I've dated someone studying Biology/Biochemistry for a while. This was interesting because the field itself is interesting so we had a lot to talk about. She was doing a PhD in a subject that was important to me (diabetes) and that I got to know quite a bit about.<p>Being a curious person I then started to read more about it and found a published study that was done at a different university on the <i>exact same subject</i>. There was no difference between experimental set-up, the parameters and the results achieved to that date matched.<p>When confronted with this she responded that she already knew that, her PhD advisor had selected the study and had presented it to the grant givers as a novel approach. He clearly already knew what the outcome would be, and the fact that it would be positive and that the grant gatekeepers would not find out about the other study until it was either too late (which would mean they'd keep quiet because they had not done their jobs properly) or at all (because nobody really cared). She didn't want to rock the boat just wanted her PhD over and done with, confronting the advisor would have been the end of her career for sure, whereas duplicating a bunch of work that you already know the outcome of is ok.<p>This study was quite extensive and burned through a whole pile of resources.<p>At the time I was quite shocked by all this, that in academia there would be such cynical misconduct. According to the lady this was perfectly normal and par for the course in her field.<p>It's one thing for a group to openly try to duplicate the results of another, it is a different thing to use the vastness of the scientific body as a means to re-do success stories found elsewhere to increase your local standing.<p>There is a Samwer Brothers parallel in there somewhere.
Abstract of the article:<p>A detailed review of all 2,047 biomedical and life-science research articles indexed by PubMed as retracted on May 3, 2012 revealed that only 21.3% of retractions were attributable to error. In contrast, 67.4% of retractions were attributable to misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud (43.4%), duplicate publication (14.2%), and plagiarism (9.8%). Incomplete, uninformative or misleading retraction announcements have led to a previous underestimation of the role of fraud in the ongoing retraction epidemic. The percentage of scientific articles retracted because of fraud has increased ∼10-fold since 1975. Retractions exhibit distinctive temporal and geographic patterns that may reveal underlying causes.<p>In general (Table 1) Retractions are not strongly related to Journal prestige, which was interesting to me. The Nature Neuroscience, Neuron and Journal of Neuroscience do not feature in the list, which, in my eyes, raises their prestige, or point to fraud in Neuroscience being harder to detect.<p>A side note: In the paper the authors use 3D pie charts with a bad color scheme (Fig 2. breakup by country). No percentages are given. Please don't do this folks, we're professionals here, not the sales dept.<p>One clarification to the blog post: it mentions duplication, which in science I consider a very good thing. I wish there were more papers that said 'we replicated your finding, thereby increasing it's credibility'. The paper authors refer to duplicate publication, which means taking the same paper and submitting it repeatedly to several journals to increase publications. A dishonest thing not from a scientific data point of view, but a scientific credit point of view.
Say 1% of papers are fraudulent and 10% have serious errors. Now assume it is 10x easier to prove fraud than to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that an error was made. The result is that 50% of retractions are due to fraud, but still only 1% of all papers are fraudulent.
I'd like to see these numbers expressed as a percentage of total publications. While fraud, etc. may be on the rise in terms of absolute numbers, perhaps a better question is whether the <i>rate</i> is also rising or if this is just the effect of an ever-increasing number of publications per year.
I wonder how this relates to the Decline Effect <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_effect" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_effect</a>
Another way to combat this is make it easier for people to publish data that goes against their hypothesis and still give them 'points' for it. Part of the problem in academic labs is that there is this race to publish papers to get more funding to publish more papers to get more funding and so on. If journals stopped treating data that goes against an initial hypothesis as 'bad data' there would be a incentive to still publish it, and ideally, prevent someone else from repeating the same experiment/hypothesis.
If fraud is discovered, it should always lead to a retraction. Errors, on the other hand, are part of the scientific process. Often, the correct response is just to publish another paper.
<i>In a field as messy as biology, it's easy to make stuff up</i><p>If 2/3 of the retracted papers are fraudulent, how many of the unretracted papers are?