Misconduct, Not Error, Is the Main Cause of Scientific Retractions

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Misconduct, Not Error, Is the Main Cause of Scientific Retractions

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday October 2, 2012 @06:03AM from the fake-data-looks-much-better-than-real-data dept.

ananyo writes "One of the largest-ever studies of retractions has found that two-thirds of retracted life-sciences papers were stricken from the scientific record because of misconduct such as fraud or suspected fraud — and that journals sometimes soft-pedal the reason. The study contradicts the conventional view that most retractions of papers in scientific journals are triggered by unintentional errors. The survey examined all 2,047 articles in the PubMed database that had been marked as retracted by 3 May this year. But rather than taking journals' retraction notices at face value, as previous analyses have done, the study used secondary sources to pin down the reasons for retraction if the notices were incomplete or vague. The analysis revealed that fraud or suspected fraud was responsible for 43% of the retractions. Other types of misconduct — duplicate publication and plagiarism — accounted for 14% and 10% of retractions, respectively. Only 21% of the papers were retracted because of error (abstract)."

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Publish or perish by i+kan+reed · 2012-10-02 06:06 · Score: 5, Interesting

"Get only positive results or never get tenure" is a policy that dooms us to this exact course. Publishing is no longer a consequence of having a brilliant idea, but rather a means to an ends(keeping your job). The academic community needs to find another metric for researcher quality other than papers published. It's costing everyone the truth.
1. Re:Publish or perish by spikenerd · 2012-10-02 06:21 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  ...The academic community needs to find another metric for researcher quality other than papers published...
  such as?
  
  Number of citations? No, it would take a 30-year probationary period before the trend was reliable.
  Have experts evaluate your efforts? No, that would require extra effort on the part of expensive tenured experts.
  Roll some dice? Hmm, maybe that could work.
2. Re:Publish or perish by raydobbs · 2012-10-02 06:22 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  With the public retreat from education, universities have to take their funding from more private sources. As a result, there is outside pressure to do research to favor these outside sources of funding, and you get a recipe for fraud and misconduct. Of course, the universities won't admit that they have had to make a deal with the devil to keep the doors open - and a large part of our (United States) political system is dead-set on taking us backward in terms of scientific progress to appease their less-than-sophisticated backers; and the problem is set to only get worse unless we as a people do something to stop it.
3. Re:Publish or perish by jamesmusik · 2012-10-02 06:32 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Journals don't only publish papers reporting "positive results," whatever that may be. Even if your study comes out a way you didn't expect, if you did it right, you should still be able to get it published. There's something beyond publish or perish that is at work here.
4. Re:Publish or perish by blueg3 · 2012-10-02 06:35 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Journals don't only publish papers reporting "positive results," whatever that may be. Even if your study comes out a way you didn't expect, if you did it right, you should still be able to get it published. There's something beyond publish or perish that is at work here.
  That's what you might think, but getting (most) journals to publish negative results is very difficult.
5. Re:Publish or perish by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-02 06:37 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Journals don't only publish papers reporting "positive results," whatever that may be
  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAhahahaha... ha... oh, oh I'm sorry, but that's funny.
  
  Yes. Journals have a very long history of not publishing 'negative results'. (id est: "We tested to see if X happened under situation Y, but no it doesn't.") Mostly because it's not 'interesting'.
  
  If you want a good example of this, check out the medical field, where the studies which don't pan out aren't published, the ones which do are, leading to severely misleading clinical data, and it leads to problematic results.
6. Re:Publish or perish by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-02 06:39 · Score: 1
  
  Roll some dice? Hmm, maybe that could work.
  I have the sudden urge to make a D20 modern "Tenure of Educational Evil" (If you don't get it, look up Temple of Elemental Evil) and propose that any researcher must be able to take their level 1 researcher through the module to get any funding. (and funding based on how many objectives they complete along the way)
7. Re:Publish or perish by crazyjj · 2012-10-02 06:40 · Score: 1
  
  It's also a great way to keep the grant money flowing in even after you have tenure, particularly if you're publishing findings that are likely to get you grants. And no one gets paid a nice bonus for finding inconclusive or negative results.
  
  --
  What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
8. Re:Publish or perish by js33 · 2012-10-02 06:52 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  A positive result is the rejection of a null hypothesis. In the frequentist statistical paradigm, a failure to reject the null hypothesis is simply not significant. Insignificant results are not usually considered worthy of publication. "If your study comes out a way you didn't expect," then the way you expected your study to come out is a null hypothesis which can supposedly be rejected with some measurable degree of significance. This way you can explain the significance of what you learned from the "failure" of your experiment, and there is no reason you should not be able to publish it.
  That's the statistical paradigm. Results just aren't significant unless you can state them in a positive way.
9. Re:Publish or perish by scamper_22 · 2012-10-02 06:56 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  It's not the academic community that is at fault. It is our society.
  I've long held the view that science only gained the credibility it has because it was free from politics and power.
  But since science has gained such credibility, people think we should now *trust* with power. Which of course destroys the very thing that gave it that trust. Ye old saying 'power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely'.
  For one thing, we now have government funding for science. Sounds like a good idea... except of course. That means funding for universities... which need to hire faculty. So whom do they hire and how much do they pay them? Why did they hire Bob and not Alice? Alice would like a job too. The whole question of fairness comes up.
  Then of course there's the issue of funding projects. Which projects get funded? Which lobbyists and politicians and special interest groups matter? What policies will be impacted?
  It all sounds very neat to have a special scientific class able to deliver *the truth*. It's just completely unscientific and contrary to all empirical evidence in history to think it possible. There has never been a group of wise people in power outside of politics.
  Plato envisioned the Philosopher Kings on a group of wise societal leaders. It is said this actually that this was the foundation of the Islamic Republic in Iran... a group of wise religious people given power in Iran. Not unlike people who wish for rational administration or scientific experts in position in Western society to make decision outside of democracy. It's all too common to hear people wishing for transit policy to be decided by transit experts in 'independent panels'. Or healthcare policy...
  It's a very dangerous road.
  In short... despite all the technology, education, and the internet and accessibility to information... the *truth* remains as elusive as ever.
10. Re:Publish or perish by frosty_tsm · 2012-10-02 07:05 · Score: 2
  
