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

Post by rscho » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 4:50 PM UTC

valarauko wrote: post #274

rscho wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least my research is. Mainly due to hierarchical pressure. And from what I see around me, most medical papers must be read with a healthy dose of skepticism. I've personally witnessed incredible feats of dishonesty that I won't describe here. There are multiple reasons degrading research quality. An important one is spreadsheet incompetence. Another one is that medical research goes hand in hand with academic achi…

I'm a postdoc at a medical school, and this hasn't been my experience. At least in our setup, clinical data tends to be channeled into a collaboration with a computational lab who are better stewards of data handling. Is there cherry picking and over selling the results? Sure. Outright dishonesty is something I have yet to see in my current institution (I did see a fair deal of fudging in my graduate institute, thoug…

Post by Jolter » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #149

SiempreViernes wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From the author, who specifically stated that this task of correcting bad science is unrewarding.

Post by jpeloquin » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

robertlagrant wrote: post #188

mlyle wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that probably most people show integrity... but it's a problem if review processes, editorial mechanisms, and culture reward those who don't show it.

The problem is of a lack of data publishing. All data should be published; all conclusions published (preferably with the code that generated the conclusions) so corrections can be made and improved conclusions drawn easily.

Post by andrewon » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 5:40 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #125

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 friend joined a group studying some cell behaviour. They had previously had a big result that they could stimulate this behaviour in defined, serum-free culture by adding a specific factor. Friend was to work on characterising this effect, so his first job was to reproduce the result as a base case. He couldn't. The factor didn't stimulate the behaviour. He asked around, comparing his execution of the protocol with…

Post by analog31 » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

antonvs wrote: post #282

analog31 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to limit my use of "science denier" when an organization or its followers systematically deny scientific knowledge on multiple unrelated fronts. Interestingly, I have read that in the 1920s and 30s, there was actually an organized relativity denialist movement, that wrote articles and held public protests.

Relativity was a huge philosophical shift from the comparative simplicity of Newton's laws. It's not surprising that there was resistance to it. Tesla was famously against relativity, telling the New York Times, "Einstein’s relativity work is a magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people tak…