I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go? • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by OscarCunningham » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 9:10 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #17

sterlind wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

couldn't you just assign each student an ID, get a random permutation of the array of students and assign violence to even indices and non-violence to odd? what am I missing here?

You can do that, but it requires all of the assignments to be done simultaneously at the beginning of the study, which will cause problems for e.g. medical trials where not everyone enrolls at once. But why bother? There's no special statistical value in having two exactly equal buckets as opposed to one bucket with 1,621 people in it and another with 1,427.

If you did want an exactly even split, you could assign every even numbered student randomly and every odd numbered student to the opposite group of the student before them. That guarantees an even split and doesn't require all the participants to be known in advance.

It also guarantees that you split evenly any group of people arriving at similar times, so no correlation between arrival time and outcome will affect the study.

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

#92

Post by physicsguy » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 9:10 AM UTC

There's a group in Asia that worked in the same area I did my PhD in. In particular, there's a guy who published 18 papers during his two years Master's degree.

Now, most of these papers were tiny. They effectively were "Run one simulation, get one interesting but tiny result, publish". To me, that's 'salami slicing', and journals should not accept papers that should have been larger studies. But he's carried on with this, has now completed a PhD and has a permanent position at a Japanese University.

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

#93

Post by lldbg » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 9:11 AM UTC

walleeee wrote: post #21

ogogmad wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the rest of academic psychology for that matter? Is this endemic to that field?

The field is over-crowded, for one. Two, its participant pool is almost exclusively undergraduate students on university campuses in WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) nations. Three, experimental designs may rely on questionably reliable, possibly retrospective self-report to infer patterns of affect and cognition. Four, experiments are often conducted in highly contrived laboratory envi…

What is an example of extremely good science in psychology? What's a result we can hold up to scrutiny and believe truthfully with conviction?

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

#94

Post by osamagirl69 » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 9:11 AM UTC

This reminds me of the story from R. Trebino about trying to get a correction published--in 123 easy steps! (spoiler alert -- the comment didn't end up being published after the 123 steps)

[1] https://frog.gatech.edu/Pubs/How-to-Publish-a-Scientific-Com...

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

#95

Post by canofbars » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 9:12 AM UTC

obscura wrote: post #55

SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its no wonder there is a trend now of just outright rejecting information presented when our "trusted" sources of information are very susceptible to malice and error without any real tools to combat it. My current view is that academic research should not be used as proof of anything and only as the starting point for your own research. And by your own research I mean your own actual tests. The papers can point you…

I don't see how this is practical. You could spend a lifetime testing the work of others and still not get through it all, let alone get to working on anything original. Progress is made by building on the work of others.

The point is not to test everything ever published, its that when you want to do X, you look for papers on X understanding that they are likely flawed but better than starting from scratch.

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

#96

Post by ramraj07 » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 9:15 AM UTC

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…

That's already a thing - https://pubpeer.com/static/about

It has definitely brought out many demons in papers but it's still not widely prescribed to or refered from in academia.

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

#97

Post by nxpnsv » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 9:17 AM UTC

raister wrote: post #34

What about Editor's ethics or lack thereof? I got accepted in a Chinese-oriented journal (i.e. most of the Editorial Board were Chinese) - I am not just 'saying' this, I'm saying because the OP mentioned "it's a Chinese thing" over results and datasets, whatever, I digress. On the last revision round, the Editor told me that I was lacking some references, which he promptly send me. Turned out that 6 out 6 of his 'rec…

I found this behavior in Europeans and Americans too. It is not a Chinese specific thing...

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

#98

Post by nxpnsv » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 9:18 AM UTC

ALittleLight wrote: post #61

SubiculumCode wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but mostly likely they'll never publish that author again.

That doesn't seem to be the case in the story in the OP. The problematic author is still publishing at a great pace.

Which is weird... I guess reviewers are lacking in stats education.

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

#99

Post by read_if_gay_ » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 9:18 AM UTC

fireattack wrote: post #89

winstont wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's not about race, it's about the quality of the academic system, which is bad in many countries. I suppose GP intended it to compound - as in the guy was sketchy per se, and from a sketchy place.

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

#100

Post by physicsguy » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 9:22 AM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #84

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.

If you want to publish in western science journals, then you should be held to western standards for science, whether that's convenient or not. Not that we're perfect by any means!