  "Get only positive results or never get tenure" is a policy that dooms us to this exact course. Publishing is no longer a consequence of having a brilliant idea, but rather a means to an ends(keeping your job). The academic community needs to find another metric for researcher quality other than papers published. It's costing everyone the truth.
  I think the issue is not that they need a new metric for researcher quality but to realize that not every professor needs to be an active researcher their whole career.
11. Re:Publish or perish by hsthompson69 · 2012-10-02 07:06 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  Well, you've got the devils on the corporate side, who may be trying to avoid bad press, say large organic potato farmers who don't wan to see studies that show the deleterious effects of carbohydrate intake on obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other chronic diseases. Fewer carbs sold means less profit to the company.
  But then, you've got the devils on the government side, who also may be trying to avoid bad press, say the USDA regulators who don't want to see studies that show the deleterious effects of carbohydrate intake on obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other chronic diseases. In this case, a refutation of government advice (four food groups, food pyramid, my plate), would mean less credibility for government advice in the future.
  In either case, I think we need systems in place to combat fraud. Start off with a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement *before* the study. Publish the result data publicly no matter what the outcome (data retention and dissemination). A focus on double blind placebo controlled work instead of observational studies that can't show causality.
  Trying to pose this as a "government schools are declining, therefore science is going wrong" is a misunderstanding of the fact that government can have non-scientific impulses.
12. Re:Publish or perish by Whole+Stuffed+Camel · 2012-10-02 07:10 · Score: 2
  
  It's not just tenure, even getting a good faculty position is dependent on publication of research in high impact journals. I think that the major conflict of interest in my field, basic biomedical research, rather than funding by pharma etc, is the necessity to generate data suitable for publishing in big journal to get/keep jobs. I'm pretty sure this is going to get very messy if something isn't done to address the problem.
13. Re:Publish or perish by englishknnigits · 2012-10-02 07:11 · Score: 1
  
  http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/09/nosek_on_truth.html
  
  Listen. Learn. Positive, sensational results get published. Negative results only get published if they contradict a well known study/result/notion. Of course there are exceptions, as always.
14. Re:Publish or perish by Gerzel · 2012-10-02 07:27 · Score: 1
  
  Aye. The result isn't surprising at all. In fact it is one of the big reasons why science demands that results be reproducible and methods be published.
15. Re:Publish or perish by JWW · 2012-10-02 07:37 · Score: 1
  
  How about calculated gross earnings of the students you have taught?
  Of course that puts a value on teaching, which is something being discouraged for tenured faculty (which I obviously don't agree with).
  Or you could measure net income from licensing of IP for creation of new technology. Notice I said licensing and creation, I wouldn't want to encourage our universities to continue acting like asses pursuing IP lawsuits as a means to make money.
16. Re:Publish or perish by FrangoAssado · 2012-10-02 08:02 · Score: 2
  
  then the way you expected your study to come out is a null hypothesis which can supposedly be rejected with some measurable degree of significance.
  You have to be very careful here. In serious studies, you don't get to choose your null hypothesis or how you're going to analyse the data after collecting it. That's a textbook example of introducing confirmation bias.
17. Re:Publish or perish by js33 · 2012-10-02 08:32 · Score: 2
  
  You have to be very careful here.
  Yes you do.
  
  In serious studies, you don't get to choose your null hypothesis or how you're going to analyse the data after collecting it. That's a textbook example of introducing confirmation bias.
  There is also the danger of making an unjustified assumption of objectivity. In preliminary studies, scientists will have gathered data, analyzed it, looked for patterns, and tried to come up with all kinds of hypotheses that could be tested. Even the most final, definitively objective experiment is not designed in a cleanroom with complete objective naivete, and often enough the scientist will have a pretty good idea of the expected nature of the data to be collected. So how significant is a failure to reject a null hypothesis? We cannot say without a full application of Bayes' theorem to interchange the roles of statistical power and degree of confidence.
18. Re:Publish or perish by interkin3tic · 2012-10-02 08:54 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  How about calculated gross earnings of the students you have taught? Of course that puts a value on teaching, which is something being discouraged for tenured faculty (which I obviously don't agree with).
  That would also make it in new professors' best interests to not teach the intro level courses where much of the class will change majors and doesn't want to be there in the first place. They'll instead focus on the upper level courses where the weak links have been weeded out.
  
  Guess which courses new faculty get stuck doing now? That would be rewarding the really weaselly ones who were able to skip the hard work.
  
