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Hi Folks -
I think Eric may have something here – and anyone who uses an entomology analogy is all right with me. I applaud Ariely's work, and I think what Casadevall says is by and large true, although I believe he's missing a large portion of the discussion. Unfortunately there aren't many popular books that are published on how well the scientific process and peer review work, and even if they were, a car crash is much more exciting than saying "our system of peer review generally works very well!".
According to the journal Nature, some 27,000 per week are published now (i.e., 1.4 M/year). Of that number, Nature says that 300 per year will havesome kind of retraction; including fraud and the like but also completely innocuous items like mislabeled graphs, references, paragraphs of text leftout, misspelling a PI's name, etc. But that means that something like only 0.023% of papers are retracted for any reason. Let's be wildly generous and say that ten times that ought to be retracted – and I think that’s an absurd number – which means of all the peer reviewed papers we publish less than 0.3 percent per year of papers – three out of a thousand—have content that should be retracted, for whatever reason. We’re Human—that number ain’t bad. You're going to get people who lie and cheat in anyplace, in any industry.
I entirely disagree that being creative gives you a tendency towards circumventing the truth, and I think the numbers above support that theory. I also find it ironic that for the Nature article on this book/issue there was a retracted statement made from the original article… Just a mistake, by the way… Nothing nefarious. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/science/study-finds-fraud-is-widespread-in-retracted-scientific-papers.html?_r=0
Much of the problems I believe may be in who is funding the research. In my perfect world less medical and ag research is funded by industry. I bet we'd have fewer retractions. Hey – a girl can dream.
I'm not saying that books and articles like these should not be published – far from it. But as educators we see this every day, that someone gets a hold of a story, that doesn't give the whole picture, it gets a lot of press and talk, and folks then come to the conclusion, "because I read about it in an article evolution and creationism are both credible scientific theories"; that "scientists doubt climate change", "peer review is bogus, and we shouldn't spend tax payer money on it", etc. I wish people who did these articles and books would also talk more about the big picture, but that doesn't sellbooks and magazines. Ah, but then, I've seen plenty of authors who dofocus on the big picture, and folks STILL only remember the car crash. Heavy sigh….
Cheers -
Carlyn
Carlyn S. Buckler, Ph.D.
Senior Education Associate
Paleontological Research Institution
and its Museum of the Earth
Adj. Asst. Professor Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
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From: Eric Siegel <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Reply-To: ASTC <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2012 10:14:28 -0400
To: ASTC <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Subject: Re: Misdeeds, Not Mistakes, Behind Most Scientific Retractions
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yeah, but you gotta love a profession that does a scientific study on how frequently scientific studies are tainted by dishonesty. It begs the question: was this an honest study or is there some deception going on here? I think they better do a study of how frequently studies that document deception in studies are deceptive.
Big fleas have little fleas,
Upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas,
and so, ad infinitum.
Eric
On Oct 2, 2012, at 10:07 AM, Charlie Carlson <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
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Hi All,
Not to belabor a point, but I'm reading Dan Ariely's book, the Honest Truth about Dishonesty and this recent paper about fraud in scientific papers serves as a remarkable case of confirmatory evidence. Furthermore, it turns out that creativity and dishonesty tend to hang together, and here is a classic example.
This is not to bemoan or berate a field or person, but more to call attention to the fact that we all tend towards dishonesty, it's a ubiquitous and likely intrinsic part of our nature. Admittedly, the number of retracted papers is very small, but the amount of deception is huge.
It's a fascinating area of scientific investigation.
I found the following story on the NPR iPad App:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/10/01/162100029/misdeeds-not-mistakes-behind-most-scientific-retractions?sc=ipad&f=1001
Misdeeds, Not Mistakes, Behind Most Scientific Retractions
by David Schultz
NPR - October 1, 2012
When there's something really wrong with a published study, the journal can retract it, much like a carmaker recalling a flawed automobile.
But are the errors that lead to retractions honest mistakes or something more problematic?
A newly published analysis finds that more than two-thirds of biomedical papers retracted over the past four decades were the result of misconduct, not error. That's much higher than previous studies of retractions had found.
"We found something that is very disturbing," Dr. Arturo Casadevall, the co-author of a paper looking into this phenomenon that was published Monday by Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, tells Shots. "This kind of stuff has the potential to do damage to science. But we need to expose it to clean our own house."
Casadevall, a microbiologist and immunologist, and his partners looked at the more than 2,000 retracted biomedical research papers since 1977. They found that more than 67 percent had to be retracted because of fraud, suspected fraud, duplicate publication or plagiarism. Only 21 percent of the retractions they looked at were the result of error.
Casadevall says the reason his team's findings differ so much from previous retraction studies is that his team independently verified why each paper had been retracted.
He says the previous research had relied on retraction notices — explanations published in journals about why studies are being retracted. But, Casadevall says, "when you retract a paper, most journals allow the authors to write the notice." That gives the authors the chance to spin the message.
For example, the authors of a 1993 study published in Science were found to have falsified and fabricated their data. Their retraction notice makes no mention of this, only stating that "some experiments have not been reproducible."
That might technically be true, but it leaves out the fact that the authors' original findings may not have even been producible in the first place.
Casadevall's team didn't take the authors' words for it. They brought in information from the federal Office of Research Integrity, as well as from independent media reports. Not only did they find that two-thirds of retracted articles involved misconduct, they found that the more highly influential a journal is the more of its retracted articles involved fraud or suspected fraud.
Casadevall's team verified some of their retraction notices with help from the blog Retraction Watch, created two years ago by health journalists Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky.
While the economic pressures of conducting biomedical research will always lead some scientists to cut corners, Oransky says journals need to force those scientists to own up to their mistakes. "These unclear, opaque notices really distort the scientific literature," he says. "They don't allow for a full picture of what's happening in science."
The bloggers behind Retraction Watch have seen, perhaps as well as anyone, how scientists can get things wrong. But Oransky says he's optimistic that Casadevall's study will bring about change.
"It's one thing for bloggers to bang on about something and make the same conclusion every week," he says. "But it's another for the peer-reviewed literature with a carefully done, well-constructed study to do the same thing. It's harder to ignore." [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]
To learn more about the NPR iPad app, go to http://ipad.npr.org/recommendnprforipad
Sent from Charlie's iPad
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