Slashdot Mirror
Another Slew of Science Papers Retracted Because of Fraud
schwit1 writes: A major scientific publisher has retracted 64 articles in 10 journals after discovering that the so-called independent peer reviewers for these articles were fabricated by the authors themselves. From the article: "The cull comes after similar discoveries of 'fake peer review' by several other major publishers, including London-based BioMed Central, an arm of Springer, which began retracting 43 articles in March citing 'reviews from fabricated reviewers'. The practice can occur when researchers submitting a paper for publication suggest reviewers, but supply contact details for them that actually route requests for review back to the researchers themselves." Overall, this indicates an incredible amount of sloppiness and laziness in the peer-review field. In total, more than a 100 papers have been retracted, simply because the journals relied on the authors to provide them contact information for their reviewers, never bothering to contact them directly.
When so many news stories about scientific papers being faked are published, it gives all the wackos ammo. They see this and start yelling about global warming and autism from innoculations. Blah. Publishers, get your act together!
If we could alleviate the pressure on academics to 'get published' or 'win grants', the market for the B.S. publications and garbage articles would dry up in a hurry.
Should be placed in the center of a circle of fellow scientists; their pocket protectors should be yanked out; their labcoats torn off; and the backs of all gathered turned upon them.
Cuz this shit is why you get, "Hurr, climate change isn't reel". Because look - look at all the bad science and bullshit studies.
"Overall, this indicates an incredible amount of sloppiness and laziness in the peer-review field" No, it indicates sloppiness & laziness from these awful journals. The "peer-review field" (science) is still working just fine.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
I have written a paper that conclusively proves that there is absolutely no fraud within the field of academic publishing within the biomedical field. It was peer reviewed by no fewer than sixty of my peers (who definitely aren't me making up names) and is absolutely concrete in its findings... provided you don't look too hard at my evidence. Clearly, anyone who says there is fraud within the biomed field is in fact fraudulent themselves.
Also, I take checks, Visa, and Mastercard, but no Amex.
Academics submit articles to journals for free. Other academics provide feedback and do quality control for the submitted articles, also for free. Yet more academics peer review the submitted articles, you guessed it, for free. Logistics are handled by a board of volunteer academics. I guess the journal staff... typeset the cover and table of contents, print the journal, and maintain the website? The typesetting is probably automated, actually.
Out of curiosity I checked the pricing on the Journal of Algebra, probably the most prestigious journal in my field. An individual subscription is $291. A 5-person e-journal subscription is $2,070.67. An institutional paper subscription is $5,314.
I guess they're too busy raking in money hand over first to bother trying to find independent reviewers.
Definitely not the review process. When you write an exam paper in college, do you provide name and contact details of the examiner?
Aside from fraud, this practice does not lead to good reviews. When I am asked to suggest reviewers to the editor, I am not able to suggest my friends, because they would not be able to provide objective reviews. Therefore, I must suggest a reviewer who I do not know much about. If the editor simply follows my suggestions, nothing has been done to ensure the reviewer is an expert in the field. Editors' primary responsibility is to know who the appropriate reviewers are. They should not cede that responsibility to authors.
Simon's Rock College
One wonders if any of the fake peer reviews supported anthropogenic global warming claims.
The same claim you make about wacko's having ammo works in both directions. People on the side you believe to have the better opinions use the same papers as their "proof" for what ever they want.
People quote mythical 'facts' regularly. Today I heard yet another bonehead talking about the alleged "Rape Culture" at college which uses a 40 year old bullshit study for it's statistics. Not because we can't do better studies, but because the numbers in that particular study favor the bullshit they want you to believe.
Not very much "Science" relates to pure black or pure white answers. In fact the majority of science is trying to figure out what shade of gray something is. The most difficult task is to figure out your own biases, and in a world that puts "feelings" over correctness.. we are getting what we should.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I guess Christianity is true, by process of (now perfectly valid) non-scientific reasoning.
