Fraud in scientific papers on the increase

[Fairportfan]

Study: Fraud growing in scientific research papers

Fraud in scientific research, while still rare, is growing at a troubling pace, a new study finds.

A review of retractions in medical and biological peer-reviewed journals finds the percentage of studies withdrawn because of fraud or suspected fraud has jumped substantially since the mid-1970s. In 1976, there were fewer than 10 fraud retractions for every 1 million studies published, compared with 96 retractions per million in 2007.

<snip>

Prominent retractions that [lead author, Arturo Casadevall, a professor of microbiology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York] cited for fraud include a notorious British study that wrongly linked childhood vaccines to autism, nine separate studies on highly touted research at Duke University about cancer treatment, and work by a South Korean cloning expert who later was convicted in court of embezzlement and illegally buying human eggs for research.

Casadevall said he was surprised because he didn't set out to study fraud. His plan was to examine the most common avoidable errors that caused retractions. What he found was that 889 of the more than 2,000 retractions were due to fraud or suspected fraud.

While other studies have shown a rise in retractions, no previous study has found scientific misconduct as the leading cause, said Nicholas Steneck, director of the research ethics program at the University of Michigan, who wasn't involved in the Casadevall study. That shows a need for better, more honest reporting of retractions by the science journals themselves, he said.

<full article>

[chibichibi01]

All of this piling on top of the Climatologists who lost their Nobel prizes for falsifying data on Global warning and making it look more serious than it actually is.

-sigh-

Why science? Why? This only firms my thoughts that believing in science is like believing in a religion. Someone tells you that these people did something and those other people corroborated the results and it becomes accepted at fact among most people, without preforming the experiments yourself, how can you be sure they aren't lying to you?

[Fairportfan]

All of this piling on top of the Climatologists who lost their Nobel prizes for falsifying data on Global warning and making it look more serious than it actually is.

Ummm - who was that? I don't recall hearing about it.

[Dave]

Why science? Why? This only firms my thoughts that believing in science is like believing in a religion. Someone tells you that these people did something and those other people corroborated the results and it becomes accepted at fact among most people, without preforming the experiments yourself, how can you be sure they aren't lying to you?

Well, that's the difference, really. With religion, you're generally required to take things on faith (believing, even in the absence of evidence) and authority ("It is written" or "S/he has spoken"). Questioning is often either discouraged or forbidden, and alternative interpretations of recorded events may be condemned as "heresy" (often punishable by death in various messy and painful fashions).

Science suffers from the same limitations and problems as any other field of human understanding... misinterpretation, honest error, fraud and deception, self-interest, faulty evidence or history, etc. However, science is intended to be a continually self-correcting social process... offering alternative explanations, performing new experiments, devising new hypotheses and figuring out how to test them, looking for error or flaw in previously-accepted evidence and interpretations are all encouraged rather than discouraged, and in fact are essential parts of the scientific process. Taking things as true on the basis of faith or authority is not encouraged, and will tend to result in a scathing peer-review of your paper.

A good scientist is willing to reject his/her favorite theory, or revise it, in the face of new evidence which invalidates it, or when a new hypothesis arises which better explains the evidence or has more predictive power. You will rarely find that attitude among organized religions.

If you can't perform your own experiments... yes, to some extent you're taking things on faith, just as in the case of religion. However, you can always review the findings and papers written by those who did the research, you can study the criticisms of these papers and theories by others, and seek to come to your own conclusions about whether the hypotheses are well-supported and convincing. You can do this within the scope of the specific scientific discipline in question. It's a lot harder to do this within the scope of most religions... I think you end up having to change churches (at least) or faiths (at most) once you "stray" very much at all from the "operating assumptions" of your religious peer group.

If you're looking for Absolute Truth - sorry, science doesn't pretend to understand everything or have the final answer to anything. Religion often does... and you'll find any number of completely incompatible Absolute Truths firmly believed by large groups of people around the world.

