There's Far More Scientific Fraud Than Anyone Wants To Admit

[AlleyCat]

There's Far More Scientific Fraud Than Anyone Wants To Admit

Despite Recent Scandals Of Research Misconduct And Error, The Academic World
Still Seems Determined To Look The Other Way

Can you say, "Michael Mann"? I knew that chu could.

Scientific misconduct has enjoyed some limelight lately. The president of
Stanford, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, resigned last month after a series of
investigations exposed serious problems in his research; an independent review
of Tessier-Lavigne's work found no evidence that he falsified data himself but
concluded that his research failed standards "of scientific rigor and process"
and that he failed to correct the record on multiple occasions.

And in June it was revealed that a scholar at Harvard Business School,
Francesca Gino, was accused of having falsified research about - wait for it -
honesty.

Of course, scientific misconduct does not happen only at Stanford and Harvard.
Of the nearly 5,500 retractions we catalogued in 2022, and the thousands of
cases we have reported on since launching our watchdog website Retraction Watch
in 2010, the vast majority involve researchers at institutions without anywhere
near Stanford and Harvard's pedigrees.

The number of retractions each year reflects about a tenth of a percent of the
papers published in a given year - in other words, one in 1,000. Yet the figure
has grown significantly from about 40 retractions in 2000, far outpacing growth
in the annual volume of papers published.

Retractions have risen sharply in recent years for two main reasons: first,
sleuthing, largely by volunteers who comb academic literature for anomalies,
and, second, major publishers" (belated) recognition that their business models
have made them susceptible to paper mills - scientific chop shops that sell
everything from authorships to entire manuscripts to researchers who need to
publish lest they perish.

Paper mills - scientific chop shops - sell everything from authorships to
entire manuscripts

These researchers are required - sometimes in stark terms - to publish papers
in order to earn and keep jobs or to be promoted. The governments of some
countries have even offered cash bonuses for publishing in certain journals.
Any surprise, then, that some scientists cheat?

And these are not merely academic matters. Particularly when it comes to
medical research, fakery hurts real people. Take the example of Joachim Boldt -
the German anesthesiologist who, with 186 retractions, now sits atop the
Retraction Watch leader board of scientists with the most pulled papers.

A specialist in critical care medicine, Boldt studied a blood substitute that
was used in hospitals across Europe. His results, which were published between
around 1990 and 2009 and widely cited, suggested that the product - used to
help keep blood pressure and the delivery of oxygen to cells adequate - was
saving lives. After his fraud came to light and researchers reanalyzed all of
the available data while leaving Boldt's results out, it turned out the
opposite was true: the substitute was "associated with a significant increased
risk of mortality and acute kidney injury".

The truth, however, is that the number of retractions in 2022 - 5,500 - is
almost definitely a vast undercount of how much misconduct and fraud exists. We
estimate that at least 100,000 retractions should occur every year; some
scientists and science journalists think the number should be even higher. (To
be sure, not every retraction is the result of misconduct; about one in five
involve cases of honest error.)

The lengths to which scientists go to fight allegations of fraud is part of the
reason the rate of retraction is lower than it should be. They punish
whistleblowing underlings, sometimes by blaming them for their misdeeds. They
sue critics. Although they rarely prevail in court, the threat of such suits,
and the cost of defending against them, exerts a chilling effect on those who
would come forward. In one particularly grisly and tragic case in 2006, a
Bangladeshi academic had a whistleblower murdered. The academic was hanged 17
years later.

Journals and publishers find ways to ignore criticism of what they have
published, leaving fatally flawed work unflagged

Journals and publishers also fail to do their part, finding ways to ignore
criticism of what they have published, leaving fatally flawed work unflagged.
They let foxes guard the henhouse, by limiting critics to brief letters to the
editor that must be approved by the authors of the work being criticized. Other
times, they delay corrections and retractions for years, or never get to them
at all.