Biomed....You can draw your own conclusions, but my conclusion is that Biomed is irretrievably corrupted.
What is the basis for your conclusion? TFS is talking about 43 "bad" papers over an unknown (at least to me) timeframe. How many biomed papers in total were produced during the timeframe? Do the "bad" papers constitute 10%? 1%? .1%? .01% of the total?
Fraud is everywhere. Always has been, always will be. Are you going to reject the research of an entire field of study because of the misdeeds of a few researchers?
Furthermore, this misconduct was identified and rectified. Sounds to me like the system is working as intended.
Overall, this indicates an incredible amount of sloppiness and laziness in the peer-review field.
That is more anti-science FUD - which is not a surprise coming from the deeply conservative "failure machine" samzenpus. They said that 64 papers were retracted. The volume of papers published in any given year is so high that 64 papers isn't even a rounding error. Yeah, some errors will be made but that is pretty well unavoidable. This kind of error rate is so low that even Toyota looks at it with admiration.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Good suggestion! Articles could be rated much like SlashDot. There could be any number of reviewers for an article. Some reviewers would have more weight than others. Knowing that a large number of reviewers think an article is worth reading is good enough. This need not cut out the publish or perish game, but the rules would need to change.
Ray Seyfarth, ray.seyfarth@gmail.com, http://rayseyfarth.blogspot.com
Academics submit articles to journals for free
Very few academics submit articles for free, especially in biomedical sciences. Many journals - even open access ones - charge $1-3k for publication. There are some cases where certain academics can submit for free if they are employed at sponsoring institutions, but those are the minority of researchers by a long shot.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
... Question, Audit, Check, Recheck, and remain open minded as to whether X actually equals Y.
There's something of a cult these days of people that say "well newspaper M said X=Y so it must be true!"... and anyone that so much as remains skeptical about that is anti science. Because after all, science is about dogmatic acceptace of authority and slavish memorization and repetition of whatever your betters tell you it is...
Oh wait, that's religion.
Cue a horde of douchebags that will tell me I'm being anti science without getting the irony that they've just outed themselves.
Mindless acceptance OR rejection of anything is not science or helpful. You need to think about these things. Or the reality is that you never thought about them and so you don't really have an opinion so much as programming.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"Overall, this indicates an incredible amount of sloppiness and laziness in the peer-review field." To me, this is outright fraud, not carelessness or sloth on the part of the contributors.
Journals are there to filter out the bad science. If they don't check the credentials and conflicts of reviewers they are not doing their jobs. It is not an all or nothing situation. Journals should be blamed for not checking reviewers. Researchers should be blamed for bad research. Employers should be blamed for allowing bad research. The blame is shared.
I got a PhD recently. I find this news shocking. I'd known of people making up figures or fudging data, but I thought, "Well, there is so much pressure in academia, sometimes people lose the ability to make proper judgements." Not that that makes it ok, of course.
But this is... just downright evil. How do you even get a bunch of co-authors to get on board with something like this? What institution do these people come from?
Damn, I'm definitely not taking any institution seriously when this kind of stuff happens in it.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
The volume of papers published per year in biomed is staggering. Indeed the volume is so high to make 64 papers insignificant.
If we were to assume that all 64 of those papers were published in the same year - which the article does not specify - it still would not be significant. Even if we assumed them to all be in the same year and roughly related - which again we don't see stated in the article - it still would not be significant.
For a good point on this, let's look at one popular field in biomed. A lot of work in done under the term "proteomics" currently. Pubmed shows nearly 6300 papers in 2014 under this term. Hence if all 64 of these papers were published last year and were proteomics papers, that would be barely 1%.
How many industries have recall rates below 1%? Not many. Sure it would be better for it to be zero, but there are bad actors in any industry and academia is not the shangri-la stress-free hippy paradise that conservative commentators make it out to be.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I've noticed that these stories about retractions of peer reviewed papers are nearly always about medical research. I wonder why.