  Furthermore, the students don't care about quality teachers, or else they'd be going to smaller schools known more for teaching than for research grants. They're voting with their wallets for schools where research is valued more than instruction. So your solution is lacking a problem, at least according to the teachers and students of such schools.
19. Re:Publish or perish by FrangoAssado · 2012-10-02 09:03 · Score: 1
  
  often enough the scientist will have a pretty good idea of the expected nature of the data to be collected.
  Sure. I was clarifying that you can't just change to a different method of analysis according to the data you got, just because your original analysis didn't give you the result you expected.
  In other words, you simply can't change your plan once you've seen the data. In this lecture, Feynman gives a very clear and real example of what can go wrong even if you're trying to be completely honest (look for the part where he talks about Millikan). That's a neat example because it's a very controlled experiment measuring a completely objective thing. In other fields, like Medicine or Psychology, it's much harder to know if your own expectations are influencing the study, so it's very important that you follow a very clearly defined plan from the beginning.
20. Re:Publish or perish by SomeKDEUser · 2012-10-02 09:33 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  The problem with biomed research is that the field is rife with people who don't understand models. Biomed research is not really science in that we are not yet at the point where we can express mathematical models to make predictions which are then falsified or not.
  All too often, it is a case of "I knock down/over-express a gene, find that it does something, and then make up some bullshit where I pretend it'll cure cancer". In many cases, articles get published because the reviewers don't say "this claim is not supported by your experiment (purely on the grounds of the claim being logically inconsistent)" or, "you say this thing is happenning, why the fuck did you not quantify it? (See, you claim this thing disappeared, what are the odds your method is just not sensitive enough?)".
  This pepperred with idiots who put gaussian error bars on numbers of cells, which ought to be a motive of immediate rejection. No, I am not bitter.
21. Re:Publish or perish by khallow · 2012-10-02 09:38 · Score: 1
  
  Furthermore, the students don't care about quality teachers, or else they'd be going to smaller schools known more for teaching than for research grants.
  Why? The respective research school selling point is that the teaching is better because the faculty is top notch.
22. Re:Publish or perish by Obfuscant · 2012-10-02 10:38 · Score: 1
  
  Why? The respective research school selling point is that the teaching is better because the faculty is top notch.
  Huh? Where did you get the idea that a good reseach faculty means a good teaching faculty? There's too much pressure on research faculty to do research to expect them to spend alot of their time concentrating on teaching. (Yeah, some research faculty are good teachers, but there is no causation.)
  You go to a reseach school if you want to get involved in research, because that's where the student jobs in research are. You go to a teaching school if you want to learn, because as an undergraduate you aren't going to be concentrating on cutting edge information anyway. Chem 101 is still Chem 101, whether it is taught by a nobel laureate research prof or an instructor.
23. Re:Publish or perish by Daniel+Dvorkin · 2012-10-02 10:40 · Score: 2
  
  In biomed, there are not models to invalidate.
  That statement is one of the stupidest things I've ever read on Slashdot ... which is pretty impressive.
  Okay, I'm going back to building models of developmental gene regulation now. You're welcome.
  
  --
  The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
24. Re:Publish or perish by SomeKDEUser · 2012-10-02 11:18 · Score: 1
  
  These are not models in the sense that the Ether Theory was a model. You build gene regulation networks by accumulating data on what gene acts as a promoter/repressor of another and what are the activation cascades.
  No one will ever invalidate that work through an experiment -- some of the network might be revised, but it is not the case that someone will come up with some experimental proof that there is no such thing as a gene expression network, which would be the equivalent of the MM experiment.
  You could say that you are building a model in the physical science sense if you could look at your network and say: there must be a gene/gene group that acts here, here and here, because this is how the kinetics of the system are when stressed, and the network I built does not have the required dynamics. Now maybe this is what you are doing, and in which case I apologise, but in my limited experience, such papers are few and far between, and are certainly not bio_med_ papers (bioinformatics seem to be mostly about producing pretty pictures for most other biologists -- sad but true).
25. Re:Publish or perish by khallow · 2012-10-02 11:58 · Score: 2
  
  Where did you get the idea that a good reseach faculty means a good teaching faculty?
  
  Note the use of the phrase, "selling point" in my original post. Where does anyone get that impression that research means better teaching and/or better education? From research schools marketing that angle.
  
  Fundamentally, your assertion that "the students don't care about quality teachers" is based on flawed premises. Prospective college students aren't well known for understanding the nuances of a college and an education. So why expect them to "know" that "smaller schools known more for teaching" have better teachers (maybe)?
  
  Even if the student doesn't care about the outcome of their education (which is a peculiar assertion to make, given that the average student puts something like five years of their life into such an education), there's no reason for the college to not care as well.
26. Re:Publish or perish by wisnoskij · 2012-10-02 12:15 · Score: 1
  
  Positive results are interesting results. Lets say you prove that watermelons cause 80% of all cancers, that is headline and front page stealing news. The report detailing how you proved watermelons have no link to cancer is not.
  Similarly, your scientific paper on how to cure cancer is worth billions and extremely interesting news, while you paper on how NOT to cure cancer is neither.
  
