Bad Research
 

This is depressing. Do they get their grant money for the next fraud anyway?

link

The article is only talking about total numbers, and doesn't put them in context. The US had the most papers withdrawn, but the article doesn't say if it also published the most. I suspect it did. A better number would be the percentage of papers withdrawn. This article is of very little value without the rest of the numbers to put this in context.

I've struck out fewer times than Babe Ruth. Maybe two dozen times total in my life. Therefore, I'm a better baseball player. Absolute BS.

It makes you wonder if this study is fraudulent.

Since my career did involve scientific publications, I am not a neutral observer here.

But a headline of "Bad Research" with no critical examination is bothersome for me.
What is especially so in this case is that the links provided do not allow direct access
to the original publication, so evaluation of source material is not possible.

I agree with Glatt. it is inappropriate to imply that US researchers
are more (intentionally?) fallible from these meager data,
particularly since the authors say the number of "repeat offenders" is signficant.

Here is an earlier report with a few raw numbers:

As the article below says, unintentional mistakes and errors do occur.
But in science the widely accepted ethical thing to do is publicly acknowledge such errors,
and do whatever is reasonable to correct the information.
Even financial reimbursement of the $-funding agencies is expected.
Such ethics are not always the case in other areas of public endeavor.

How many scientific papers should be retracted?
Murat Cokol, Ivan Iossifov, Raul Rodriguez-Esteban & Andrey Rzhetsky

Direct from New Scientist:

As I read this, the original study compared fraud-retractions to error-retractions.
A much better measure is retractions of either type compared to total publications. On that, the US comes out about normal.

So is the original study just badly done? or downright fraudulent?

It says nothing about the original study. We haven't read the original study so we don't know how it was presented, or what conclusions were purported. All we know is what the Science Daily reporter plucked from the study and the conclusions he made. That's why it's important to look at what people who have seen it have to say.

I find it depressing that there are cases of fraud. Mistakes I can understand, and hope they would be discovered and corrected. But the cases of fraud make all research papers suspect, to me.

That seems completely unreasonable to me. Every industry and every profession has its share of shady operators. Every product and every line has its quality control issues. No quality control is 100% effective.

What is heartening is how much of that fraud actually gets picked up and the work retracted. The more important and relevant a paper, the more scrutiny it will inevitably attract; the more likely a fraudulent paper in that area will be discovered.

That seems completely reasonable to me since every industry and every profession has its share of shady operators. Every product and every line has its quality control issues. No quality control is 100% effective. Therefore they all MUST BE suspect.

Bruce, Classic, good news.

Firstly, the number of fraudulent articles per decade is in the hundreds. There are over 100,000 academic journals, each publishing either yearly, quarterly, monthly, or even weekly. Each issue will have a dozen or more articles. We're talking something between one and five million articles per year. Maybe a few dozen are fraudulent. Compare that to other industries - how many badly made cars or building are done each year? How many unsafely cooked meals are served in restaurants? etc etc. as a percentage, it is minute. What percentage of news media reports are bull#$%#?

And for Classic, every article is suspect. That's the point of publication. Anyone else working in that field will read the article and try to pick it apart. If it seems interesting, they will replicate the experiments. If no-one can reproduce the results, people start scrutinising the original article very closely.

You're right, though, to not get carried away when we read in the paper that "scientists have discovered that ...". Always wait for checking and so on.

I notice that this is the second thread we've had in a few months about criticisms of academic and scientific research. :eyebrow: It didn't start in the cellar, but I'm wondering if some vested interests are deliberately trying to undermine confidence in research.

I think we need a better word than 'suspect'. Perhaps one less loaded with negative connotations. All research papers should be viewed critically. But the idea that because some small minority of research scientists have engaged in dishonest practice all research should be considered 'morally' suspect, which is what we are in fact talking about, is unreasonable.

All research is 'suspect' only in terms of it having to be proved and scrutinised and not taken at face value without some kind of critical appraisal of methodology and results. To approach all scientific research papers with one eye open to fraud is an over reaction to a very small problem.

[eta]

Not just 'research'. Academia in general. There have been a lot of negative academia stories in the news recently; the kind that basically suggest that academia is a big-business con trick and academicians somehow less worthy and more distant than other professionals.

Which is probably why my tone may have been unnecessarily abrasive. There is a little cultural war being played out, over here and in the US; don't know about other places. It's no coincidence that respect ratings for teachers (along with wages in the public/non-fee sector) are lower here than in most other countries.

You're right that the scientific world seems to come in for special approbation at times. They're clearly perceived as dangerous; whilst other academics are simply not valued.

Dana! You retracted!

It's very difficult to find a scientist who isn't biased one way or another. There are very few altruistic scientists out there. They all have their own beliefs and requirements for their studies, and in the end, most of them have to pay the bills one way or another anyway.

Science is no more black and white than any other field. There are many shades of grey.

My suggestion is that the reason science is coming under scrutiny is that every tom, dick or harry can get their hands on scientific research these days thanks to the internet, so everyone thinks they're smarter and more informed than ever before. While this may be true in some cases, in others, people simply do not have the basic skills to disseminate the information in front of them properly and come to wildly unfounded conclusions based on, yep, you guessed it. Their very own personal biases.

The thing about science is it's almost impossible to develop a good experiment without a pre-conceived idea about the result. Hence the need fo a null hypothesis. But you still know what you want/expect to happen, and scientists are human. And money can make them more so.....

Right now there is a very large amount of pressure on professors and researchers to get grants and put out studies and mistakes and fraud will be an unfortunate consequence of it.

Another large problem is that the reasons for "mistakes" are so varied. It is really tough to tell the difference between outright fraud for profit, mistakes, and people in the middle who feel they have to publish something or risk not getting tenure.

I agree Pierce. You'll note that the post you quoted was basically Dana's response to xoB, with my interpretation.