[bmonk]

Science suffers from the same limitations and problems as any other field of human understanding... misinterpretation, honest error, fraud and deception, self-interest, faulty evidence or history, etc. However, science is intended to be a continually self-correcting social process... offering alternative explanations, performing new experiments, devising new hypotheses and figuring out how to test them, looking for error or flaw in previously-accepted evidence and interpretations are all encouraged rather than discouraged, and in fact are essential parts of the scientific process. Taking things as true on the basis of faith or authority is not encouraged, and will tend to result in a scathing peer-review of your paper.

A good scientist is willing to reject his/her favorite theory, or revise it, in the face of new evidence which invalidates it, or when a new hypothesis arises which better explains the evidence or has more predictive power. You will rarely find that attitude among organized religions.

In a sense, then, the existence of fraud cases at all among science papers is not all a bad sign--it means that these deceptions are being caught and corrected (eventually). Fraud in religious terms usually involves a church official making off with the donations, more than matters of substance...

[chibichibi01]

All of this piling on top of the Climatologists who lost their Nobel prizes for falsifying data on Global warning and making it look more serious than it actually is.

Ummm - who was that? I don't recall hearing about it.

It was a few years ago if I recall correctly. Maybe they didn't have their Nobel prizes revoked, but it did come out that these people falsified their data to panic people into changing their habits in case it became a worse issue later on... It centered around Penn State, i think.

[Julie]

Well, that's the difference, really. With religion, you're generally required to take things on faith (believing, even in the absence of evidence) and authority ("It is written" or "S/he has spoken"). Questioning is often either discouraged or forbidden, and alternative interpretations of recorded events may be condemned as "heresy" (often punishable by death in various messy and painful fashions).

Which is why I'm super-glad that I was raised in one of the faith-groupings that encourages questioning, study, and "finding the truth for yourself" instead of just "believe it because I told you to."

While Science is known for encouraging questions, questioning things that many people have chosen to believe as Truth (even if it's still just a theory) often ruffles a lot of scientific feathers, too. People are generally just too damn sure that they're right about things...and many are willing to take leaps even for science (I, for example, believe whole-heartedly in the theory of evolution...even though it's a theory). It's usually the people who suck, which taints the institutions that weren't bad in and of themselves.

Just thought I'd step in there as a faith-and-science-can-play-in-the-same-sand-pit kind of person.

[chibichibi01]

Well, that's the difference, really. With religion, you're generally required to take things on faith (believing, even in the absence of evidence) and authority ("It is written" or "S/he has spoken"). Questioning is often either discouraged or forbidden, and alternative interpretations of recorded events may be condemned as "heresy" (often punishable by death in various messy and painful fashions).

Which is why I'm super-glad that I was raised in one of the faith-groupings that encourages questioning, study, and "finding the truth for yourself" instead of just "believe it because I told you to."

While Science is known for encouraging questions, questioning things that many people have chosen to believe as Truth (even if it's still just a theory) often ruffles a lot of scientific feathers, too. People are generally just too damn sure that they're right about things...and many are willing to take leaps even for science (I, for example, believe whole-heartedly in the theory of evolution...even though it's a theory). It's usually the people who suck, which taints the institutions that weren't bad in and of themselves.

Just thought I'd step in there as a faith-and-science-can-play-in-the-same-sand-pit kind of person.

This^ This is something I wholeheartedly encourage, no matter what your faith is. I'm a deist, my family is made of varying denominations of Christianity, but we all feel the same way. Science and religion can go hand in hand. Even the Pope says so

[Mark N]

Well, that's the difference, really. With religion, you're generally required to take things on faith (believing, even in the absence of evidence) and authority ("It is written" or "S/he has spoken"). Questioning is often either discouraged or forbidden, and alternative interpretations of recorded events may be condemned as "heresy" (often punishable by death in various messy and painful fashions).

Which is why I'm super-glad that I was raised in one of the faith-groupings that encourages questioning, study, and "finding the truth for yourself" instead of just "believe it because I told you to."