  --
  Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
27. Re:Publish or perish by Swave+An+deBwoner · 2012-10-02 13:28 · Score: 1
  
  Most of the organic potatoes I've seen were small to middlin'.
28. Re:Publish or perish by khallow · 2012-10-02 15:14 · Score: 2
  
  With the public retreat from education, universities have to take their funding from more private sources.
  Last I checked, there was no such retreat from education. There's been a remarkable decline in the quality of education and what public funds buy. But it's a dangerous illusion to claim that there has been a retreat from education when the problem is elsewhere.
29. Re:Publish or perish by Eskarel · 2012-10-02 16:47 · Score: 1
  
  I think the OP was referring more to the fact that if you make the hypothesis that if you give drug X to rats their hair will turn green and instead giving drug X to rats caused them to, with a reasonable degree of statistical correlation, grow a third ear instead, you might still have a paper. What you thought was the case was wrong, but you still got an interesting result.
  On the other hand the result "nothing happened" or "the rats all died" isn't necessarily all that interesting unless there was an existing scientific consensus that this result contradicted.
30. Re:Publish or perish by superwiz · 2012-10-02 19:13 · Score: 1
  
  But good teaching is not a good metric of quality of research. The goal of research is discovery rather than dissemination of information.
  
  --
  Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
31. Re:Publish or perish by maxwell+demon · 2012-10-02 20:32 · Score: 1
  
  Most students are going to choose institutions where the certificate they get at the end will have the highest prestige attached. Now if certificates from universities with better teaching would provide higher prestige (which would make sense, because the students from there should be better educated, after all), then students would select the universities with the best teaching, and thus universities in turn would have a higher interest in improving their teaching in order to get more students.
  
  --
  The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
32. Re:Publish or perish by ilguido · 2012-10-03 02:43 · Score: 1
  
  Why do we need to rate researcher quality in the first place? To label a scientist as first grade, second grade, third grade? Can't we just rate every single research instead, we've got a lot of example of (so called) mediocre researchers that had a brilliant idea later in their life, while many young promising scientists produced very little after a good start.
33. Re:Publish or perish by poofmeisterp · 2012-10-03 04:57 · Score: 1
  
  "Get only positive results or never get tenure" is a policy that dooms us to this exact course. Publishing is no longer a consequence of having a brilliant idea, but rather a means to an ends(keeping your job). The academic community needs to find another metric for researcher quality other than papers published. It's costing everyone the truth.
  This sounds an awful lot like something teachers told me in grade school:
  "Show me you're busy working on something or I'll send you to the office."
  Then, an awful lot like something I heard when working during the dotcom era:
  "We need to look like we're doing busy work or we'll all get canned."
34. Re:Publish or perish by Daniel+Dvorkin · 2012-10-03 05:26 · Score: 1
  
  The point I think you're missing is that simple phenomena are amenable to simple models, while more complicated phenomena require more complicated models. The propagation of light is, in and of itself, a simple thing, and the luminiferous ether model and the photon model which replaced it are pretty simple too--which is why it was possible to choose one over the other based on simple experiments.
  The interaction of gene regulation within a living organism, on the other hand, is tremendously complicated, and any simple model will simply be too simple to make useful predictions. ("All models are wrong, but some are useful.") There are complicated processes that require complicated models in physics too, you know--ask an astrophysicist about galaxy formation sometime. And it's possible that some experiment (or more likely, observation, in the case of astrophysics) will someday prove that these things don't happen at all: that genes do not, in fact, express RNA that directly or indirectly (via translation into protein) regulate the expression of other genes, or that the things we think are galaxies are actually just random collections of stars that appear to be grouped together thanks to tricks of perspective, like constellations, and therefore are not required to "form" at all. Of course, neither one seems particularly likely at this point; we're about as sure that genes regulate other genes, and that galaxies are real aggregations of stars, as we are that light propagates from point to point.
  The model-building is therefore in the details, and there a whole lot of those details, every single one of which is subject to revision and occasionally complete disposal. This is where the simple models, the type you seem to consider the only admissible ones, come in. If biology has an analogue to the modern model of the propagation of light, it's probably the translation of mRNA into protein in the ribosome. And believe me, there were a whole lot of competing models for this in the early days, each rigorously tested and repeatedly modified; the bad ones were discarded, and we're left now with the current model which seems to best explain all the evidence--but could still be thrown out tomorrow if someone devises an experiment like Michelson-Morley which shows that it's just completely wrong. In my work, I pretty much take it at face value, just as an astrophysicist studying galaxy formation takes the photon model at face value, because these aren't the problems we're trying to solve.
  
  You could say that you are building a model in the physical science sense if you could look at your network and say: there must be a gene/gene group that acts here, here and here, because this is how the kinetics of the system are when stressed, and the network I built does not have the required dynamics.
  Kind of, yeah. Specifically, my model attempts to account for certain kinds of perturbations in the network (genetic knockouts for key transcription factors and cofactors in the Drosophila embryo Hedgehog pathway in one instance, and artificially elevated and depressed levels of growth factors in the transition from fibroblasts to myofibroblasts in porcine and human hearts in the other, if you care) by choosing the topology and parameters which best fit the data. If the data change, so does the fitted model. This is pretty standard practice, and I don't see the problem with it, or why you think it's different from what scientists in other fields do.
  
