the system, there's a much simpler solution: stop putting so much pressure on scientists. We can never eliminate the pressure to publish and get citations (since it is its own reward), but we can at least remove unnecessary pressure, such as the more-is-better mentality for publications and citations. Maybe we should have a kind of "quote system" where scientists are rewarded for the single best publication each year, not for their total number.
One bit of sunlight on this dismal state of 'science' would be a mandate to register any studies funded by outside organizations or governments before they are done, such that their results are available even if not published or negative.
I once heard from a faculty member at a very prestigious university in the United States that in current research world, it is networking and power that count. If you are honest, you will be kicked out directly. Only those who are dishonest and fake results will prevail.
Or is it that there's just more communication and more people rehashing other people's work? After all, since forever, maybe 90% or some such of all scientific papers are never cited. Probably nobody knows how many of the minor deadend papers ever published are at very least irreproducible.
Remove cut and paste from the internet. Make the cheats at least copy in long hand. That way, at least they know about what they write and publish.
OK
I just read the wikipedia page on retraction. Practically everything is from the field of Biology (genetics, medicine, drug studies...) (Except the Schön scandal.) ...?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retraction
What does it mean? Why is this?
- On this field results are more often reproduced by others?
- Drugs usually do nothing, so there is a greater need for false results?
- Is it more lucrative due to the deep pockets of the drug industry?
Mod parent up if you believe in well deserved justice.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
A group I now published a highly referenced article...turns out they discovered their conclusions were incorrect and they pushed a paper correcting their error (i.e. retracting there previous work) out a year or so later. But the effect still lingers as the original paper gets ref. occasionally as it is "in the wild".