Some of Boldt's papers were only retracted this year - more than a decade after
his fraud was incontrovertible. Journals are invariably more interested in
protecting their reputations and the reputations of their authors than in
correcting the record. Following evidence and testimony by Retraction Watch,
the British House of Commons's science, innovation and technology select
committee was concerned enough that it said in a report earlier this year that
corrections and retractions should take no longer than two months.

Universities hardly have an incentive to air their dirty laundry, but in the
vast majority of cases they are left to investigate their own. Indeed, that is
the law of the land in the United States, where scientists and universities
have done their best to steadily erode the power of the US government's Office
of Research Integrity, which oversees - but does not perform - investigations
into allegations of misconduct in federally funded research. University lawyers
tell those in the know to say nothing, a form of academic omertà that lets
fraudsters slip through many cracks.

The Stanford case - as Theo Baker, the student journalist who broke it open,
has described - epitomizes all of these factors. Despite having been flagged on
a site called PubPeer starting in 2014, the problems in Tessier-Lavigne's
papers would have remained virtually unknown, and might have never been
corrected at all, were it not for Baker's investigation. (Ivan Oransky, the co-
author of this op-ed, is a volunteer member of the PubPeer Foundation's board
of directors.)

One of the main reasons scientists feel pressure to cut corners or fudge data
is because funding rates are so low. The US National Institutes of Health last
year approved about 20% of applications for new grants. And that's a marked
increase from recent years.

Funding to detect and sanction fraud should be a reasonable fraction of the
dollars being spent - instead of mere millions in a sea of tens of billions.
Until publishing papers is decoupled from earning funding and employment,
however, it's difficult to imagine how much will change.

Ivan Oransky is co-founder of Retraction Watch, editor-in-chief of Spectrum and
journalist in residence at NYU's Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute

Adam Marcus is co-founder of Retraction Watch and editorial director for
primary care at Medscape

=====

August... so hot!

U.S. Burn Acreage Fourth-Lowest On Record (Since 1926)

UT And CO Still Have Snow

Barrier Reef Holding On To Record Coral Gains

German Mountains See 4-Inches of Summer Snow

Cold Julys From Fiji To The UK

Historically Cold Italy

U.S. Ski Industry Reports Record-Breaking 65.4 Million Skier Visits Last Season

Cold Ireland

Cool U.S.

"Unusual" Temperature Drop Recorded Across Pacific Islands

Record-Cold Sweeps Europe As "Intense Snow" Continues To Pound Italy And Spain

Almanac Predicts Cold, Snowy Winter For U.S.

New August Low For Rapa Island

Europe's Colder-Than-Average (And Snowy) July

UK's Historically Cold Summer Drags On

Greenland Ice Sheet Uptick

Sierra Snow pack 1000% of Normal

Svalbard Polar Bears Enjoy Above Average Ice

[Kym Horsell]

On Saturday, August 12, 2023 at 10:08:42 AM UTC+10, AlleyCat wrote:
> There's Far More Scientific Fraud Than Anyone Wants To Admit
>

....


LOL. You had to go there.

Yeah. We know. People that are not qualified to do up their shoelaces boost "csientific research" that can't calculate
the average of US temperatures correctly.

And their dim-wiited boosters that proclaim "record low temperature" for a new met sttaion at the top of some mountain that has only been working for 12 months.

Stuff like that.

We see it posted across a bunch of newsgroups 50 times a day.

