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2024-11-11
In my experience, people don't pay much attention to anything from those countries unless there's some special reason to take it seriously.
I had a near panic like shit, 10,000 retractions is a huge thing. Especially after all the incidents between 2010-2018 where we were hitting 1000 retractions a year
But then I read China and yeah, okay. They're probably going through their own shake up.
Ya I generally avoid any paper that's from China unless I really need the information it provides and then I need to go down a super tedious rabbit hole to make sure I can actually trust that it's true.
Yeah, I've come across one or two papers of questionable origin presenting performance metrics nowhere near what I could replicate.
Needless to say, I could only replicate the results when I introduced a very mundane procedure error nobody reputable would make. So yeah, lots of garbage out there
And that's not even fraudulent, just incompetent...
Freakonomics has a couple of interesting podcasts on academic fraud, where they discuss what motivates it and some suggestions for mitigating the problem:
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-there-so-much-fraud-in-academia/
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/can-academic-fraud-be-stopped/
Want to save us 79 minutes and summarize what the motivation is? I'm assuming it's agenda propaganda. Is that right?
What is "agenda propaganda"?
The motivation is mainly just the extreme pressure put on academics to publish relentlessly, combined with a publishing culture that favours "interesting" results. When you set out to test a hypothesis with an experiment, the results could turn out to be more or less remarkable. if the results are unremarkable it's still a valid result and useful data, but it's difficult to report that in a paper and get it published, because the journals favour "interesting" results. So a lot of perfectly valid and useful science can't get published. This creates a big temptation to massage results to create something that looks more striking and will get published. This may start with selectively omitting data or selectively analyzing the data, but it's a bit of a slippery slope towards changing data points that don't support the paper's thesis.
They mention one mitigation scheme in particular that is interesting: in this scheme scientists submit the question their experiment is supposed to answer to the journal before they do the experiment. The journal editors decide whether they want to publish it before they see the experimental results. If they commit to publish, they publish the paper no matter what the experimental results turn out to be. This removes an incentive to massage the data to get published.
There's also the way funding and jobs are allocated: you have to have a real stack of publications to your name and constantly be publishing to keep your job or get your research program funded. This creates an incentive for scientists to pay to be included in the author list of papers they didn't actually work on. And there's the phenomenon of professors putting their name to research by their students where they haven't examined the data in detail, and the fact that there are too many papers for anyone to thoroughly peer review, both of which make it easier to slip manipulated or faked data into publications.
Agenda propaganda refers to the use of media and communication tools to promote a specific set of ideas, values, or a particular agenda, often by presenting selective facts or by manipulating emotions to influence public opinion and behavior.
Thanks for the summary!
Prestige, money, career. Plus a dash of something else.
ketchup ? it has to be ketchup
They talk about many things, but the one that stands out is incentives. There is a lot of competition in academia, publish or perish, with big prizes, so some people are taking shortcuts.
These were great, really enjoyed them, especially the coverage of the Data Colada story
Isn't this just fraud and should be prosecuted?
Prosecuting scientists for publishing unheard of ideas in a manner that hasn't been sanctioned by an established scholarly/religious institutions....
The solution to bad science is science.
Well if you put it like that :D
I'm not sure you're right now. Fight fire with water, but what if you only have a teacup full of water? Meaning there could be an immense potential of energy on one side, and a small on the other. On one side you have money for careers and whatnot, on the other you have... nerds who believe ~~love~~science conquers all :D
Unfortunately Chinese papers in my field have a reputation for being less trustworthy than historical scientific powerhouses like Europe, the UK, the US and Canada. Countries like Iran aren't even on the map.