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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 In total, more than a 100 papers have been retracted, simply because the journals relied on the authors to provide them contact information for their reviewers, never bothering to contact them directly.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!
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.
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.
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.
It's not terrible. Turns out that according to editors I've spoken to, the harshest reviews often come from the suggested reviewers "friends", as those are the ones with most knowledge of the field and therefore closest.
Also, I've sometimes been listed as a suggested reviewer by someone I've never met simply because I'm quite well known (still, even though I'm no longer in academia).
SJW n. One who posts facts.
"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.
Editors' primary responsibility is to know who the appropriate reviewers are.
So the editor must know the credentials and area of work of every possible reviewer in the world. That seems to be a tall order.
If the editor simply follows my suggestions, nothing has been done to ensure the reviewer is an expert in the field.
That is the problem. The editor should check the credentials of the suggested reviewers and filter them for expertise and conflict. A good editor would also add at least one reviewer not on the list.
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.
You are right, but you are also wrong.
There are many Scientists, even many in Academia, who don't Publish. I've got a co-author on a few Papers, but it never meant much in over three decades of Performance Reviews.
I was a Working Scientist. It's very much like being a Working Actor- a face seen briefly a few dozen times over a career, but never a Leading Role. Still, it paid the bills.
You are an utter asshole for promoting the "Publish or Perish" myth. It is simply not true.
But you are quite right about Killing the Market.
This is about Ideas. There shouldn't _be_ a Market for sharing Idea; that's a Middleman concept.
Middlemen- kill them all.
Let's first start with Shakespeare's recommendation- Lawyers.
And then we can go after the for-profit Academic Publishers.
Oh, I love this Captcha: anodes
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.
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.
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.
Oddly enough, the "publish or perish" myth isn't a myth for those of use who do hear "# articles published" in our performance reviews.
You are an asshole for calling OP an asshole. Congratulations on finding a job that does not do that.
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
You don't need to publish to work as a scientist, but it is something that is important to do in order to get tenure in many schools and as you said, is the way to be a leading scientist. And if you're working towards that sort of leading role, you're the type of person who would be publishing to begin with.
As you said, you didn't have to publish, and many don't, but the ones who do publish are often the ones under the most pressure to do so, for whatever reason. This means that the people who have an important part to play in the scientific world are also the most likely to have a reason to misrepresent their results or strive to be underhanded to avoid actual peer review.
What is the upside for a working scientist to misrepresent their results? A better review? Even then, you probably get reviewed more for your investigative technique or your experimental or apparatus design. Which means that you'd get just as good a review for being good at knocking down novel hypotheses as you would for sustaining them. In other words, you'd get a good review for being a good scientist.
A leading scientist is under a lot more pressure to offer something that they can publish which gets themselves or their labs more grant money so that research can continue. Like you, they are valued if they are good at science and falsifying hypotheses, but grants are usually offered for new, interesting science. Knocking over your own bad hypotheses is necessary, but you have to have something to offer in the meantime.
Some researchers end up with nothing they can offer, and they realize that, but they can't pay the bills with all negative results. So they peer review their own work to keep the grants coming. This is no doubt done in the hope that their faith in their hypothesis is rewarded and that they will be able to produce a return on investment, but there are certainly other reasons for that.
Publish or perish is real, it's just not real for everyone who calls themselves a scientist. However, it is a real problem for the scientific community, because grant money and prestige is what keeps academic scientists working. No doubt you would be fine, albeit at a different school or lab, but you and your ilk are not the problem, your bosses and senior researchers are the ones at risk.
I don't want to defend academic publishers here. I have heard many uncomplimentary things about them. The thing is, the middlemen aren't the ones falsifying the peer review recommendations, the scientists are. And there's really only one reason for that: they don't want to go through the peer review process. That's a *science* problem and it must be solved by *scientists*.
If the peer review process for journals does not work, then the scientists on the editorial boards need to stand up and work out a better method. An academic journal isn't worth wiping your ass with if the scientists involved with it refuse to endorse it. And that is what they need to do. Policy makers and laypeople tend to trust scientists in general in a manner that some trust their priests. In fact, these days, a lot more than priests.
However, that is all based on faith and trust, as they are not doing the experiments themselves. Scientists need to work at maintaining the trust they have in their field as a whole or it provides the ammunition to either distrust science or to encourage misrepresentation of results for certain unscientific aims.
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.
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.
Also every single name on the retracted list sounds Chinese.
Up until about 5 or 10 years ago, Chinese medicine was famous for fraud.
There was one Chinese neurosurgeon who was doing effectively lobotomies with the claim that it would cure all kinds of mental diseases. Families gave him their life savings, and their relatives turned out worse than they were before, if they survived.
It's also still popular in China for doctors to give monthly intravenous antibiotic infusions, to healthy patients, as a "tonic." As you might expect, this produces antibiotic resistance, making the antibiotics worthless when somebody really needs them. And occasionally the IV infusions lead to life-threatening infections. One woman got a flesh-eating bacterial infection, and lost 2 feet and a hand.
(It's not just China. This is what happens in the free market anywhere, when doctors can make a lot of money and don't have competent government oversight. See Quackwatch.com for U.S. examples.)
According to Science magazine, there was (and is) a big fight going on between the "traditional" do-your-own-thing Chinese practitioners and the Western-educated MDs who are trying to impose modern scientific methods and education. The modern Chinese MDs seem to be winning.
I read about 10 scientific journals a week and I noticed a dramatic increase in the Chinese names, either among the "et al." or now increasingly as principal investigators, either from Western institutions or now increasingly from Chinese institutions.
I remember one paper in Science in which they sequenced the DNA of 2 species of Chinese bats -- one a fruit-eating bat and the other an insectivorous bat. Of course anyone can sequence DNA these days, but they did a great job of identifying the interesting differences between the 2 species and interpreting the evolutionary significance.
There are also a lot of good Chinese papers in the major medical journals. If you consider Taiwan as part of China, they have the entire Taiwanese population in their medical insurance database, and they're running studies to see how many people with **disease or drug** get **adverse effect** over 10 or 20 years.
They also seem to have a big bureaucracy in which scientists get rewarded and promoted on the basis of their citations, since it's an easy metric. I'm glad that doesn't happen here.
The Republican Party.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.