While Science is known for encouraging questions, questioning things that many people have chosen to believe as Truth (even if it's still just a theory) often ruffles a lot of scientific feathers, too. People are generally just too damn sure that they're right about things...and many are willing to take leaps even for science (I, for example, believe whole-heartedly in the theory of evolution...even though it's a theory). It's usually the people who suck, which taints the institutions that weren't bad in and of themselves.

Just thought I'd step in there as a faith-and-science-can-play-in-the-same-sand-pit kind of person.

This^ This is something I wholeheartedly encourage, no matter what your faith is. I'm a deist, my family is made of varying denominations of Christianity, but we all feel the same way. Science and religion can go hand in hand. Even the Pope says so

Ahem. Amen sister. This all reminds me of growing up and having a hard time explaining to some people how I can believe in science and evolution and still believe in God.

[Dave11]

Well, that's the difference, really. With religion, you're generally required to take things on faith (believing, even in the absence of evidence) and authority ("It is written" or "S/he has spoken"). Questioning is often either discouraged or forbidden, and alternative interpretations of recorded events may be condemned as "heresy" (often punishable by death in various messy and painful fashions).

Which is why I'm super-glad that I was raised in one of the faith-groupings that encourages questioning, study, and "finding the truth for yourself" instead of just "believe it because I told you to."

While Science is known for encouraging questions, questioning things that many people have chosen to believe as Truth (even if it's still just a theory) often ruffles a lot of scientific feathers, too. People are generally just too damn sure that they're right about things...and many are willing to take leaps even for science (I, for example, believe whole-heartedly in the theory of evolution...even though it's a theory). It's usually the people who suck, which taints the institutions that weren't bad in and of themselves.

Just thought I'd step in there as a faith-and-science-can-play-in-the-same-sand-pit kind of person.

This^ This is something I wholeheartedly encourage, no matter what your faith is. I'm a deist, my family is made of varying denominations of Christianity, but we all feel the same way. Science and religion can go hand in hand. Even the Pope says so

Absolutely. I believe in a higher power, but I think S/he's too busy to keep an instant-by-instant eye on all of us. S/he nudges things in the right direction from time to time, but otherwise just lets hir grand design play out.

[chibichibi01]

>.>

<.<

Sorry for derailing the thread. Scientists who fake data disappoint me. Those that conveniently lose vital materials which are needed to replicate their experiments anger me too. It's a sad place where you can't even trust science.

[bmonk]

>.>

<.<

Sorry for derailing the thread. Scientists who fake data disappoint me. Those that conveniently lose vital materials which are needed to replicate their experiments anger me too. It's a sad place where you can't even trust science.

On the other hand, historically not all experiments are reproducible, and not from faking data. Sometimes it's the little factors that count.

Organic chemistry is particularly notorious.

One chemist used to get unreproducible results on occasion--until other chemists realized he was a tobacco chewer, and had a habit of spitting in the pot, which added certain catalysts and suchlike...

Another chemist was trying to get a compound to crystallize, but without a suitable seed, he wasn't having any luck.
So he wrote to the chemist that had first managed to get it to crystallize, asking him to send a few seed crystals in the mail.
The day he got the letter, and was opening it on the other side of the lab--the solution began to crystallize. Apparently a few of the dust motes from the letter were enough to start the process.

[chibichibi01]

But then you have people like the Becker et al that claims to have found the smoking gun "crater" that adds evidence to the highly popular impact theory that ended the Permian. Once the Alvarez's showed us the one that started off the Cretaceous extinction this other group was in a hurry to prove that ALL mass extinctions were impact related. They claim to have found buckyballs with helium-3 and such in China that proved this new paradigm. They tested samples from the site Becker et al used and found they couldn't replicate the results, and asked the team for the samples they used to which they got the reply of "Uh... we used it all up, sorry!" Then Becker et al said they found the crater and published that story. The crater was later tested by other scientists and determined to not be an impact crater.

