Peer review

That might include not being able to get a loan, run a company, or apply for a job: The policy, announced last month, is an extension of the country’s controversial ‘social credit system’, where failure to comply with the rules of one government agency can mean facing restrictions or penalties from other agencies. The punishment overhaul is the government’s latest measure to crack down on misconduct. But the nature and extent of the policy has surprised many researchers. “I have never seen such a comprehensive list of penalties for research misconduct elsewhere in the world,” says Chien Chou, a scientific integrity education researcher at Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. … As of April, the number of times people were denied Read More ›

Should we believe them when they tell us that the drinking four cups of coffee daily lowers our risk of death people with spouses live longer? A statistician and a physician team up to explain why not: A subtler manifestation of dishonesty in research is what amounts to statistical cheating. Here is how it works… If you try to answer one question – by asking about levels of coffee consumption, for example, to test whether drinking certain amounts a day are associated with more or less cancer; or whether being married is associated with increased longevity — and test the results with appropriate statistical methods, there is a 5% chance of getting a (nominally) statistically significant result purely by chance Read More ›

Yes, if you mean “dumb AI,” and there ain’t no “smart AI”: Quantity is definitely a solved problem. STM, the “voice of scholarly publishing” estimated in 2015 that roughly 2.5 million science papers are published each year. Some are, admittedly, in predatory or fake journals. But over 2800 journals are assumed to be genuine. From all this, we can deduce that most scientists have not read most of the literature in their field, though they probably read immediately relevant or ground-breaking findings. But the question has arisen whether, in some cases, scientists have even read papers in which they are listed as authors. A report in Nature (September 2018) revealed that “Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days” Read More ›

Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed has the story: Academic freedom is meant to protect scholars with controversial ideas. But a group of philosophers says academic freedom isn’t protection enough in an era of campus speech debates, internet trolls and threats against professors — and that academics now need a place to publish their most sensitive ideas pseudonymously. That venue, The Journal of Controversial Ideas, will launch next year. Co-founder Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and no stranger to controversial ideas, mentioned the idea for such a journal in a 2017 interview. But plans for it took shape in a BBC Radio 4 documentary on viewpoint diversity, Read More ›

It’s becoming harder to ignore the stench: The drive recruited labs around the world to try to replicate the results of 28 classic and contemporary psychology experiments. Only half were reproduced successfully using a strict threshold for significance that was set at P < 0.0001 (the P value is a common test for judging the strength of scientific evidence). Brian Owens, “Replication failures in psychology not due to differences in study populations” at Nature So why did so many classic studies fail? The account in Nature doesn’t say but that won’t The Atlantic, stop people wondering: Despite the large sample sizes and the blessings of the original teams, the team failed to replicate half of the studies it focused on. It Read More ›

We run this story as a public service. Sometimes the pressure might get to you but it is almost never entirely that person’s fault and this is not the way to go about dealing with it: Graduate student Zijie Wang has pleaded guilty to poisoning a co-worker in the chemistry labs at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. He had been dosing his co-worker’s food with N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA), used to induce cancer in rats, which initially made the victim vomit and gave him diarrhoea. The victim – who survived and testified in court on 2 November – subsequently installed a camera on his desk, and recorded Wang pipetting a substance into his food. Wang is due to be sentenced on 11 Read More ›

For decades, researchers have complained that one of the problems that compromises research today is null findings – that is, if you don’t prove your point, you’re a failure, so you bury it (the file drawer problem). But that attitude shows poor collective reasoning skills. Showing which answers are wrong is, logically, a step on the road to right answers. A proposed reform has been registering studies and peer reviewing the protocols, so that whatever the researchers find will count as a finding. They don’t have to find something when there’s nothing, as long as the hunt is agreed to be worthwhile in principle, justifiable. What happened when it was tried? To see whether registered reports increase the frequency at Read More ›

A tenfold increase in retractions around the turn of the millennium prompted action and study, including the project by Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, founders of Retraction Watch, to list and study retractions. Overall, improved vigilance has slowed the trend, but key problems remain, including: A disturbingly large portion of papers—about 2%—contain “problematic” scientific images that experts readily identified as deliberately manipulated, according to a study of 20,000 papers published in mBio in 2016 by Elisabeth Bik of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and colleagues. What’s more, our analysis showed that most of the 12,000 journals recorded in Clarivate’s widely used Web of Science database of scientific articles have not reported a single retraction since 2003. Jeffrey Brainard, Jia Read More ›

Just when doctors are abandoning the Hippocratic Oath because of its restriction on killing humans, some propose that scientists adopt a version of the basic idea. Others disagree: The authors suggest that researchers sign off on a number of statements, including: I will practice and support a scientific process that is based on logic, intellectual rigour, personal integrity, and an uncompromising respect for truth; And: I will never let the potential for personal recognition or advancement cause me to act in a way that violates the public trust in science or in me as a scientist. Fleischfresser outlines a number of such proposals in recent history and then quotes the current Oath’s critics: While Doherty reserves judgement on the idea Read More ›

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon, occasioned by the social sciences’ war on empirical fact and objectivity: — Duke University professor John Staddon’s Quillette article is particularly relevant in light of the recent 20-paper hoax on the “grievance studies” division of sociology. As John Ioannidis has observed, many areas of science are suffering from “non-reproducibility.” Nor is this limited to the areas of liberal arts and medicine. Sabine Hossenfelder’s book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, details the “non-empirical” nature of the devolution in theoretical particle physics. Just today, I noticed a link to an article, “Is dark energy even allowed?” that details the theory wars between string theorists, dark energy theorists, and experimental particle physicists. It demonstrates that Read More ›

Even the most alert reader may not recall our piece on how gender theory can turn a dog’s life into a, well, dog’s life: Turns out, it may have been another Sokal hoax: Something has gone wrong in the university—especially in certain fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous. For many, this problem has been growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking. For this reason, the three of us just spent a Read More ›

But the reason for the manipulation is unclear: A fresh investigation into publications from a French plant-biology laboratory has revealed “severe” and “intentional” manipulation of research figures. No one has yet been named as responsible for the misconduct, but the institute that led the investigation is expected to announce disciplinary measures by the end of September. The inquiry — led by France’s national research council, the CNRS, with the participation of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) — investigated five molecular-biology articles from researchers at the CNRS Institute of Plant Molecular Biology in Strasbourg, France. The now-defunct lab was renowned for its work on how a gene-silencing technique called RNA interference helps plants, invertebrates and mammals to combat Read More ›