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Misconduct, Not Error, Is the Main Cause of Scientific Retractions
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)."
"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'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.
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.
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.
That would be too ironic.
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.
this is a bad idea.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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
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.
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.
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.
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Mynd you, m00se bites Kan be pretty nasti ...
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
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.
This implies that an extra -5 scientists entered.
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.
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.)