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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?

#351

Post by DarkWiiPlayer »

captain_price7 wrote: post #206
DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question is, why don't scientists just put everything on public platforms (read: github) and call it a day? Is it only a matter of funding, or do other factors also play a role in that?

For all its faults, peer-review is still the best mechanism to keep science in right track. What you propose would mean twitter or facebook will replace those journals, people with huge twitter followings, or "celebrity" scientists would dominate science, the works of people without such marketing skills would get drowned out. (This is sort of true for current system too, but I think situation would be much worse in…

> people with huge twitter followings [...] would dominate science

Isn't that at its core the same as with scientific journals? People trust these journals to curate science in the same way you suggest twitter would come to curate science if it made the move online.

1. It's already possible to call attention to a paper through twitter, regardless of whether it's published in a journal or not. Paywalls gate-keep the content somewhat and makes sharing easier, but that's a minor side effect of a very broken system.

2. Papers (and involved data) being available on public platforms like github that already have mechanisms for reporting and tracking issues as well as built-in review tools, in githubs case even a separate discussion feature now, would allow for much quicker discussion critizising bad methodology.

3. Working with a VCS like git would automatically make it clear who wrote, edited or removed what.

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

#352

Post by dandare »

JW_00000 wrote: post #221
dandare wrote: post #196

Two of the mentioned studies seem to be related to the question whether violent games and movies influence our behaviour. Assuming Qian Zhang's work is fraudulent, what was his agenda? That violent games are OK, or the opposite?

His agenda could also just be to advance his career, and make as much money with as little work as possible.

Of course, but in doing so he would choose a certain course, I doubt his studies would contradict each other.

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

#353

Post by arethuza »

pas wrote: post #328
arethuza wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies, I meant conservative in the sense of resistance to contemplate new ideas rather than the political sense. Somewhat naively I had assumed that academic research was where people would be most welcoming of at least discussing new ideas, whereas I found the opposite to be true.

Thanks! Could you give a few examples? About what were folks so conservative? Were they stubborn proving/supporting their own paradigm/hypothesis or ... they were just simply not open to any ideas? About methods or about theory? Both?

It was quite a long time ago (~30 years) but I suspect a lot of it was simply because senior academics didn't realise they were actually managers, had no interest in managing or even understand that there were problems.

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

#354

Post by valarauko »

asveikau wrote: post #302
stanford_labrat wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did my undergrad at UW and was heavily involved with the GS department. There’s only so many people this could be lol, really makes me wonder. Edit: found who it is. Why am I not surprised?

I don't know anything about this field and I certainly don't know any people involved, but this comment made me curious and after a few google searches I think I can tell who it is too. Which leads me into some thoughts about not rushing to judgement. I believe the commenter above is doing his best to be a reliable narrator, but it's always possible there was more to this story that was not visible to him at the time…

I also did a few Google searches and am no closer to figuring out who this is supposed to be :(

For what it's worth, I agree with you that we shouldn't rush to judgement. While its certainly possible in this particular case that there was genuine misconduct, quite often there is a simple misunderstanding.

As an anecdote, during my graduate work I had a fellow PhD candidate convinced his guide was out to sabotage his work, because it 'threatened' to overthrow the guide's long established model. He was convinced that the work of the prior student's work that clashed with his was fudged, and that the PI was covering it up. It is possible? Sure, but not very likely. It's a tad convenient when the people you disagree with also happen to be mustache twirling villains.

I've seen a general trend with young academics at the beginning of their scientific career. They tend to be exuberant, convinced of their own superiority. Until that point, they've tended to be the smartest person in the room, the pick of the lot from among their peers. Hit graduate school, and suddenly everybody around you is just as smart as you, but that appreciation takes a few years to sink in. When your experiments don't work, it's hard to digest and easy to imagine the other guy cutting corners. I'm not suggesting that this is what happened with the top level comment, but could explain many of the other comments I see here.

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

#355

Post by tboettch »

Method5440 wrote: post #203

My best friend went to UCSD for his PhD in biology. He was brilliant and had a nearly unique depth of insight into knotty problems and an incredible drive to progress the field. Unfortunately he was also a bit of an idealist with little real political sense. In grad school he selected a difficult problem in the cancer space and worked on it in the lab for 6 years. His advisor thought he was on track for a Nature pape…

I don't have anything to add, but I wanted to thank you for sharing this story. I have also noticed this lack of empathy, in myself and others, and I don't have any easy solutions.

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

#356

Post by N1H1L »

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…

This is fundamentally because the risk-reward incentive structure is absolutely broken right now. If your lab expects productivity and transformative science (basically if you get a Nature paper every month that will be good!) then something will give.

And this rot starts all the way from funding agencies (NIH/NSF/DOE) who have become hardcore bean counters.

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

#358

Post by austinjp »

petschge wrote: post #313
austinjp wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have noted, this is a global problem, not just Chinese. The version that is more difficult to detect is when a cabal of colleagues agree to push each others' papers in this way. So editor A says "you should really quote authors B, C and D." And somewhere else, editor B is saying "you should really quote authors A, C and D." Machine learning might be a way to tackle this at scale, by teasing out these associ…

How do you propose to detect if A, B, C and D are a cabal that push their own papers or if they are the people who actually know the subject and want to improve the quality of paper that new people produce?

Well indeed, that's why I said it's harder to detect :)

More worrying, what does it mean for science if we can't distinguish between a self-serving cabal and genuine good intentions?

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

#359

Post by bongoman37 »

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 moved from Physics to Biology. It was quite a culture shock and I ended up leaving after a few years. The amount of shady practices, outright data manipulation, PIs ignoring students just making up stuff was just hard to be in on.

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

#360

Post by bongoman37 »

selimthegrim wrote: post #334
garmaine wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should tell UW about this.

This is the sign of someone who has never been in grad school

Yes, universities will always protect insiders over outsiders. You can go on Twitter or something and post but it will likely just be seen as a ranting by someone who couldn't make it and most outsiders don't understand the system anyway.
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