A New Record For Scientific Retractions?

sciencehabit writes "An investigating committee in Japan has concluded that a Japanese anesthesiologist, Yoshitaka Fujii, fabricated a whopping 172 papers over the past 19 years. Among other problems, the panel, set up by the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists, could find no records of patients and no evidence medication was ever administered. 'It is as if someone sat at a desk and wrote a novel about a research idea,' the committee wrote in a 29 June summary report."

Comments

Indepently repeated trials

[Bronster]

And this, ladies and gentlement, is why real science is done by not only performing the experiement and recording the results, but by writing up your method with sufficient clarity that your results can be replicated by independent researchers.

Once that has been done sufficient times, if your method itself is sound, then the results are valid.

Re:Indepently repeated trials

[digitig]

And this, ladies and gentlement, is why real science is done by not only performing the experiement and recording the results, but by writing up your method with sufficient clarity that your results can be replicated by independent researchers.

Once that has been done sufficient times, if your method itself is sound, then the results are valid.

Nope, not good enough. It's not enough to write it up in such a way that it can be replicated by independent researchers. You should only start to trust the results when it has been replicated by independent researchers. Unfortunately that hardly ever happens, because it's all but impossible to get funding for replication of work that's already been done.

Re:Um

[Anonymous Coward]

Peer review is not designed to catch fraud, although it can, as to work on the assumption that the work may be fraudulent would cost too much and would not even be effective against cleverer frauds. The only way to catch a clever fraud is to try and replicate their work, and this can only happen after publication, usually when another researcher tries to build on the original work. If you do this all fraud will eventually be caught, the best you can hope for in the long run, as a scientist committing fraud, is to be thought of as critically incompetent. For this reason fraud is rare among academic scientists, but is unfortunately more common among their commercial counterparts.

Re:but but but he has degrees

[Colonel Korn]

he has 50 years of education, anything he writes is fact

20 years from now people will be saying the same thing about this supposed global warming. in the northeast it has actually been cooler than 30 years ago when i was a kid. almost every ridiculous theory about super hurricanes destroying NYC by 2010 have not happened.

To summarize: straw man, nonsense, nonsensical anecdote that doesn't matter even if true, straw man.

Re:Um

[ceoyoyo]

"Some sort of independent verification needs to be worked into the process before a new study is put out there for general consumption."

The media, and the public, need to learn. Publishing and dissemination are a critical part of science and shouldn't be compromised to make some reporters' jobs easier. Fraud isn't even the big problem with jumping to conclusions based on unverified studies - FAR more studies will be incorrect simply due to honest false positives than to fraud.

Fixing the wrong problem

[DragonWriter]

Unfortunately, it is upon publication when a study is picked up by the media and exposed to the general public. By the time other scientists try to replicate the experiments and find they're bullshit, it's "too late" in a sense.

Some sort of independent verification needs to be worked into the process before a new study is put out there for general consumption.

The whole point of the scientific method is that putting work out for general consumption is the best avenue for independent verification (to adapt a phrase familiar to this audience, one might think of it as "with many eyes, all non-reproducible results are shallow".)

The fact that reporters covering science in the popular media lack a basic understanding of the scientific method is a reason to change something, but the thing that needs change isn't scientific publishing.