Prominent Chinese crystallographer faked data for years.
journals.iucr.org
Prominent Chinese crystallographer faked data for years.
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: Prominent Chinese crystallographer faked data for years.
#2Anyone have an idea just how significant this is in the scheme of things?
Re: Prominent Chinese crystallographer faked data for years.
#3Anyone have an idea just how significant this is in the scheme of things?
As a rule this sort of fraud isn't.
If the result is important, people will try to do work based on it and sooner or later figure out that the foundation is rotten and why.
Most of the time the work isn't important, except to the "scientist" himself in accumulating published papers ("publish or perish").
This is one of the reasons there's no need to directly double check every scientific conclusion, instead you tend to work on good faith and then backtrack when things get screwy.
Re: Prominent Chinese crystallographer faked data for years.
#4What the fuck is wrong with the scientific community? First Elsevier (who faked an entire journal), then the East Angela university climate group and now this?
Re: Prominent Chinese crystallographer faked data for years.
#5Anyone have an idea just how significant this is in the scheme of things?
As a rule this sort of fraud isn't. If the result is important, people will try to do work based on it and sooner or later figure out that the foundation is rotten and why. Most of the time the work isn't important, except to the "scientist" himself in accumulating published papers ("publish or perish"). This is one of the reasons there's no need to directly double check every scientific conclusion, instead you tend…
Exactly. And that's often how fraud gets found. You are trying to build on someones research and some of the assumptions aren't working or you can't baseline the work. That usually leads to trying to reproduce the original work and voila ... fraud at the worst (I'd say most of the time it's just sloppy work)
Re: Prominent Chinese crystallographer faked data for years.
#6Anyone have an idea just how significant this is in the scheme of things?
As a rule this sort of fraud isn't. If the result is important, people will try to do work based on it and sooner or later figure out that the foundation is rotten and why. Most of the time the work isn't important, except to the "scientist" himself in accumulating published papers ("publish or perish"). This is one of the reasons there's no need to directly double check every scientific conclusion, instead you tend…
I disagree with your assertion, due to the consequence of a similar series of faked results first reported on earlier this week.
Essentially, people wasted 2 months of distributed computing time trying to use the data from a fake crystal structure. Unsurprisingly, these were unsuccessful. Hundreds of thousands of compute hours were wasted and people were diverted from making real discoveries because the structure was already 'solved'. This is a huge setback, in my opinion.
Re: Prominent Chinese crystallographer faked data for years.
#7Prominent? Based on what? I've never heard of Jinggangshan University before. It's not even top 5 in Jiangxi province, where there ain't many universities.
Re: Prominent Chinese crystallographer faked data for years.
#8When I was in university, I had a friend who had faked her thesis to get a Master's degree from a university in Beijing. She admitted to me that she had simply found an obscure English journal paper and translated it into Chinese.
I wouldn't be surprised if this incident happened in the same atmosphere that existed at her school: new grad students who have grown accustomed to cheating on their way through undergrad, and professors who don't check their students' work.
Re: Prominent Chinese crystallographer faked data for years.
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a rule this sort of fraud isn't. If the result is important, people will try to do work based on it and sooner or later figure out that the foundation is rotten and why. Most of the time the work isn't important, except to the "scientist" himself in accumulating published papers ("publish or perish"). This is one of the reasons there's no need to directly double check every scientific conclusion, instead you tend…
I disagree with your assertion, due to the consequence of a similar series of faked results first reported on earlier this week. Essentially, people wasted 2 months of distributed computing time trying to use the data from a fake crystal structure. Unsurprisingly, these were unsuccessful. Hundreds of thousands of compute hours were wasted and people were diverted from making real discoveries because the structure was…
We disagree on how huge of a setback it is, "how significant this is in the scheme of things" as the original question put it.
A setback, yes. Huge for those who wasted their time? Maybe.
But compare it to, say, Lysenkoism. That was a huge setback for Soviet biology.
Re: Prominent Chinese crystallographer faked data for years.
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a rule this sort of fraud isn't. If the result is important, people will try to do work based on it and sooner or later figure out that the foundation is rotten and why. Most of the time the work isn't important, except to the "scientist" himself in accumulating published papers ("publish or perish"). This is one of the reasons there's no need to directly double check every scientific conclusion, instead you tend…
I disagree with your assertion, due to the consequence of a similar series of faked results first reported on earlier this week. Essentially, people wasted 2 months of distributed computing time trying to use the data from a fake crystal structure. Unsurprisingly, these were unsuccessful. Hundreds of thousands of compute hours were wasted and people were diverted from making real discoveries because the structure was…
a similar series of faked results first reported on earlier this week
Wait, is this a separate scandal? What's with all this bogus crystallography?