This is a big deal. I submit articles to these publishers, and this is outrageous. The idea that I would give email addresses to editors that came back to me in order to review my own papers not only never occurred to me, it seems like it would require a researcher with absolutely no ethics or morals whatsoever. The entire peer review process needs to be revamped from the ground up, and I think it would benefit science to have an open comment period on submitted articles or something similar. Authors should not be able to suggest reviewers, and both authors and reviewer should know who each other are, and interact as the paper goes through review. The absurd situation now where the reviewer knows who the authors are, but not visa versa, and where there is extremely limited interaction, mostly in the form of reviewer critiques that are often off-base but nonetheless accepted by editors, is not acceptable. A more interactive system is required, possibly with crowd-commenting for a limited time. The idea that the reviewers on high end papers were giving "reviewer contacts" to editors that went back to them is insane. I guess this is what money and desperation does to people.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Over time the models got better and we now know that the climate will change.
Everyone who looks out the window now and again knows the climate changes. Only a few fanatical climate change deniers claim the climate didn't change before humans came along.
Some places will get hotter and some places will get cooler, but over all the trend is towards more heat and climate change.
That'll be why the models continue diverging from reality unless we continually 'adjust' the temperature record to make them a better fit.
This assumes the co-authors were aware of the deception, which may not be true depending on the study and how it was run. If someone who is in charge of data analysis is fed bad data, how much can you fault them for providing an incorrect analysis? Perhaps they were suspicious but suspended their own disbelief and are therefor culpable, but most people don't operate at a level of paranoia to suspect that type of thing, even if the results fly in the face of common sense.
Personally I find that the whole incident leaves me with a positive feeling. Rather than looking at this from the perspective of "Oh look, science is full of crap as well", I look at as science being willing to point out when it is full of crap and take corrective measures. When you find the same behavior in religion, politics, or other of life's institutions that people tend to take seriously if not put a lot of faith in, then we can talk.
Like any endeavor involving humans, science is capable of folly. However, institutionally it has one of the best track records for identifying and removing that folly, even if it takes a while. Much else in life seems as—if not more—subject to the whim of those in charge as it does to any laws of nature or the universe.
The review system is deeply flawed as it stands now. Cronyism, favoritism, and punitive harassment run rampant. Since experts in your field are often people who review your papers its not uncommon to be rejected out of spite or to let a competitor publish first. The competition isn't just fierce it's underhanded and extraordinarily wasteful in terms lost money and lost brainpower.
Knowing that a large number of reviewers think an article is worth reading is good enough.
Even better: there should be a way to find the article score in various demographics, like they have on imdb. That way when an article is rated 8.4 by females age 18-29 and 6.4 by males 30-44 (like Divergent on imdb), I will know better than read it.
lucm, indeed.
Cuz this shit is why you get, "Hurr, climate change isn't reel". Because look - look at all the bad science and bullshit studies.
Actually it's looking more and more like that's EXACTLY were we got "Hockey stick! We're all going to die! (Unless we give governments the power to regulate the economy back into the bronze age and Al Gore a carbon-credit market from which he can make billions in profits {even after paying for his movie}.)"
Which is really annoying, because if there REALLY IS a DANGEROUS climate change PROBLEM that DOES NEED FIXING and CAN BE FIXED, "climate science" has been so discredited that it will no longer be possible to convince people this is the case. B-b
And your characterization is part of the problem.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That'll be why the models continue diverging from reality unless we continually 'adjust' the temperature record to make them a better fit.
I'm always amused by statements that say things like that without applying any rigorous science to back it up.
Is slew the proper collective term? I would think pan-tload would fit better.
On the other hand, the media is often sensationalizing a few outlying cases. A single research group was caught falsifying global warming data? A few dozen others were publishing real data.
