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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?

#301

Post by jpeloquin »

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #159
jacquesm wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More and more evidence that the magazine based publication route is a net negative to science.

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?

Scientific data does not fit on most public platforms. GitHub in particular has tight limits on file size, push size (100 MB), bandwidth, and storage ($100 / TB / month). Which isn't that surprising; git is designed for code, not data.

Even if funders gave large sums of money dedicated to data publication, if recurring billing is involved it will eventually break as attention wanes. Data archives need to be managed by an institution or purchased with a single up-front fee, otherwise they won't stick around.

There's also the aspect that, even if you as an individual take it upon yourself to publish your data without institutional support, anyone who reads your paper will most likely ignore your dataset. Which is somewhat demotivating.

https://docs.github.com/en/github/managing-large-files/condi...

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

#302

Post by asveikau »

stanford_labrat wrote: post #165
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 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, that might exculpate a bit. It's also notable that people change over time, can improve on their faults, and might have learned something in the years since. Best not to view their past mistakes as forever damaging.

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

#303

Post by jfengel »

singhrac wrote: post #257
andrewon wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked in both academia and industry in biotech field, I have to say that the bar of reproducibility is a lot higher in industry. In academia, the goal is to publish. The peer-review process won't care to repeat your experiments. And the chance that other lab repeating your experiments was slim -- why spending time repeating other people's success? In contrast, in industry, an experiment has to be bullet-proof…

I can second this. Working in industry, the bar is quite high for rigor. The general attitude of industrial researchers is to be very very skeptical of academia, since a lot of things just don't reproduce (cherry-picked data, p-hacking, only work in a narrow domain, etc., etc.). These researchers are almost all people with PhDs in various science fields, so not exactly skeptics.

The bar is different, but so are the aims.

Industry works solely on stuff that's reproducible because it wants to put these things into practice. That makes for an admirable level of rigor, but constrains their freedom to look at unprofitable and unlikely ideas. That inevitably results in inadvertent p-hacking. The first attempt to look at something unexpected is always "This might be nothing, but..."

They call in other people earlier because they're not protecting trade secrets or trying to get an advantage. They do want priority, and arguably it would be better if they could wait longer and do more work first, but the funding goes to the ones who discover it first.

So there's no real reason for either academics or industry scientists to look askance at each other. They're doing different things, with standards that differ because they're pursuing different goals. They both need each other: applications result in money that pushed for new ideas, and ideas result in new applications.

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

#304

Post by jpeloquin »

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…

> For all its faults, peer-review is still the best mechanism to keep science in right track.

Peer review is often effective, but it can't reliably block fraudulent publications like those described in the posted article. Most bad papers are rejected, but the authors can always try again at another journal. Any paper will probably get published somewhere, eventually, even if only in a Hindawi or MDPI journal. The journals aren't accountable to anyone, and as long as they have enough good articles to serve as cover, academics will need to pay for access because citing relevant prior work is obligatory. The publishing system is very weak against fraud.

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

#306

Post by [deleted] »

mooseburger wrote: post #260
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…

Shouldn't you name and shame this guy in this comment? It doesn't seem like he deserves anonimity.

[deleted]

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

#307

Post by 8note »

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…

This feels like automation would have great benefits for these types of things.

Instead of relying on people getting the right technique, you load in their program, dump chemicals into the right vials, then let it run and check the results

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

#308

Post by kube-system »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #200
cies wrote: post #178

Many stories like this and people wonder why the general public is less "believing" in science lately. I think sadly the general public is right not to believe as strongly in science as it maybe once did, the results though are dramatic in "baby bathwater" kind of proportions. I think science should fix itself. Just publishing paper should not be the metric to reward. A retraction should seriously reward the flaw fin…

It is very good that the general public is less believing in science. I remember well when the public was very believing, including me, and in hindsight it was always undeserving of such faith. It was a very misguided thing to take a conclusion as fact, so long as it be called “science”, for often upon closer inspection the methodology was dubious, and it was never attempted to be reproduced, so even if the methodolo…

To be credible does not require infallibility. The broader social consequence of the general public losing faith in science is not that they will suddenly become enlightened in the nuances of the scientific discovery process -- it is that they will turn to alternative sources of truth. Science isn't a perfect source of truth but it is a heck of a lot better than seeking truth through mythology, tribalism and the opinions of ideologues. Scientific literacy is the ideal state, but the world is not that.

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

#309

Post by dennis_jeeves »

Radim wrote: post #189
mlang23 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is worse. If you mention that you are not trusting every scientific results per se, you're being labeled as stupid and uneducated . This sort of absolute reasoning is making the distrust even worse. How can you have trust in a in a system that is unwilling to publicly admit its shortcomings? Trust and honesty come in pairs.

This science-bro movement scares me too. "But SCIENCE said so! You're a SCIENCE denier!" It feels like a religion, with its own T-shirts and all. Appeals to authority, intellectual posturing… often from people with little understanding of the actual science. Honest insiders are way more careful with any absolute statements. No wonder there's a (also scary) rise of conspiracy theories. How do people not observe those…

> "But SCIENCE said so! You're a SCIENCE denier!"

This is re-incarnation of what used to be religion. Religion is alive an well, just not in form that our predecessors were familiar with.

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

#310

Post by mncharity »

fabian2k wrote: post #150
hmwhy wrote: post #141

> Science is supposed to be self-correcting. I admire the author's belief, not least because I used to be like that, but I personally think that couldn't be further form the truth for contemporary scientific research, and it's no better in evidence-base physical sciences. I personally know many people who used to be, or still are, in scientific research who wouldn't hesitate to agree with me that scientific research…

Basing your own work on something that doesn't work is incredibly frustrating and can lead to enormous amounts of wasted effort. It doesn't even have to be fraud, there are so many factors you often can't fully control, and reactions can depend on very subtle details or minor impurities. My impression is that usually the informal communication about stuff "that everyone knows doesn't actually work" is far more effici…

> the informal communication about stuff "that everyone knows doesn't actually work"

Informal communication, as an important part of the system of "science", seems very underappreciated in nearby threads.

Science in quotes because even subfields can be very diverse.

Often the corrective mechanism isn't retractions or demotion, it's the hallway gossip at conferences, the "don't believe it - he (high-profile PI) sees what he wants to see". And associated differential aging-out of relevance. There can be a lot of science system state that isn't captured by the short-term state of the research literature.

But regrettably, as the stories here of smashed careers and lives illustrate, it can be very far from "everyone" that "knows". And a big difference between someone "knowing", and that being well expressed in their mentorship and leadership.

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