There's a good book printed in 2007 (so I don't know how much the information has changed) that challenges the paradigm on impact extinctions. It's called Under a Green Sky, by Dr. Peter Ward

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~mukh ... ce_PTB.pdf paper published in 2001

http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/content/ ... /1398.full this one talks about it too

These are the people that get my goat. They go along with common thoughts and say "We did it!" for the publicity and then never surface again.

[DinkyInky]

It's folks like Andrew Wakefield that make it difficult for folks to trust modern medicine. I got blamed for my wee one having Autism because I gave him the MMR vaccine.

It's already been determined by experts that there's a 90% likelihood that I have Asperger's Syndrome. I didn't get the MMR vaccine until I was close to my teens(it flat out wasn't a requirement at the time, nor were most vaccinations). In fact, I've gotten that one a lot of times because my system never develops the antibodies for it, and they keep sticking me with it to try because they say it is impossible for someone with a normal immune system to not develop them.

How then, could I have gotten Asperger's? I already showed signs of it when I was small(no diagnosis of Autism was available back then).

I get horribly agitated when I find people that do not vaccinate their children period. No vaccines at all. I got the Shingles at 17. I have nerve flare-ups whenever I get really sick or really stressed. Other than pain medication, there is nothing they can do until I am over 50(the Shingles vaccine isn't for anyone younger). I get rather upset when folks bring their kids out in public with Chicken Pox, stating it's better for kids to get it this way. Every time I get near someone with Chicken Pox, I get Shingles, and flirt with more hospital time.

My nephew nearly died from contracting Rubella(and after researching it, we determined that whoever caused the outbreak never went to the doctor's to get treated for it, as it was never reported--CDC keeps track of all cases of it).

Yet folks keep quoting Andrew Wakefield as Gospel. Kids die because their parents believe this crap. Personally, I'd rather my child be Autistic as a result of a vaccine than dead or severely disabled/disfigured from a truly preventable disease. That loud-mouthed jerk still claims his words are truth, even when 11 out of 13 of his "proofs" were retracted and his whole paper debunked as wishful thinking and fear-mongering. They also tell me I should thank God for Autism Speaks. Yeah, right. Autism Speaks doesn't speak for the majority of Autistic families and parents of Autistic Children. They don't know what I go through on a daily basis, no matter how much they thin they do. I much prefer the supporting places like GRASP foundation, who do speak for folks with Autism. One of the main rules is that any member of the board actually has to have Asperger's. Who else knows what folks with Autism goes through except someone who lives it?

I wish folks like Wakefield were held more accountable for their falsehoods. It's disgusting.

[shadowinthelight]

My understanding is the whole ball of blaming vaccines for causing things like Autism got rolling some time ago with one scientist (I can't remember his name) who publicly questioned the safety of a flu vaccine at the time. Big surprise, that scientist was on the payroll for a pharmaceutical company with a competing vaccine. While the scientific community is sometimes guilty of being too resistant to change, I would say the general public is more often guilty of being too quick to accept things that challenge the consensus of experts. If you don't know about computers you trust a technician to fix your computer. If you don't about cars you trust a mechanic to tell you what is wrong. It saddens me that so many have allowed themselves to be manipulated into distrusting all scientists, usually by others who have a financial interest in the matter.

[NOTDilbert]

My biggest scientific disappointment? Cold Fusion.

But not necessarily from fraud.

Irreproducible results involving nuclear reactions, which occur at an unobservable level - yep, almost a given. I am pleased that they continue to refine their proceedures and quietly continue the reserch, instead of having flat given up - and show no signs of premature publication. So there is still hope - that they will figure out the missing factor(s), or discover it is truly a dead end (with today's technology - tomorrow, who knows?)

Quiet optimism.......