In this case, 100 papers were retracted for fraud. The most recent two issues of the planetary astronomy journal I frequently publish in which few of you have even heard of comprised 100 articles total. 100 articles retracted is a *tiny* tiny percentage of the reliable peer reviews published.
Fraud is bad. When found, punish it. But this single incident does not signal the end of science.
Even pantload is an exaggeration. Handful is stretching it, even. Considering the minuscule fraction represented here, a better term would be "blip" or even just "few". But this is slashdot, and to not put something like this on the front page in a way that excites the conservative base would be considered a disservice. Notice how many people started threads here telling us their feelings about global warming, even though this has absolutely nothing to do with global warming; that shows that this front page story did its job quite well.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
So now what? We always hear of fraud, bad practices, and papers disproved/invalidated. But what happens then? Are hundreds/thousands of scientist fired and rendered un-hire-able every single year? Or do things like this not have repercussions? When a peer review journal has absolute proof of fraud is there any chance the scientists will lose their job? Will be ostracized and forever more be ineligible for grants and no community college would touch him? Or does he continue working and researching? What about lesser offences, what if it just turns out that your ground breaking research that got you a job turns out to be false. It is not proof of fraud, but it invalidates your results at the very least.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I don't think this article implies that 64 is the total number of articles that used this method of feud. Just that a single publisher spent tiny amount of effort and found 64 articles. What is this publisher 1% of the industry? .00001%? It does not say. It states 10 journals, what does a single journal publish per year? I imagine these 64 are out of a pool in the thousands, possible a little less or a little more. But we have no reason to assume that they caught any big percentage of the fraudsters.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The assumption you're making here is that those 43 papers represent all of the fraudulent papers. That's foolish. It could very well be more.
When you see one roach...
Required reading for internet skeptics
I'm not calling you anti-science.
Remember before when I was talking about how you weren't anti-science? That was a metaphor. I wasn't actually talking about you. And I'm not sorry. You didn't react at the time, so I was worried it sailed right over your head. Which would have made this non-apology seem insane. That's why I had to say you weren't anti-science a second time just now."
> It was clearly a load of Bat Guano to claim that all 60 were principals who researched and wrote the article.
You are missing the point. Its that authorship credits should not be just limited to just the principals. You haven't seen the article about the one with 5154 authors?
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
You better have a lot of valid arguments before dissing one of the top journals in the world (not an opinion - going by impact factor).
Pretty much every one. That's why recalls are such big news - they're actually pretty rare compared to the volume of products. And recalls for products that simply don't work (the equivalent of faked papers) as opposed to one or more features not working are practically non existent.
This is a big deal. I submit articles to these publishers, and this is outrageous. The idea that I would give email addresses to editors that came back to me in order to review my own papers not only never occurred to me, it seems like it would require a researcher with absolutely no ethics or morals whatsoever.
It depends on the journal. I review for a number of CS journals, and none of them would ever allow this, there's a predefined pool of vetted reviewers who get sent papers, the submitters have no control over who reviews them, or even know who the reviewers are, it's all anonymous and blinded. Conversely, I've reviewed for an MIS journal where the submitters suggest the reviewers (which included charming notes like "please don't send them to X, Y, or Z, because they've given us bad reviews in the past"). It was a really strange process, there was an endless amount of reviewing and re-reviewing and re-re-reviewing, I think more time was spent in the reviewing process than in writing the paper, for papers where you could tell from half a beers' worth of analysis that they should never get published. It may have just been my science bias that saw this as a strange way to do things, and in some sense a certain amount of snobbery, "it's an MIS paper, who cares if the review process is broken...".
I agree they should be fired. What makes you think private industry would be more reluctant to fire them? I think it is the opposite.
The authors are likely from China, Taiwan or similar.
This is how it works here. Publish -> you get a bonus (and people are crazy even for petty cash). Not publish X times a year -> fired.
They will only get fired if they embarass someone, or because they got caught and brought their for-profit "university" to disrepute.
