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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.
Analyze that elemental analysis, if it's obviously fabricated publish short refuting paper in a better journal
Or offer ACS to print it if ACS is the best in the industry, boom name recognition and easy paper.
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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Very well could just be as they say, a poor choice of words. Maybe he just wanted her to do the needful?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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.
Why let the search for truth get in the way of a good lynching.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
None of the data talked about in the note was used in the final journal submission and the compound the author was referring to was what he claimed was a theoretical intermediate. I am leaning toward a misunderstanding in a hastily written note.
love is just extroverted narcissism
It's not that rare for reviewers to skim the appendix of a paper, and it doesn't necessarily go against their instructions. Appendices tend to be more useful to people who need detailed information about how the results presented in a paper were obtained (typically these are researchers in the same subfield), rather than reviewers or researchers whose work is only moderately related to the paper.
weinersmith
when I was tricked into drinking Hydrogen Hydroxide when I distinctly requested a beaker full of Dihydrogen Monoxide. The cover-up, the pointing of fingers, the falling out of the scientific community. HOYVIN GLAVIN!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Was Andrew Wakefield involved?
Trolling is a art,
when this is not nearly a non-story.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
I'm not disturbed by the note, and yes it's likely a poor choice of words from a non-English speaker.
Are we now condemning conspiracy to submit fraudulent information? I thought fraud was the bad act.
I've worked with non-English speaking students, and there are a surprising number of awkward constructions that you wouldn't notice as a native speaker.
For example, one multiple-choice optics test question had this answer: "The image is half as large".
The phrase "half as large" translates simultaneously into "big" and "small" at the same time... it was pointed out that many students didn't know what this meant. The first rewrite came out as "half the size", but since many cultures implicitly measure size in terms of area instead of height, lots of people misinterpreted this as well (half the height = 1/4 the area). Having an answer "none of the above" further confused the issue. The test should have been specific in saying "half the height".
I've proofread/edited more than 10 papers written by foreign types, and "twisted meanings" are quite common - phrases that seem syntactically reasonable but which have a different meaning to a native speaker. (I grew up in Amish territory - statements like "Sarah is wonderful sick today" and "throw papa down the stairs his hat" were commonplace.)
I wouldn't think twice about the note in the paper. Unless the researcher actually makes up the analysis out of whole cloth it's not a problem.
Science is about evidence, not hearsay.
This is most likely a misunderstanding, these things happen and should be caught in peer reviewing.
Emma, please insert a little bit of misdirection on this post and click on submit after previewing. Those suckers will buy it like it's a 38k dollars handbag.
Remember that this was just an informal note. Even as an English speaker I occasionally produce an awkward construction when I'm in a hurry and writing informally. Any possible ambiguities only becomes apparent when I read it back later.
I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt until we find out more.
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.
...they went to publish it, realized they didn't have a supporting NMR, so he told his assistant to make one up.
Here's the rub... what that means to the assistant is, run an NMR; what it means to all the people who don't have a the education to understand what it means, or even what an NMR is, is that they can try to paint science as bad. You cant "make up" an NMR in that way, although you could substitute some other chemical and run the analysis... but why bother? Any lab with an NMR could check your work simply by running the correct NMR; and, running the correct chemical will take exactly as long, and exactly the same amount of effort.
This is basically people who don't have enough education somehow seeing a conspiracy in nothing. I swear, the human race is fucking pathetic sometimes.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
In a fit of pique, she purchased the entire country and now Stedman is evicting all its citizens to make way for condos . . .
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A researcher friend recently described how their PI handed them a paper from a former lab member from many years ago and said "review this, ok?" (and what was of course unsaid was "approve it.") Turns out the journal of the National Academy of Sciences is a joke - it's just a place for members to dump crap they can't get accepted for publishing anywhere else. It certainly is a joke if you can get someone in your own lab to accept a paper from a former lab member.
Please help metamoderate.
