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

Posted by Soulskill on 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)."

12 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Publish or perish by i+kan+reed · · 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 · · 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 · · 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 blueg3 · · 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.

    4. Re:Publish or perish by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    5. Re:Publish or perish by js33 · · 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.

    6. Re:Publish or perish by interkin3tic · · 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.

  2. Just stupid by UnresolvedExternal · · 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.

  3. Misconduct! Fraud! Please ... by jabberwock · · 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.

  4. And that's why.... by roc97007 · · 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.
  5. Because ordinary errors don't lead to retractions by Jimmy_B · · 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.

  6. Re:academic tenure is an elitist system by Aardpig · · 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.