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Request to Falsify Data Published In Chemistry Journal
New submitter Jim_Austin writes "A note inadvertently left in the 'supplemental information' of a journal article appears to instruct a subordinate scientist to fabricate data. Quoting: 'The first author of the article, "Synthesis, Structure, and Catalytic Studies of Palladium and Platinum Bis-Sulfoxide Complexes," published online ahead of print in the American Chemical Society (ACS) journal Organometallics, is Emma E. Drinkel of the University of Zurich in Switzerland. The online version of the article includes a link to this supporting information file. The bottom of page 12 of the document contains this instruction: "Emma, please insert NMR data here! where are they? and for this compound, just make up an elemental analysis ..." We are making no judgments here. We don't know who wrote this, and some commenters have noted that "just make up" could be an awkward choice of words by a non-native speaker of English who intended to instruct his student to make up a sample and then conduct the elemental analysis. Other commenters aren't buying it.'"
The beauty of (natural) science is that you can replicate the results. Why spark a debate (which is more in social sciences ballpark) when you can just run the experiments and validate the statement that way? The paper would only omit important analysis steps if a patent is involved, something that the title of the paper does not imply.
some commenters have noted that "just make up" could be an awkward choice of words by a non-native speaker of English who intended to instruct his student to make up a sample and then conduct the elemental analysis. Other commenters aren't buying it.
You know what the great thing about science is? We don't have to focus on emotion and rhetoric. We can do the experiment, and see if it would have supported the conclusion. If it would, our societal view of justice compels us to assume they were asking for the valid test results to be included. If it would not have supported the conclusion, then we can call for the author to be sanctioned.
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I would have thought that standard peer review would have caught this - someone reading this, specifically with an eye towards accuracy, should have noticed it well before it made it to print. Whether that would result in just removing the offending text (which, while not completely guilty, definitely sounds bad) or result in actual correction of the experiment, I can't say.
Ah, true. Can't blame peer review for only skimming the appendices.
Now, the journal editors, them I think we can blame.
Or has that already happened?
On numerous occasions politicians have released MS-Word docs, and the full edit history could be retrieved, with occasionally embarrassing results.
Yes, we can do the experiment, but most of the time we don't. Nobody gets grant money for replicating stuff other people have already done. There's no glory in it; the citations, the namings, the prestige will all go to the original experimenter, and grants are very much about glory (to the host institution, of course, not so much for the researcher herself). Yes, the big, important stuff gets replicated, but a dreadfully mundane study of some palladium catalysed reaction is not in that category, and so is unlikely to be replicated. The allegation of "made up" data in this particular paper may prompt somebody to try it in this case, but there will be many more that will slip through.
Exactly. It's someone telling their assistant to get a NMR done.
It's become a sad day here in the US where there's a faction of people so against science, that they try to manufacture issues like this. I don't care that some people want to remain stupid... it's there choice, but they should at least have enough brain cells left to understand if they want to stay stupid, their opinion doesn't mean shit because it's based on stupidity.
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Yeah, this whole thing is absolutely stupid. I don't even buy that it was a non-native English speaker; "go make up a..." is just another way of telling someone to go produce something.