They will NOT get fired for cheating or gaming the system. That is expected, and everyone does it.
The Republican Party.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I've made no such assumption. I simply asked a question.
But OK, instead of 43 papers, let's say it's 430 papers. Or let's say it's 4,300 papers. I still have the same question: why should anyone conclude that "Biomed is irretrievably corrupted" as GP claims? If there was 43,000 papers submitted during the timeframe in question, 10% of papers are questionable. Is that enough?
IMO, there has to be something more than a few anecdotal reports of fraud before I'll write off an entire field of study as being "irretrievably corrupted".
The idea that I would give email addresses to editors that came back to me in order to review my own papers not only never occurred to me, it seems like it would require a researcher with absolutely no ethics or morals whatsoever.
Well, true; a certain proportion of any group are likely to be liars, cheats, parasites etc. I'm not sure about the complete lack of ethics or morals, though - it is not difficult to imagine a path from 'excusable inaccuracies' to full blown fraud, and when you're measured on the volume of articles rather than the quality of your research, then it isn't surprising that you may occasionally start taking shortcuts to make your results look better. The thing is, when you have taken the first step down that slippery road, it quickly becomes impossible to turn back without your whole career exploding in your face - so you carry on.
I think we need not just a better way to manage reasearch results - peer review comes from a time when scientists were few and far between, and when most of them came from the upper crust of society, where concepts like honour were literally beaten into them at school with a blunt instrument. I don't suggest a return to that, of course, but I think a rigorous course in ethics for students of science would be a place to start. Not so much to instill some sort of unthinking adherence to a code of conduct, but to teach people to reason and think critically about these issues before they are in a situation where the pressure tempts them to make the wrong decision.
Yes, I was once recruited to review my own paper, and I didn't suggest me. I can't remember which journal. I sarcastically refused, but always wondered whether I would have gotten away with it.
Sounds like the way a lot of people do job references. You can get away with it too as it's real easy to get temporary phone numbers and with contracted out reference checkers it's easy enough to pretend to be multiple people. I've detected this scam a few time for companies that were trying to hire for "commodity" type jobs.
Yes, this is all journal dependent. Recently we have stopped even suggesting possible reviewers when we get to that stage in the submission process. We stopped listing negative reviewers a long time ago. The process is broken, and needs to be revamped from the ground up. I think that each journal maybe should even consider having an open comment period on submitted manuscripts, and that back and forth discussions occur between the authors and the commenters and reviewers. Many papers would probably end up being much more accurate by the time they were published if they went through a more public process. Of course this would only work in an open access environment, because the pay-walled journals would never let anyone see the papers before they were published.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Here's the problem.
this misconduct was identified and rectified. Sounds to me like the system is working as intended.
See, the system is, quite clearly, not working as intended. That's what allowed those particular instances of fraud to happen in the first place! Worse, these few were caught only because Curtis thought the contact details for the reviewers looked a bit off.
Further, look at your reasoning here. If no fraud is noticed, you go "Look how great things are, no fraud spotted." When fraud is found, you go "Look, we rooted out the fraud, the system works." You are simply incapable of acknowledging any problems.
Required reading for internet skeptics
0.02% of articles are retracted according to 538: http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...
http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/11...
You are simply incapable of acknowledging any problems.
Not at all. There's certainly a problem. Research integrity has been a problem since Academia was born. That's why every research university has an "Office of Research Integrity" or somesuch.
But as I've said (repeatedly), I want to know the magnitude of the problem. Do you think that ONE fraudulent biomed paper is enough to conclude the entire field is "irretrievably corrupted"? Do 43 fraudulent papers vilify the field? Because that's the ridiculous claim I'm challenging. If one isn't enough, how many then?
Part of the problem is that we have no viable way of determining the magnitude of the problem. Yes, that means everything is tainted to some degree.