[DinkyInky]

My understanding is the whole ball of blaming vaccines for causing things like Autism got rolling some time ago with one scientist (I can't remember his name) who publicly questioned the safety of a flu vaccine at the time. Big surprise, that scientist was on the payroll for a pharmaceutical company with a competing vaccine. While the scientific community is sometimes guilty of being too resistant to change, I would say the general public is more often guilty of being too quick to accept things that challenge the consensus of experts. If you don't know about computers you trust a technician to fix your computer. If you don't about cars you trust a mechanic to tell you what is wrong. It saddens me that so many have allowed themselves to be manipulated into distrusting all scientists, usually by others who have a financial interest in the matter.

Yup, that would be Andrew Wakefield. He lost his credibility, his medical license, and yet he still maintains that he's telling the truth. And there are gullible folks in both the religious communities and Autism communities that eat this garbage up. I find it hard to fight these idiots(who have been very vocal and physical) on this subject, so I ignore them when at all possible, to the point of shutting the door on them during voting years. Vaccines save lives. Period. Someone needs to find a way to make Wakefield's groupies Wake Up.

[shadowinthelight]

I really wish I could remember that person's name but I am pretty sure we are thinking of different people. I saw the story some time ago, probably on Frontline. His supposed study only questioned the safety of that particular flu vaccine, before Wakefield and any controversy over MMR. However, his accusation spread like a bad internet meme to all vaccines afterward and allowed people like Wakefield to flourish.

[DinkyInky]

Okay. He's the only one whose name that seems to pop up everywhere on the subject, though his was regarding MMR. Wakefield is a nozzle though. He really needs to be hit with a Darwin stick.

The other study was Thimerasol in the influenza vaccine and Mercury poisoning/Autism. I can't find any names in my old books about who the scientist was, and google has failed me right now.

It's still all crap that chem companies have pocket scientists to fast track drugs without the data, and now all of us mistrust science in some form or other.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Part of the fraud problem lies in funding, which goes contrary to the Scientific Method.

You see, the Scientific Method is as follows:

Step 1) Observe a phenomenon.

Step 2) Gather Data about said Phenomenon

Step 3) Form a hypothesis based on the gathered data

Step 4) Test hypothesis

Step 5) Refine hypothesis based on test results

Step 6) Repeat steps 4 and 5 until you have a hypothesis which seems to be holding water

Step 7) Formulate a Theory based on this hypothesis which has been repeatedly tested and refined

Step 8) Release all pertinent data on the theory, along with all test results (including negative results) to the scientific community at large so you have a wider base of individuals testing your theory

Step 9) Refine Theory based on results from experiments by scientific community at large and confirm results.

Step 10) Publish Refined Theory.

That's how it should work. Unfortunately, you don't actually get funding to do that. To get funding, you need to follow these steps:

1) Formulate a theory based on the amount of shock-value and/or funding available in the field

2) Try to prove this Theory by finding ways to twist the evidence to support it.

3) Continue to get funding by continuing to prove this theory correct

4) Discredit people who disprove your Theory by any means necessary to defend your Theory.

5) Find popular figures in media to support your theory to the public to garner more funding

6) Sell patents for $$$

Case in point: Global Warming.

The idea that humanity had a statically significant impact on the climactic changes of the planet is based largely on a failure to realize just how massive the planet's climate truly is. One volcanic eruption, for example, releases more CO2 into the atmosphere than the entire industrial age. We're trying to compare ourselves to something which is many magnitudes more vast. We have about as much chance of affecting the global climate as an ant has of pushing a pickup truck on a flat surface in neutral. Sure, it's theoretically possible that there might be some movement, but it's not going to affect anything in the long run.

About the only thing Humanity can do to change the global climate in any meaningful fashion is to set off every nuclear weapon in everyone's inventory in the entire world. That might be enough to induce a cooling trend over the next decade or so. Mind you, you'll kill off humanity just through the radiation, and the roaches who are left probably won't care about it, and the world spins on.

There's been seven extinction events we've recorded so far, we might be the cause of number 8, but it won't be through a change in climate.

So basically, the only successful scientists are the ones who throw out the scientific method in favor of getting funding. This behavior of encouraging poor scientific practices is what is causing an upswing in fraud.