  Now maybe this is what you are doing, and in which case I apologise, but in my limited experience, such papers are few and far between, and are certainly not bio_med_ papers
  "Biomed" is unfortunately a vague term that seems to mean pretty much whatever the person using it wants it to mean; if you're going to argue that models relating to human biology (a.k.a. "medicine") tend to be less well-formed than those relating to other kinds of biology, I tend to agree with you, but
  
  --
  The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The numbers by somaTh · 2012-10-02 06:08 · Score: 2

I've read the abstract and several stories that cite it, and I haven't seen some specific numbers that would make this story more relevant. They talk about the number of retractions being up sharply, and the number of those pulled for "misconduct" being up as well. The abstract and other sources have yet to put either number in relative terms. Of the number of papers published, is the percentage of those papers that are retracted up? Of those retracted, is the percentage of retractions due to misconduct up?

--
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
1. Re:The numbers by ceoyoyo · 2012-10-02 06:32 · Score: 2
  
  That's not the point. The point is that journals need to be clearer about why a paper is retracted. Fraudsters shouldn't be able to hide behind the assumption that a vague retraction notice means someone made an honest error. The authors specifically state that they cannot make statements about the fraud rate because they don't have a good measure of the total number of papers published.
2. Re:The numbers by maxwell+demon · 2012-10-02 07:08 · Score: 1
  
  Before I judge this paper, I'll first wait some time whether it will get retracted because of misconduct. :-)
  
  --
  The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
3. Re:The numbers by Joe+Torres · 2012-10-02 07:25 · Score: 2
  
  The first figure of the PNAS paper shows that less than 0.01% (maybe 0.008%) of all published papers are retracted for fraud or suspected fraud and it has been increasing since 1975 (maybe around 0.001%). The authors state that the current number is probably under-reporting because not all fraud is detected and retracted. It is possible that the 1975 numbers are less representative, since fraud might have been harder to detect (at least for duplicate publication and plagiarism).
4. Re:The numbers by JustinOpinion · 2012-10-02 09:13 · Score: 1
  
  This article has the title "Tenfold increase in scientific research papers retracted for fraud", but at least mentions some actual numbers:
  
  In addition, the long-term trend for misconduct was on the up: in 1976 there were only three retractions for misconduct out of 309,800 papers (0.00097%) whereas there were 83 retractions for misconduct out of 867,700 papers at a recent peak in 2007 (0.0096%).
  Percentage-wise, we're talking about a very small number of papers. They quote one of the authors:
  
  "The better the counterfeit, the less likely you are to find it – whatever we show, it is an underestimate," said Arturo Casadevall, professor of microbiology, immunology and medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and an author on the study.
  While this is indeed true... even if the true number of misconduct cases is ten-fold what they measured, it's still a small fraction of the literature. Of course, any number of fraudulent papers is cause for concern (and we should work to remedy the situation); but these results should not cause us to call into question the majority of published science. In fact it points towards the vast majority of papers surviving scrutiny.
large "culture of cheating" in school now by peter303 · 2012-10-02 06:12 · Score: 2

I dont know if more students cheat now than when I attended grade school in pre-internet days. But the ease and temptation with the web is greater now. Surveys I read suggest at least half of students cheat.
The mystery has been how one progresses from a cheating culture in grade school, then lose it by the time you reach grad school and professorship. Apparently fewer dont escape this culture. Significant science will be attempted to be replicated and fraud discovered.
Just stupid by UnresolvedExternal · 2012-10-02 06:13 · Score: 3, Insightful

What surprises me is that these scientists actually weigh the risk reward in favour of damn lies. Fifteen minutes of fame then a dead career.
1. Re:Just stupid by UnresolvedExternal · 2012-10-02 06:29 · Score: 2
  
  Fair point - but where are these peer reviewers hiding?
2. Re:Just stupid by Penguinisto · 2012-10-02 06:56 · Score: 2
  
  Well, FWIW, if Hendrik Schön hadn't gotten stupid and made some pretty massive (and physics-defying) claims in his paper, and stuck with semi-muddy results that looked pretty (as opposed to sexy), but were harder to replicate? His career would have likely lasted years, if not decades, before he got caught.
  It all depends, from the fraudster's point-of-view, whether he wants rockstar status, or to make a comfortable living...
  
  --
  Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
3. Re:Just stupid by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-02 06:57 · Score: 1
  
  Fair point - but where are these peer reviewers hiding?
  In tenure.
4. Re:Just stupid by gotfork · 2012-10-02 08:39 · Score: 1
  
  Eh, even if he had made up realistic-looking data, there were a lot of other red flags: not saving raw data or samples, no one else making measurements, all other groups unable to reproduce results, etc. In retrospect, it sounds like it only went on that long because he was at a private lab, but I see what you mean.
5. Re:Just stupid by narcc · 2012-10-02 10:33 · Score: 1
  
  What do you think peer reviewers do? They sure as hell aren't replicating your work! The feedback you get also varies greatly in quality and importance.
  From what I've seen, the average reviewer doesn't spend more than an hour or two of their time on you. Even if they set aside a whole week for you, they can't guard against a completely fabricated experiment. Short of some gross or obvious error, I can see how such a thing could easily slip past.
  Conference papers are worse -- I doesn't surprise me in the least that a randomly generated paper could slip in and get accepted.
  
  --
  Required reading for internet skeptics
6. Re:Just stupid by superwiz · 2012-10-02 19:19 · Score: 1
  
  Most papers are too esoteric. The group of peers who have enough expertise to examine validity of the papers is usually very small (no more than a dozen in the world). In fact, many papers are so full of cross references that understanding them is akin to understanding inside jokes (too much history for anyone outside to follow). Anything that is stated vaguely enough will probably be skimmed over and not challenged by the reviewers. And unless the paper claims any far-reaching discoveries, it is likely to never be examined again.
  
