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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?

#111

Post by tgv »

lanevorockz wrote: post #109

The belief that any research is automatically true is so bogus and so abused that industries and lobbyists came to rely on it. It’s sad that then people blindly push as “it’s science”. Main issue is the sheer amount of papers being published and the lack of capacity of the body of experts to read all of it. I guess it’s the professionalisation of research. People publish papers to improve their rankings and not becau…

There actually is more than enough capacity to peer review (). It's just that nobody wants to do it. It costs time and money. Not compensated by the publisher, of course.

() edit: that's raw body count. I wouldn't know how many people could actually spot the errors mentioned in the OP.

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

#112

Post by hoseja »

rurban wrote: post #73

You are not fighting science, you are fighting politics. China obviously wants to forbid violent movies and games for minors, so they come up with these fantasy studies. Very similar phenomenons also just happened in the west, where news and politics wanted to suppress critical scientists. News was stronger. You also have to fight corruption all the time. Paid studies are constantly published to support some companie…

Finally someone is talking about the content of Zhang's "studies". Seems motivated to support predetermined policy, probably so the CCP can boast about their decisions being backed by science.

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

#113

Post by renewiltord »

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…

My cousin was a student at a lab where a sketchy grad student doctored results too. She was majorly sketched out by the whole thing and that the PI supported the whole op. It was very painful and set her back a bit but she managed to switch to a different lab and do proper work, defend her thesis, graduate, and get far away from those people. Now we just shake our head in disbelief at them but at that point it was fairly existential. It's not easy to switch labs after some time there and people will sort of distrust you and everything.

My impression is that some large number of 'results' are fake results. I can't even imagine in non-hard sciences what the fakery is when the hard sciences have this stuff.

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

#114

Post by throw14082020 »

I can't imagine how tiring it is to do the investigation the author performed. He had to subscribe to literally garbage papers (from Qian Zhang) to investigate them. He had to do the policing. Because there is no quality control in research. Just citation counts and people-you-know.

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

#115

Post by iagovar »

nxpnsv wrote: post #97
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...

I've never seen it in Spanish publications, although I've been told it happens (social sciences).

I know about the politics too, that's the main reason why I never went to pursue an academic career, but being honest I never witnessed such plain fraud in my UNI. It was more of a friends-get-all scheme.

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

#116

Post by SiempreViernes »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #81
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 happe…

The usual way is someone writing a better paper and everyone going "yeah, that's a better reading of the data".

Not sure why you say correcting an established consensus would be unrewarding? Sure, for unimportant details getting a correction out isn't much fun, but correcting an important point is basically the career goal of every scientist precisely because it is important and rewarding.

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

#117

Post by radiator »

jdsalaro wrote: post #41
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…

I'm sorry but this saddens me to no end, even I did better science during my BSc and MSc; it's not just disheartening, it's frightening. Reading this almost made me feel ill to my stomach. I don't know what else to say at the blatant disregard for scientific ethics and sense of duty. And we complain that the public at large doesn't trust us "educated" folk, well I can't see why...

This is true, and in my opinion there is one more tendency which you also imply.

Not only the public at large, but even University graduates start to an extent distrusting those who are "professionals" in academia. It is simply a whole other world, where you are only judged by the number of papers under your name, perhaps never having contributed to anything practical - seems so detached from real life.

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

#118

Post by raister »

crististm wrote: post #103
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…

So you lowered your bar huh? Who am I to judge, but I would have preferred a story with something more than the game is rigged and that's what I get to play with

The paper was not accepted at that point. He could just denied publication out of spite. I played the odds, and got published, despite doing that.

I'm sorry the story ended badly :) and yes - I've lowered the bar, sadly.

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

#119

Post by hasjekyll »

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…

Unfortunately this happens in astronomy in non-Chinese journals too.

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

#120

Post by JesseMReeves »

ALittleLight wrote: post #51
op03 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dont worry about it. It becomes a trap and many of them loose their minds as them dig themselves into deeper and deeper holes not knowing what else to do. Source: shrink in the family at a univ counselling center. At the end of the day they are misguided people. Even though there is a high price, their function is to train the survival skills of the honest folk who rise up the food chain. And dont have any doubt they…

The problem isn't that such people are getting away with unearned good feelings and so the fact that some may feel bad later isn't a solution or a reason not to worry. The problem is that they are wasting scientific resources (e.g. the time of the careful intern trying to reproduce flawed results), polluting research by publishing misleading findings, and discouraging legitimate research.

The problem is that there is no working system in place that makes such abuses of scientific truth visible.

We would need to get away from inefficient communication via publications and set a system in place that tracks findings in detail, and whether they can be replicated first.

But there is no willingness to do so after the US of A deeply harmed the scientific mission and academics by introducing infuriatingly dumb economical incentives into science.

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