Some one here made an analogy some time back. If you had a bag of m&m's and I told you one of the candies was deadly, would you still eat a few? What if it were 100 bags? 1000? Of course not. Every piece is suspect.
Making excuses for these journals or outright denying the problem as "the system is working as intended" (when it clearly is not) isn't helpful. Real protections need to be put in place to prevent this kind of fraud beforehand. We also need ways to find fraudulent papers and excise them, should some any find their way to publication.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Peer review exists to help a journal editor to decide whether an article is worth publishing in their journal, not whether the article is true. In principle, a peer reviewer for "The Journal of Irreproducible Results" would have to determine not whether the submitted article is true, but whether it is sufficiently irreproducible and funny to be published there (the JIR doesn't use peer review AFAIK, but it's just to illustrate the point). A low-end, high acceptance journal may not use very rigorous peer review. A journal like Nature, on the other hand, may reject many excellent articles simply because they don't judge them interesting enough, while accepting some questionable articles in order to start discussion. Failures in peer review are a problem for a journal that prides itself on high quality content, but they are not per se a problem for science.
How many industries have recall rates below 1%?
Pretty much every one.
That is not an example. Do a little research before making such an extravagant claim.
That's why recalls are such big news - they're actually pretty rare compared to the volume of products.
No. Safety recalls - such as the airbag recalls that are effecting almost every car made in Japan in the past 5 years - are huge. There are tons of smaller recalls for products all the time that don't make the news. To stick with my example of the automobile industry, I'm not aware of a car on the market today that hasn't been recalled for something in the past 2-3 years. A lot of recalls are pretty benign - things relating to audio or climate control, or exterior trim issues - but they are out there nonetheless.
(the equivalent of faked papers)
The papers described here are not necessarily completely bogus, however the authors gamed the review system to get them in. Whether the science was crap or not is not clear. Cheating the peer review system suggests there is a chance of the paper being fabricated completely but that does not guarantee it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Don't hold me to a standard you refuse to hold yourself to mate.
Ah, I see that you're unaware that cars are only a very small part of "industries". Or, you're trying to retroactively limit your former claim of "what industries?" to "what automobiles?". No dice.
Nice - you act like all recalls should be held accountable, but hold the papers to an entirely different standard.
Can you say "bias"? I thought you could.
Kindly fuck off.
Making excuses for these journals or outright denying the problem as "the system is working as intended" (when it clearly is not) isn't helpful.
Clearly to who? Evidence (non anecdotal) please.
The issue is that people are inherently manipulative, so they don't want better numbers. Studies use intentionally incorrect information, like you point out with male rape not being counted as rape.
Had they been manipulative they'd change the data and simply report inflated numbers - not use vague, badly worded definitions, prone to misinterpretation, or protocols and methodology prone to bias from both surveyors and surveyed.
You are describing a conspiracy where "studies use intentionally incorrect information".
I am describing a situation where confirmation biases of people designing and running the study, forces them to set goalposts so wide in order to get the results they are expecting - that the results they get are so high it is obviously ridiculous.
Your theory proposes existence of scientifically sound studies which produce correct conclusions based on falsified data (scientists lied), which could not be proven wrong without repeating the study.
My theory suggests a reason for faulty interpretation of correct data (both scientists and subjects told the truth) - which can be proven by just looking at the data and methodology of the study.
Two other manipulations heavily used are studies that count bisexuals as gay and as bisexual to double the wanted demographics numbers. Murders not being counted as murders to make it appear like crime is being reduced. Deaths being linked to a specific cause to manipulate society even when the cause was only a minor factor.
Now that sounds even more conspiratorial.
Fake gays, hidden murders and lying about causes of death. Oh my!
My point was not intended to say that science is not possible
Neither was mine.
It was to suggest that people coming up with those specific studies have their minds set about what those studies MUST show - so they unintentionally or through the lack of scientific rigor (they are often psychologists) produce badly designed studies.