  --
  Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Hoping to not see a retraction of this by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-02 06:14 · Score: 2, Funny

That would be too ironic.
Misconduct! Fraud! Please ... by jabberwock · 2012-10-02 06:16 · Score: 5, Informative

I think that the article implicitly misrepresents the level of misconduct by leaving out some relevant statistics. ... More than 2,000 scientific articles, retracted! And ... fraud! ... plagiarism!
In context -- PubMed has more than 22 million documents and accepts 500,000 a year, according to Wikipedia.
So, to do the math: Number of fraudulent articles, total, = vanishingly small percentage of the total articles.
1. Re:Misconduct! Fraud! Please ... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-02 06:32 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Yep. That's a very important, and very *missing* bit of information. Even if *ALL* of the retracted articles were for *blatant* and *intentional* misconduct (not duplicate publication), and all of them were published in the same year, and all of them were in PubMed, that would be a whopping 0.4% fraud rate.
  It boggles my mind that this number wasn't asked for by the article's author.
  Well, it *should*, but instead I'm just getting more cynical and assuming either incompetence (the author is writing about something he has absolutely no clue about, and therefore doesn't even know to ask for the information to put it into context), or malice (the author is trying to paint modern science as intentionally fraudulent).
2. Re:Misconduct! Fraud! Please ... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-02 06:57 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  > So, to do the math: Number of fraudulent articles, total, = vanishingly small percentage of the total articles.
  Those are only the ones that get discovered. I roll my eyes often when I read medical papers. The statistics are frequently hopelessly muddled (and occasionally just plain wrong on their face), the studies are set up poorly (as in, I would expect better study designs from first year students), or they are obvious cases of plagarism.
  EX: does early fertility predict future fertility. "We divide the population into two groups: women aged 20 to 30, and women aged 20 to 40. We find that fertility in the first group predicts fertility in the second group with R^2=.46" Well no shit, because the second group includes the first group, so of course they correlate. If you redo the stats correctly, you find that R=0.001. This paper still stands...
  EX: "we found that eating walnuts increases male fertility." No shit. Walnuts are known to be high in Arginine. Arginine is known to increase male fertility (multiple studies already on this). Next, the same group will publish a breakthrough study on male fertility and pumpkin seeds (hint:pumpkin seeds have twice the Arginie concentration as walnuts). The study authors try hard to hide their plagarism though, not once mentioning Arginie. They hypothesize that it is from the ALA in the walnuts... which is BS because they could have tested an ALA hypothesis using flax-seed oil. Oh, and I forgot to mention that this study was not even done single-blind. No placebos were used. One group was given walnuts (not in concealed form, just plain walnuts), the other was given nothing. This paper also still stands...
3. Re:Misconduct! Fraud! Please ... by Hentes · 2012-10-02 07:03 · Score: 1
  
  Assuming that all fraudsters get caught which knowing the situation of medical science is very far from the truth. The paper doesn't talk about the number of erroneous articles, only the ratio between the number of frauds and the number of genuine mistakes.
4. Re:Misconduct! Fraud! Please ... by hsthompson69 · 2012-10-02 07:12 · Score: 1
  
  http://pmretract.heroku.com/byyear
  Seems like despite the small percentage (say, like CO2 ppm in the atmosphere), the trend is alarming.
5. Re:Misconduct! Fraud! Please ... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-02 07:18 · Score: 1
  
  It boggles my mind that this number wasn't asked for by the article's author.
  Not me. There's a blatant and obvious movement going on to discredit science in general. No one mentions how much different medical science is from physical science when they talk about this either. Find one bad scientist and they think they've won. Guilt by association.
6. Re:Misconduct! Fraud! Please ... by jabberwock · 2012-10-02 07:30 · Score: 2
  
  Respectfully, you're compounding the error by referring to "all fraudsters" and the "situation of medical science," implying, by language, that this is a much larger problem than statistics show when considering the enormous volume of scientific articles. I'm not a scientist but I'm very good at interpreting numbers.
  I didn't say that fraud does not exist, or that there isn't pressure to produce publishable results that might affect accuracy or ethics (on occasion.) I said that this is a much smaller problem than the article implies. Only the retractions were analyzed; the retractions are a vanishingly small percentage of the total. If you want to argue that the retractions are the tip of an iceberg of falsified scientific data, let me know.
7. Re:Misconduct! Fraud! Please ... by jabberwock · 2012-10-02 08:08 · Score: 1
  
  Right.
  
  Except that my point about the article -- that it implies that there is lots of fraud in science -- has already been made by the fact that a fair number of commenters jumped right to that unproven implication.
  
  And it would be quite reasonable to complain about such a study of cancer deaths if the article implied that the deaths were substantially greater than might be expected in the general population, without offering evidence.
8. Re:Misconduct! Fraud! Please ... by khallow · 2012-10-02 09:50 · Score: 2
  
  It boggles my mind that this number wasn't asked for by the article's author.
  Not me. There's a blatant and obvious movement going on to discredit science in general. No one mentions how much different medical science is from physical science when they talk about this either. Find one bad scientist and they think they've won. Guilt by association.
  Here's a case in point. Someone does research on fraud in science and the first thing that you and the parent poster think, "What is the ulterior motive?" That's just another anti-scientific attitude.
9. Re:Misconduct! Fraud! Please ... by superwiz · 2012-10-02 19:23 · Score: 1
  
  Maybe the summary does. The article itself states pretty revealing numbers 96 in a million vs 10 in a million. These are hardly scandalous. But they are indicative of poorly managed incentives. Examining incentives is well within the purview of ethicists. The article is solid. Slashdot summary is what it is.
  
