Slashdot Mirror
How Did Those STAP Stem Cell Papers Get Accepted In the First Place?
bmahersciwriter writes The news team at the scientific journal Nature turns its investigative power on the journal itself. The goal: to try and understand how two papers that made extraordinary claims about a new way to create stem cells managed to get published despite some obvious errors and a paucity of solid evidence. The saga behind these so-called STAP cells is engaging, but sadly reminiscent of so many other scientific controversies.
Peer reviewed. Yeah, right. And just who is reviewing the peers?
And found out in short order.
As for what causes researchers to do this sort of thing, well it's the same thing that other humans do. The biggest difference is that science accepts it's lumps and corrects them.
You'll have someone feeling pressure to get results, and they fudge, make hopeful assumptions, or even fake results. This woman appears to have done all three.
Then she manages to get some highly respected researchers to sign on. Laziness on their part. The pee reviewers see the names, and get a little lazy themselves.
Viola. But in all this, the fact remains that others will be fact checking, and trying to reproduce the results claimed in any paper, especially one making these extraordinary claims And that's the strange thing. If you fake the results, you're going to be found out to a high degree of certainty. She toasted her career with a similar degree of certainty.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It's probably not the case that she wrote the paper cackling to herself madly and proclaiming "Those suckers will never find out!"
It's probably the case that through self-delusion and carelessness she managed to partially convince herself that the results were true, and this, coupled with pressure to produce results, caused her to take a few shortcuts to get it published. What she did was wrong, and her career is over. It's not something a rational mind would have done. But scientists are just human and sometimes prone to making irrational decisions. The great thing is that we have the scientific method to weed out the good from the bad.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Seriously though, I would have imagined that the papers should only get published if the results themselves were reproducible. Somehow those are skipped and the whole peer review system is in trouble.
Actually, the whole peer review system is not in trouble. See, the peer review done by (volunteer) reviewers for the magazine is just the first step. The next step comes when the article is published and the entire world gets to see the paper. The fact that the fraud was exposed in pretty short order after publication shows that, indeed, peer review does work.
Perhaps one source of misunderstanding here is that some people assume that peer review is supposed to be some kind of ultimate validation of a work. It's not, it's a basic sanity check and a validation that what the authors *claim* to have done is sufficiently interesting. It's not an endorsement by the publication venue that the work is correct and the authors are honest, because it's impractical to validate something like that without investing a lot more effort than feasible for a peer review. Reproducing a work might take months, even years.