No one is lying, faking or hiding anything. They are just incompetent.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"Overall, this indicates an incredible amount of sloppiness and laziness in the peer-review field."
I disagree with this statement, but it has some merit. I hope my insider experience can give some insight for those who care. The main problem is that "the peer review field" is ambiguous. It could include publishers, but also researchers, journal editors and reviewers. The last three are not paid jobs, they are part of the general job of being an academic. But academics are pressured more and more to publish more (note, not do more or better research, but to publish more highly cited papers in highly cited journals) while at the same time teaching more students with fewer resources. Like almost every worker in the world, we too in our ivory towers are pressured to do more with less (and to be happy while doing it, and thankful for a job).
I peer review a dozen or so articles per year, and have been doing so for about 20 years. During this time I have learned that the peer review system has many problems, but no-one has proposed a better alternative that has gained popularity (OK, one field has. See below). The biggest problem is that peer reviewers and journal editors are not paid, so their only motivation to do a good job is some sense of social responsibility (If I submit articles that other people review for free, then I should return the favour.).
And everyone knows that academic publishers, like other intermediaries from the pre-digital world, are extracting economic rents while trying to protect models based on scarcity, manual labour and other factors that no longer apply in today's world. But who can do anything about that? Our systems of remuneration and promotion are so intimately tied to the outdated commercial publication model (impact factors) that no-one seems willing to upset the status quo. Physics seems to have broken away with arXiv (http://arxiv.org/) but no other field has, to my knowledge, repeated this amazing feat. But the academics' lack of courage in challenging the status quo is not a result of protecting cozy economic rent-seeking; rather it's a reaction to that fact that when all our resources are being stripped away, we become extremely risk-averse (i.e. we want to protect what we've got).
Bottom line: more trustworthy science can be promoted only by funding researchers to such a level that they have decent job security (as much as anyone can these days) and adequate resources to do the job, so that they are not tempted to cut corners just to keep their job!
All this discussion, of course, ignores that far bigger cause of untrustworthy science: commercialism. Scientists typically depend on short-term grants, and must show "results" to get more grants (i.e. keep putting food on the table for their family). And funding agencies may have non-scientific motives, and very rarely understand the deep truth behind the aphorism "Fast, cheap, good: pick any two".
Professional Idiot
Most of the crap published is a waste of space and funds.
See the article linked in the summary.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Uh huh. So the supposed irretrievable corruption in the biomed field is a figment of your imagination. Got it.
Had they been manipulative they'd change the data and simply report inflated numbers - not use vague, badly worded definitions, prone to misinterpretation, or protocols and methodology prone to bias from both surveyors and surveyed.
I smell a troll. Manipulation does not require one form, it takes many forms. Similarly dishonesty is not simply a lie, but can also be withholding information or re-ordering information to present a false reality.
You are describing a conspiracy where "studies use intentionally incorrect information".
Yup, it's a troll. I never claimed there was a conspiracy, I claimed that people commonly call things "science" in order to manipulate the public and provided examples which are easy to find and validate.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I never claimed there was a conspiracy, I claimed that people commonly call things "science" in order to manipulate the public and provided examples which are easy to find and validate.
That "people" lying i.e. "call things science" in order to manipulate - that's a description of a conspiracy by definition. ANY definition.
If it walks like duck... Meeh... you know the rest.
As for examples "easy to find"... Go find me a James Bond movie I'm thinking off right now. Here's a hint: he kills a guy in it.
You provided vague anecdotes you only half remember as "examples" of your conspiracy theories about manipulators of the public calling non-science science - and you expect everyone else to know your thoughts.
Onus probandi much? No?
You do realize that the examples I gave (without handwaving "it's out there... find the truth yourself") ARE science?
Nothing unscientific about them.
It's just that their methodology and conclusions are (probably) tainted by biases.
BUT! Because it is science, the proofs and examples where they went wrong are RIGHT THERE, in the studies. Built in.
