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Cracking down on research fraud
141–150 of 227 posts
Re: Cracking down on research fraud
#142Estimating from my own reading, 1% of research is fraud and 80% is worthless for other reasons. Numbers vary between fields. If that's the case, what's the argument for why we should spend time doing something about the 1%? Solving 100% of the 1% wouldn't change the overall situation much. Possible arguments include: - Fixing the 80% is hard, but fixing the 1% is satisfying (to the aggressively conventional-minded, a…
It's hard to know that a worthless research paper will always be worthless.
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Re: Cracking down on research fraud
#143These issues of research fraud come up often, but the root of the problem is a bit more subtle. In North America at least, biomedical research labs operate largely as fiefdoms of the individual principal investigators (PIs). The actual research work falls almost entirely on the backs of grad students and postdoctoral fellows. The grad students need to generate "good" data in order to graduate, the postdocs need the s…
What do you suggest as an alternative?
This entire thread is really frustrating for me to read. A lot of these ideas are one-liners from people who have had very little experience with different parts of academia, except maybe being a student. Every single idea here are debated to death by academics already (not just university academics, but funding agencies, academic societies, award panels, journal editors and conference organizers), with changes happening all the time.
If it was this simple that a random person here could come up with how to "solve" academia, we'd have already done it decades ago. The ideas also lack nuance and when you get into the definitions of things (for example, p-hacking), then things become a lot more grey; are you allowed to look at a dataset that you spent 2 years collecting if your first hypothesis does not pan out? The clear cut cases are obvious to everyone, it's the grey area that takes 99% of the time to figure out.
Imagine reading a thread where everyone is proposing "solutions" to software development. It'd go something like "software development is a cesspool and 80% of it fails (see voting systems, MySpace, electronic health records, Theranos. Here's what software companies need to do:" [yes I'm being intentionally stupid to demonstrate how annoying this is]
1) stop releasing before the bugs are fixed. Software and games are rushed out. Companies need to take their time to fix the bugs so the users don't have to encounter them.
2) no more technical debt. Programmers are sloppy and introduce technical debt because they are not incentivized to do high quality programs. [yes, see how triggering that is]
3) cap team sizes. Everyone knows that large teams fail more spectacularly. Gmail and Napster and the original version of Google were made by a group of 4 people. Software teams need to be 4-5 people max.
4) programmers must use a transparency scorecard. Software companies like Oracle and IBM charge ridiculous amounts for their work. They hide costs and cut corners. Programmers should be transparent about the work they are doing each day, what data they access, and which functions they are writing.
These changes need to happen. derp derp
Re: Cracking down on research fraud
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Along the same lines, “what question to ask” or “what idea to try” should never generate credit or fame for individuals. This incentivizes Indiana Jones style research, results at all costs. As a researcher you should be desiring to get jobs or rewards based solely on the care of methodology, clarity of communication and ease of reproducibility. If you do those things well and the papers turn up negative results, tha…
It can be argued that part of being a good researcher is developing an intuition and taste for interesting and promising research questions. Of course, the counterpart to this is that you see hype and fads developing very easily. But overall it is very easy to come up with experiments that any experienced researcher would have told you beforehand had no chance of producing interesting / impactful / positive results.…
The comparison with startups isn’t valid - they seek an explicit profit outcome where good or bad ideas are judged by success in markets. Research is meant to be a public good, that furthers society’s at large repository of knowledge and culture.
> “ It can be argued that part of being a good researcher is developing an intuition and taste for interesting and promising research questions.”
I don’t think this can be argued actually. This is mythology, usually applied to creditmongers who run labs and accumulate accolades that are actually due to a wide array of students and post-docs who are made to get reduced credit as a type of dues paying laced with rampant discrimination and sexism.
I’d say mythologizing the idea of a crack sleuth who has a special knack for research intuition is extremely harmful on all fronts: depriving value to society because it’s false and depriving value to the wide network of lower level staff who are actually responsible for progress.
Re: Cracking down on research fraud
#145[deleted]
Re: Cracking down on research fraud
#146A friend of mine was doing a chemistry phd when he discovered his supervisor was falsifying data. If he had blown the whistle it would have ended his career, but if he had played along his dissertation would have been based on false data. Both options were bad so he just quit. https://www.statnews.com/2016/11/25/postdocs-grad-students-f...
I was doing a robotics engineering PhD at a highly ranked university a few years ago. I contacted the dean of engineering and the office of legal affairs and informed them that my advisor had submitted falsified data to journals, falsified financial statements to his sponsors and the university, performed experiments risking serious bodily harm on human test subjects without IRB approval, committed wage theft against multiple students, and slandered several of his research assistants to keep them from getting funding and work outside of his control. They swept it under the rug and gave him tenure. This was one of the universities that was in the news for faculty members and administrators accepting bribes from celebrities a year or two ago. They added another billion to their endowment and I left with my MS.
Re: Cracking down on research fraud
#147[deleted]
Re: Cracking down on research fraud
#148The root of the problem is that we allow people with high esteemed credentials to run society. They jumped through a hoop. "You got straight As at 14 - 18 years old and got into an ivy league school as a result? Here run this venture fund." "You got a PhD in Economics with a good publication by P-hacking your secret data? Here take a run at the FED with power over the US Economy. Your Phd shows that you are the man f…
Can't agree more. And it's getting worse. In certain fields people are almost untouchable. Couldn't count anymore the number of discussions I had about doctors and how absolutely incompetent some of them are: the usual reaction is like 'No, you don't say! But the selection process ensures only the smartest get selected,so what are you on about?'. The second one is PhDs, and in general all sorts of professors almost e…
>Couldn't count anymore the number of discussions I had about doctors and how absolutely incompetent some of them are: the usual reaction is like 'No, you don't say! But the selection process ensures only the smartest get selected,so what are you on about?'. The second one is PhDs, and in general all sorts of professors almost elevated to god like level. You almost get a free pass to spread whatever shit you want if the credentials are right.
It's like the old joke: what do you call the worst-performing graduate from medical school (or a PhD program), the one who was at the bottom of their class? You call them "Doctor"!
Re: Cracking down on research fraud
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Limiting the number of graduate students. Isn't a lot of the graduate school product providing a way for people to immigrate to the United States? The economy around it is pretty complicated and definitely there's way more pressure to supply more, not fewer, spots.
No, the problem is a bit more structural then that. A single professor trains dozens of grad students over the course of their career. Even if you remove every single foreigner, and every single person who does not want to pursue a career in academia, you still end up with dozens of graduates - per professor. The number of jobs available for those graduates? One - that professor's - when he or she retires. And until…
> The number of jobs available for those graduates? One - that professor's - when he or she retires.
This simply isn't true. Remaining in academia is only one of many career paths for graduate students, and many are financially compensated much better.
Some examples of these include physics and math grad students being recruited by hedge funds, comp sci grad students being recruited by tech companies and geology grad students being recruited by oil, gas and resource companies.
Even within academia the size of the market isn't static. New and emerging universities are hungry for qualified research professors and many come from these programs.
Re: Cracking down on research fraud
#150Estimating from my own reading, 1% of research is fraud and 80% is worthless for other reasons. Numbers vary between fields. If that's the case, what's the argument for why we should spend time doing something about the 1%? Solving 100% of the 1% wouldn't change the overall situation much. Possible arguments include: - Fixing the 80% is hard, but fixing the 1% is satisfying (to the aggressively conventional-minded, a…
>1% of research is fraud
You are way, waaaaaay underestimating the extent of the problem.