--
[Alleycat Computers doesnt know the difference between C and CO2:]
On 3/6/2016 5:24 PM, AlleyCat wrote:
> On Sun, 6 Mar 2016 15:55:21 -0600, Unum says...
>>> Hmmm... why is the ONLY site saying that we're putting 40gts, (39.8gt,
>>> actually), a GOVERNMENT run site?
>>> NO ONE else is saying it's that high... NO ONE. So, again, you are lying,
>>> because THEY are lying.
>> ratboy snipped this one too, which agrees;
>> http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n10/full/ngeo2248.html
>> See chart A on figure 1.
> You mean THIS one: http://i.imgur.com/HafRCKf.jpg
> The one that has data up to 2013 ONLY, and is ESTIMATING we'll BE at 38gts
> in 2015? LOL Again... THEY'RE ESTIMATES, and WRONG.
> STILL ain't at 40gts. 2016 is FAR from over, and that is a computer model
> of what it MIGHT be, not is.
> BTW... could they have made that graph ANY smaller? LOL
>>> Why isn't anyone ELSE using the "Global Carbon Project international
>>> team", to cite the output?... NO ONE.
>>> Of COURSE they're going to lie... THAT'S THEIR JOB, you fucking moron.
>>> LOL... eUnuch Unum is using an entity that's PAID (by WHOM, we do not
>>> know) to monitor carbon output over other entities that DON'T come up with
>>> 40 gigatonnes.
>> You are welcome to cite these mysterious other entities, ratboy. And
>> they better not be getting paid by anyone for anything.
> People gotta make a living basement boy, but rest-assured, they're NOT
> being paid by the government, that IS into an admitted wealth
So who doesn't come up with 40 gigatonnes that isn't being paid
any money for anything?
> https://www.co2.earth
You cited somebody's blog that supports my position.
> Global Emissions
> Year Total Fossil-Fuel Land-Use
> &Cement Change
> 2014 9.795GtC ~0.9 Gt
...
> 2006 9.355 Gtc 8.363 GtC 0.992 GtC

You didn't see the footnote, dumbass?
*Convert carbon to carbon dioxide (CO2) by multiplying the numbers
above by 3.67.
-- Unum, 09 Mar 2016

["Alleycat" then tries to cover up his latest blunder by initially
arguing that the diff between 38 gt and 40 gt ("39.8gt actually") is huge and
therefore indicates "a lie".
When that falls flat his next excuse is that people that don't carefully say
whether they're talking on short tons or long tons are trying to confuse
everyone.
Apparently he never personally heard of tonnes either].

[Siri Cruise]

AlleyCat wrote:
> There's Far More Scientific Fraud Than Anyone Wants To Admit
>
> Despite Recent Scandals Of Research Misconduct And Error, The Academic World
> Still Seems Determined To Look The Other Way
>

What alternative do you propose?

The system is simple: encourage people to publish their results
and how to reproduce the results. If the results are signficant,
someone else will be encouraged to repeat and report if their
results are different.. The hope is eventually all mistakes and
frauds will be discoverred. Are they? We don't know until science
is completed.

--
Siri Seal of Disavowal #000-001. Disavowed. Denied. @
'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' /|\
The Church of the Holey Apple .signature 3.O / \
of Discordian Mysteries. This post insults Islam. Mohamed

[Dhu on Gate]

On Fri, 11 Aug 2023 18:18:32 -0700, Siri Cruise wrote:

> AlleyCat wrote:
>> There's Far More Scientific Fraud Than Anyone Wants To Admit
>>
>> Despite Recent Scandals Of Research Misconduct And Error, The Academic World
>> Still Seems Determined To Look The Other Way
>>
>
> What alternative do you propose?
>
> The system is simple: encourage people to publish their results
> and how to reproduce the results. If the results are signficant,
> someone else will be encouraged to repeat and report if their
> results are different.. The hope is eventually all mistakes and
> frauds will be discoverred. Are they? We don't know until science
> is completed.

No time soon, then. As opposed to a rigged demon, Reality tends to
>expand< when you poke at it: always more complexity and just more.
Games / demos collapse.

Dhu (yaya. this might have some connex to alt.global-warming)


--
Je suis Canadien. Ce n'est pas Francais ou Anglais.
C'est une esp`ece de sauvage: ne obliviscaris, vix ea nostra voco;-)
Duncan Patton a Campbell