  --
  Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
And that's why.... by roc97007 · 2012-10-02 06:25 · Score: 3, Insightful

this is a bad idea.

--
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
1. Re:And that's why.... by Burning1 · 2012-10-02 07:38 · Score: 1
  
  Why? Are you suggesting that the scientific studies are suddenly somehow not living up to standards of repeatability and peer-review?
  We already have ways of dealing with these issues...
Are the retracted articles localized? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-02 06:26 · Score: 1

It would be fun to know how many of those were made in China (a country with a record of forged and fraudulent papers) and how many are from the US.
FTFY by drerwk · 2012-10-02 06:28 · Score: 2

Misconduct, Not Error, Is the Main Cause of Medical Scientific Retractions

Other than Hendrik Schön are there some in Math or Physics that are as likely to commit misconduct?
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v418/n6894/full/418120a.html
1. Re:FTFY by ceoyoyo · 2012-10-02 06:46 · Score: 1
  
  Life sciences. Not medical. That was in the first sentence of the summary.
  Yes, math and physics have issues with misconduct. The article you link to mentions several physical scientists who think it's a problem. You identified a famous one. Retraction Watch lists others, quit a few in chemistry for some reason. Complete fabrication might be a bit less common for the reasons mentioned in your article, but I have no doubt that there's data pruning, faking extra results because you don't have time to do the experiments, plagiarism, dodgy stats, etc. From the sounds of it, the problem might be worse because the physical sciences haven't faced as many high profile scandals as the life sciences and don't have the same controls in place.
2. Re:FTFY by fermion · 2012-10-02 08:48 · Score: 1
  
  And this is more proof that life science, medical science, about half of the articles seems to be "medical research" is not science. It is based too much on what people want to believe, too much on making a profit off pushing drugs, too little rigorous science. We know that many articles are paid for, written by ghost writers. We know that drug dealers want the drugs to be safe for kids, but really don't know or won't pay to do the proper research. We know that cancer is a business, and the research is not pushing for a cure, but to promote high cost treatments. We are told that we must be diagnosed with cancer early, but is that because early cancer is generally better for a cure, or because early diagnosis increases the years of survival, the statistic that is most used in cancer advertising. I still hear that early diagnosis of prostate cancer is critical on commercials, but that is not supported by real research. Or maybe it is. We won't know until biomedical researchers are paid at the level of the physics researcher, and doctors are paid at the level of teachers.
  
  --
  "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
They were unintentional errors by crazyjj · 2012-10-02 06:37 · Score: 1

It's not like they *intended* to get caught.

--
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
So what? by Sarten-X · 2012-10-02 06:50 · Score: 1

If a researcher follows proper procedure but ends up with an incorrect result, it's still valid science. Perhaps it's the exception to some theory that will lead to later breakthroughs in the future. Simply being incorrect is not a reason to retract. Rather, a retraction is wiping the slate clean, hoping to forget that the research was ever done. The only reason to do that is if the research itself was unethical.

--
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Suspected fraud? by damn_registrars · 2012-10-02 06:50 · Score: 1

That is like suspected murder. It needs to be clearly proven or the accused needs to admit to it. Just because there is a whisper campaign alleging fraud from someone doesn't mean it is automatically the case.

An honest journalist would have separated "demonstrated fraud" from "suspected fraud".

--
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Study has since been retracted by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-02 06:51 · Score: 1

Turns out they made up all the retraction numbers
Re:Obviously by Sarten-X · 2012-10-02 06:55 · Score: 2, Funny

You've discovered representative traits of different societies. In many Asian societies, individual achievement is valued highly, so each individual must work the hardest to be outstanding. In many Indian societies, the collective effort is what's valued, so a team gathering bits and pieces from myriad sources and reassembling them into a new product is the respectable path to success. In many European and American societies, slacking off and blaming others for the consequences is a venerated tradition.

--
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Because ordinary errors don't lead to retractions by Jimmy_B · 2012-10-02 07:06 · Score: 4, Informative

You might be tempted to think that this means ordinary errors aren't as common as we thought. Lots of papers - actually most papers, at least in medicine - are wrong for reasons like the author being confused, doing the statistics wrong, or using a type of experiment that can't support the conclusions drawn. But merely publishing a paper that's bullshit? That usually isn't enough to trigger a retraction, because retracting papers looks bad for the journals. Only an accusation of Serious Willful Misconduct can reliably force a retraction.
We apologize for the misconduct. by Ichijo · 2012-10-02 07:12 · Score: 2

The papers responsible have been retracted.

We apologize again for the misconduct. The papers responsible for retracting the papers that have been retracted, have been retracted.

The researchers hired to write papers after the other papers had been retracted, wish it to be known that their papers have just been retracted.
The new papers have been completed in an entirely different style at great expense and at the last minute.
---
Mynd you, m00se bites Kan be pretty nasti ...