No one had to manipulate, lie, hide, conspire...
They wrote down exactly where they fucked up. That's a feature of the scientific method.
What you are describing sounds like tabloid "science" and conspiracy theories.
Manipulation does not require one form, it takes many forms. Similarly dishonesty is not simply a lie, but can also be withholding information or re-ordering information to present a false reality.
You don't seem to understand the difference between a scientific study and a tabloid article.
Main feature of science is that it can be taken apart because - it is science.
And it MUST be taken apart during scientific work because - it is science.
You can't "re-order" or "withhold" gravity or any other established law of nature or a finding proven previously.
It is not some secret art. It is all out in the open already. You WILL be called out as a bad scientist and a kook if you try to do that.
Richard Feynman called out Linus Pauling as a "vitamin C cures cancer" kook in a damn song.
All you can do is fiddle with numbers and hope no one tries to replicate your results while you live.
P-hacking is obvious, mislabeling too, using vague survey questions, badly set up controls...
It is all obvious and it will be right there in the paper. Or it will not be - WHICH WILL MAKE IT EVEN MORE OBVIOUS.
You are basically tossing ad hominems (though maybe unintentionally... you seem to have a misunderstanding of topics you are arguing), strawmen (again... maybe you don't understand the scientific process) and demanding of people to prove that you are right.
Which is ironic... cause my original post was supporting yours, though through a more moderate explanation.
But you seem to be too enamored in your "EVERYONE LIES!!! ALL THE TIME!!!" theory to realize that.
Then again... you find it "amazing" that 1 in 5 Americans comes out to "about 63 million people" in my guesstimate and in the "BS study you referred to".
As if dividing about 318 million with about 5 should change significantly depending on who does such basic math.
I have a feeling that when you say "science" you do not think it means what it actually means.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The situation hete in fact is pretty obvious. It used to be that academic journal editors were experts in their fields. This allowed them to know who can be a reviewer on a paper and meditate the review process. Now there is so many journals and papers, a whole lot of "editors" are not just inexperienced, but are simply morons, not only not experts in paper's field, often not even an academic faculty. That's why they want authors to suppy them reviewers suggestions - really quite an idiotic idea if you come to think about it... Ban reviewer suggestions and have the editors do their jobs, as it used to be, is all that's required to fix this one.
I'm not aware of a car on the market today that hasn't been recalled for something in the past 2-3 years.
Ah, I see that you're unaware that cars are only a very small part of "industries".
I was referring to cars as a product of the automotive industry. I asked you to provide an example of an industry so we could discuss its recall rate, and you provided no example. I, however, did live up to that very simple request and provided one.
And when discussing the automotive industry, it is natural to discuss the automobile as the product of that industry. Sure, you can buy parts or hats or shirts or wallets from Toyota but their ultimate product is the automobile itself. Hence the recall rate for that industry is based on how many of their automobiles are recalled.
This is really, really, simple.
Or, you're trying to retroactively limit your former claim of "what industries?" to "what automobiles?". No dice.
There is no need to get angry, here. You could try reading instead of yelling; you might actually learn something along the way.
The papers described here are not necessarily completely bogus, however the authors gamed the review system to get them in. Whether the science was crap or not is not clear. Cheating the peer review system suggests there is a chance of the paper being fabricated completely but that does not guarantee it.
Nice - you act like all recalls should be held accountable, but hold the papers to an entirely different standard.
Try reading what you are replying to, and you will realize that your comment is your own fabrication, completely disconnected from reality. It appears that you are trying to place some great conspiracy in here when you have no evidence to support its existence.
Can you say "bias"? I thought you could.
Can you say "evidence"? Can you do simple math? Can you close out your comment without making yourself look like an angry child with no concept of what he is replying to?
Kindly fuck off.
Well, the answer to the last one is clearly no. The two prior, likely no as well. Have a nice day, son.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.