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I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

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Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#81

Post by marcus_holmes »

Ace17 wrote: post #42

> I was curious to see how the self-correcting mechanisms of science would respond [...] > I was disappointed by the response from Southwest University. Their verdict has protected [a fraudulent researcher] and enabled him to continue publishing suspicious research at great pace. The self-correcting mechanisms of science can only correct knowledge . Those mechanism work mainly by requiring the research works to be ch…

How does bad research get retracted and corrected then?

As the author points out, the "data" in these papers is large enough to contaminate meta-analyses for years to come. And if the Bad Scientist continues to produce more of them, then decades to come. The consensus of the entire discipline will be swayed. Self-correcting this will be very difficult, require lots of data, and be unrewarding. It probably won't happen. Politicians consulting The Science on this subject will get erroneous conclusions and make erroneous decisions.

The Scientific Method is self-correcting. Academia, not so much.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#82

Post by fareesh »

What if you had a webpage with the paper at the top and a comments section at the bottom where anyone in the world could post a rich-media post of their findings that cast doubt on some findings with regard to the original paper.

We currently treat academic research by a metric of "citations", why not have a new metric where the world can be cautioned of potential issues with the result. You could use the bug bounty model and invite crowdfunded contributions to pay out bounties to those who participate in debunkings.

This does not need to be accepted as canonical by the scientific community at large.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#84

Post by marcus_holmes »

KirillPanov wrote: post #54

> They said, no, "It's a China thing." This needs to stop being an acceptable answer. Not just in academia, but also in politics, in business, in the naming of viral strains, ...

It's tricky. There are huge differences in culture that we don't appreciate. What we think of as ethical and honest doesn't match what that culture thinks of as ethical and honest. And there's no reason for them to think that we're right and they're wrong.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#85

Post by winstont »

dnautics wrote: post #31

In graduate school, in my lab there was a grad student who was kind of an unlikely "professor's pet". He was tall and had surfer's long hair with a bit of a hippie aesthetic. Anyways, he was also really completely clueless about how to do science correctly, but also, I guess, really good about playing politics (there was a time when he asked me to put some bacterial plasmid DNA on my mammalian cells. I told him "it d…

> a super sketchy foreign postdoc

I'm unsure of how the term "foreign" is being used above. Is it implied as a pejorative there? For example, if OP had written "a super sketchy white postdoc", or "a super sketchy black postdoc", would the HN community tolerate that?

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#86

Post by dnautics »

panabee wrote: post #76
dnautics wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm doing pretty good, thank you! I enjoy coding, I've always been a better coder than a biochemist (likely on account of started coding at age 5, started biochemistry at age 19). I'm still doing garage science here and there, and being a programmer affords me the capability to both afford that and have some time to do it.

i have been thinking a lot about this problem. society has innumerable unsolved problems in healthcare, and many talented people who would like to contribute but cannot. in software, the open-source model allows people to advance critical initiatives without quitting their day jobs or making onerous commitments. how can we achieve the same in healthcare, that is let outsiders contribute and advance the state of the a…

I don't know if it will "allow outsiders to contribute" but I would like to see a biotech that makes patent-free drugs. I tried to make nonprofit out of that but there was a lot I didn't understand about how I work, how the world works, and how to get things done, so I will take another crack at it in 5-10 years.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#87

Post by pjc50 »

fareesh wrote: post #82

What if you had a webpage with the paper at the top and a comments section at the bottom where anyone in the world could post a rich-media post of their findings that cast doubt on some findings with regard to the original paper. We currently treat academic research by a metric of "citations", why not have a new metric where the world can be cautioned of potential issues with the result. You could use the bug bounty…

> What if you had a webpage with the paper at the top and a comments section at the bottom where anyone in the world could post a rich-media post of their findings that cast doubt on some findings with regard to the original paper.

That just enables your field to be destroyed by cranks who themselves have no accountability.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#88

Post by read_if_gay_ »

gspr wrote: post #78
qqj wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is incredible. And I thought I had it bad with politics in tech companies... this is some next level not giving a fuck right there - people who cheat like that should be punished severely, and work as supermarket cashiers, not become fricking professors. Unfortunately, I too, were I in your shoes, wouldn't pursue it much further past filing a formal complaint or two: the game is asymmetrical, it's much harder to…

Just be aware that it's not always like this, and that some fields are less prone to it than others. In my 8 years in research mathematics, I didn't see a single case that would come close to this horror show (not that mathematics is free of unethical behavior, of course). Collaborating with biologists, however, I got exposed to a world far more backstabby than I've since experienced in the corporate world.

I think this is largely because results in math are easily verifiable compared to chemistry, or as an even worse example, the social sciences. The latter are also suffering from the replication crisis the most.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#89

Post by fireattack »

winstont wrote: post #85
dnautics wrote: post #31

In graduate school, in my lab there was a grad student who was kind of an unlikely "professor's pet". He was tall and had surfer's long hair with a bit of a hippie aesthetic. Anyways, he was also really completely clueless about how to do science correctly, but also, I guess, really good about playing politics (there was a time when he asked me to put some bacterial plasmid DNA on my mammalian cells. I told him "it d…

> a super sketchy foreign postdoc I'm unsure of how the term "foreign" is being used above. Is it implied as a pejorative there? For example, if OP had written "a super sketchy white postdoc", or "a super sketchy black postdoc", would the HN community tolerate that?

I agree that's unnecessary detail.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#90

Post by fiftyacorn »

I remember doing chemistry at university and lab results quite frequently didn't match the expected results. So the first time you submit the results you report what you've found and try and explain it, and get marked down

Lesson learned in future you give them what they want and attach large error bars

I changed course after that as part of science should be explaining bad results

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