Obviously there is nothing criminal going on, just a conspiracy by a stupid editor. Make up = do. If he wrote manufacture I might wonder but still it isn't proof.
I have an idea, must not be the first to have it though.
When slashdot and other sites (like boingboing) get news stories from syndicators of syndicators etc. in the normal idiotic trickle-down blog syndication and altruistic submitters tree and the article upon intelligent reading is obvious drivel, the end consumers (the conglomeration of all slashdot readers who have read it) should be able to push back in the reverse direction along this tree that it is stupid.
Something like a message, "300 readers of slashdot.org think this article is stupid. Your cred dropped to 50%."
Finally something worthy to vote about!
I had a manual that described doing a track alignment on a floppy drive. Basically loosen the lock screw, adjust, tighten the screw. But...the author's english was from another continent...
"...when adjustment is complete, screw it up."
The semi-important data would be in the NMR, the elemental analysis would be more of a formality to show they are working with what they said they were working with. I think that is reason to believe they would have worded it in such a way suggesting they needed a real NMR result but some pain in the but boring work they have an expected answer for is to be just made up. Obviously bad practice, probably doesn't have much bearing on the paper itself though, assuming their materials suppliers are trustworthy.
http://www.wordreference.com/ proposes "make up" (vtr) => "assemble, put together"
I wouldn't have seen any problem in saying "please, put an elemental analysis together", thinking: the article lacks an analysis for completeness, a simple one should be included.
Makes me remember of red side notes from my teachers in my homework, long ago: "Results are ok, but where's the analysis?!"...
I only see conscienciousness by a (non-english) reviewer, in this instruction.
It's what is incentivize when you count no results as non-knowledge. That's a large part of the problem. No results are information too, Unfortunately just anyone can produce unlimited amounts on demand.
There should be (and the idea is not original to me) and perhaps is now a journal of interesting no-effects, non-results.
The lying is pandemic in academia, and it's not just PIs lying about their results, it's everywhere .. sorry to say it's a culture which tolerates lying at every level. At our university, TAs openly threatened students with being graded down for doing stuff like showing up to the TAs office hours if they missed class for any reason, then followed through on those threats. The profs knew about it and looked the other way.
I know PIs in our department were said to fake results and it was unofficially encouraged via the grapevine. In theory it gets discovered, but as far as I know no one has ever systematically gone through with the required statistical tools and correlated unrepeatedable results with PIs or departments, or more subtly, contraindicated results , results that could not be true if a wealth of other results of seemingly unrelated experiments were true. Sure some high focus pursuits like climate change and alternative energy get properly and excruciatingly scrutinized and rescrutinized, but the low level chemical pathway shit this guy is slogging around in? Not so much. He knows he's out of the spotlight.
Here's a tip for young idealists of the sort I was. Every power hierarchy has a disproportionate number of sociopaths at the top and academia is no exception. The dishonest, law-breaking, libelous and slandering political maneuvering that spoils other ventures spoils academic pursuits at least as much.
It was Henry Kissinger who noted that department politics are so vicious just because there is so little to fight over and he may be right. The monetary rewards are marginal, the job security is gone and work environment is bone grinding and relentless all the while it's demanded that you get positive results so you get funding.
We need a kind of policing function in academia. We need people whose specific job it is to use what methods they can think of to catch cheaters. There mere presence of such an entity would be a huge deterrent by itself.
We also need to detach course grading and degree granting from the university. There's nothing at the university, no particular resource anyone needs access to in order to learn to the undergrad or even masters degree level. It's overpriced, it under delivers it's causing the next financial (aid) bubble and it subjects students to a time consuming, humiliating and demeaning process of vying to be liked personally by people who have despotic-level power over their futures. Enough.
It took balls to say that.
I come here for the love
I expect that it was being used in the sense that I am now going to make up my bed.
*Insert ridiculous, apparently intelligent but ultimately meaningless phrase here*