--
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Bloodsport by DarthVain · 2012-10-02 07:31 · Score: 1

Have an annual fight to the death for tenure.
As an added byproduct I bet A) Your average tenured professor would start to look a bit different, and B) You gotta bet they would be taking way less shit from students and TA's...
Though seriously though, I know in some circles it has been discussed that not every university be structured in the same way. For the most part most/many are more less training centres rather than places of deep discovery.
Tenure and papers, might make sense if your primary goal is the discovery of the universe. However if your primary goal is moving another year of pukes out the door, perhaps you just need a system like they already have for high school teachers (not that it is all that great either).
1. Re:Bloodsport by ColdWetDog · 2012-10-02 08:13 · Score: 1
  
  Two Scientists enter!
  Eight Scientists leave!
  (This might not work out they way you had planned it ... )
  
  --
  Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
2. Re:Bloodsport by SomeKDEUser · 2012-10-02 09:25 · Score: 2
  
  This implies that an extra -5 scientists entered.
3. Re:Bloodsport by xouumalperxe · 2012-10-02 22:42 · Score: 1
  
  Or that the winning scientist figured out how to create instantaneous, full-grown, mind controlled clones.
Re:Because ordinary errors don't lead to retractio by Colonel+Korn · 2012-10-02 07:32 · Score: 1

You might be tempted to think that this means ordinary errors aren't as common as we thought. Lots of papers - actually most papers, at least in medicine - are wrong for reasons like the author being confused, doing the statistics wrong, or using a type of experiment that can't support the conclusions drawn. But merely publishing a paper that's bullshit? That usually isn't enough to trigger a retraction, because retracting papers looks bad for the journals. Only an accusation of Serious Willful Misconduct can reliably force a retraction.
Bingo. Mod to +5.

--
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Re:academic tenure is an elitist system by Aardpig · 2012-10-02 09:18 · Score: 3, Insightful

The REAL peers are the folks doing work in the profession day in and day out.
As an astrophysicist in a research University, I'd like to know where these REAL peers are. I thought I was the expert, but now you tell me there's someone working hard at an astrophysics day job — so hard, in fact, they're too busy to review the papers I write while quaffing champagne by the bucket-load in the penthouse suite of my ivory tower.
I'm all ears.

--
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Re:academic tenure is an elitist system by Daniel+Dvorkin · 2012-10-02 09:27 · Score: 2

The REAL peers are the folks doing work in the profession day in and day out. As a rule most peer reviews are conducted by people with a decidedly academic focus - the experts in the field are working day jobs that don't afford them time to participate in silly self congratulatory exercises.
And in most scientific fields, those folks are overwhelmingly to be found at academic institutions, and most of those who aren't in academia are in government. Corporate R&D is almost all "D" these days. There used to be a lot more research and publication, and peer review, by people outside academia--in light of your username, you might want to consider the history of Bell Labs, and how sad that history's been in recent years.

--
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Re:Because ordinary errors don't lead to retractio by goodmanj · 2012-10-02 10:00 · Score: 2

Parent is right. Small errors which don't affect the outcome are published as short "correction" notes. Larger, more subtle errors are corrected by the author and/or whoever noticed he was wrong writing a new paper which critiques the old one. But the original paper remains, because it's a useful part of the dialogue.
(And *that* is why you should always do a reverse bibliography search on any paper you read.)
The way it should be. by goodmanj · 2012-10-02 10:12 · Score: 1

Getting it wrong an important part of doing science. Papers with errors should be corrected by new publications, not retracted. The incorrect paper inspired the correct one, and so is a useful part of the dialogue. Also, anyone else who has the same wrong idea can follow the paper trail, see the correction, and avoid making the same mistake again.
Classic but extreme example: the Bohr model of the atom, with the electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets around a star. It's wrong. Very wrong. But we still teach it today, because only by studying it you realize the flaws in the classical description of subatomic particles, and the need for quantum mechanics.
1. Re:The way it should be. by nedlohs · 2012-10-02 14:51 · Score: 1
  
  We also teach it because it works. Sure it's wrong. Sure it gives the wrong answers in a lot of cases. But it gives the right answers for some useful cases.
  And it isn't a classical description. It's a quantum theory (not quantum mechanics though).
Scientific Fraud or MEDICAL Fraud? by __aaltlg1547 · 2012-10-02 13:00 · Score: 1

Since PubMed was the source of the data, it really is only applicable to medical science. I'd like to see how the rates of misconduct compare between different kinds of scientific publications.
1. Re:Scientific Fraud or MEDICAL Fraud? by nedlohs · 2012-10-02 14:41 · Score: 1
  
  Because http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23019611 is a medical science paper?
2. Re:Scientific Fraud or MEDICAL Fraud? by __aaltlg1547 · 2012-10-02 15:22 · Score: 1
  
  Interesting. That's outside their declared scope: "PubMed comprises more than 22 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites."
3. Re:Scientific Fraud or MEDICAL Fraud? by nedlohs · 2012-10-02 15:50 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah, my day job involves processing pubmed data. It's a true PITA when irrelevant (for the stuff we care about) stuff like that comes in and messes with the author lists. And it's not uncommon...
Peer review design by arikol · 2012-10-02 21:08 · Score: 1

One part of the problem is that peer review is set up in a way to catch mistakes, not really to vet for misconduct. I have no idea what would be required to properly vet for misconduct, but I'm guessing that it should be a good idea to statistically analyse any numbers presented, that should catch the most blatant cheaters.
Electrolytes! by DarthVain · 2012-10-04 03:49 · Score: 1

It's what Scientists Crave!