Bad-Science
Bad Science
“Despite its professed commitment to self-correction, science is a discipline that relies mainly on a culture of mutual trust and good faith to stay clean. Talking about its faults can feel like a kind of heresy. (It has been likened to) pederasty among priests. The exposure of fraud directly threatens the special claim science has on truth, which relies on the belief that its methods are purely rational and objective” Stephen Buranyi
Bad science includes real science done badly or with fraudulent intent, and pseudoscience. We have listed elsewhere a number of useful blogs on the subject.
Page Content
1 Main Forms of Misconduct
The main forms of misconduct in scientific research are:
- fabrication — making up results (sometimes referred to as ‘dry-labbing’);
- falsification — manipulating research materials, equipment or processes or changing or omitting data/results such that the research record is corrupted; and
- plagiarism — appropriating other people's ideas, results or words without giving appropriate credit.
Some academics consider suppression to be another form of misconduct — the failure to publish significant findings because they are contrary to the interests of the researcher or sponsor. And then there’s plain incompetence.[1]
The extent of the problem is not well understood, although there are regular reports in the technical press about researchers not being able to reproduce others results. One large-scale study (in 2015) found that only one-third of published psychology research was reliable.[2]
The motivation to commit fraud is often career-related — scientists depend on a good reputation to get funding, and for this they need to publish high-profile scientific papers in refereed journals. What’s more they can expect to get away with cheating because other people’s results are notoriously difficult to reproduce, and if ‘mistakes’ are discovered the individual involved can claim innocence. Published papers may be retracted, but this is normally done with a minimum of fuss and researchers may not realise for some time. The practice may be more widespread that people think. [3]
Fraud (and mistakes) are usually exposed in the end but often at a high cost especially if they go undetected for a long time. There is the wasted effort by other researchers working to confirm or refute the finding, and research agendas being distorted to address the fraudulent evidence. Public health may also be compromised, for example when medical or other interventions are based on dubious research findings. The Piltdown Man hoax is one of the best known and most notorious cases,[4] but there have been many more examples that were less high profile.
When deception (or ineptitude) implicates nation states the consequences can be even more serious: for example, doubts
have recently been raised about the accuracy of data on greenhouse gas emissions submitted by Italy, India and China, and this threatens to undermine the 2016 Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Things don’t get much bigger.
2 Exposing Fraud
A number of internet tools are now available to aid in the detection of plagiarism and multiple publication and statistical errors. [Source of graphic]
One, Déjà vu, is an open-access database which contains several thousand instances of duplicate publication; another, a computer program named Statcheck, which is designed to check the maths behind published statistical results. The creation of such tools has ignited much discussion
in the scientific community concerning issues such as ethical behaviour, journal standards, and intellectual copyright.
Asked what it would take to totally eradicate fraud from the scientific process, one investigator suggested that “scientists make all of their data public; register the intentions of their work before conducting experiments, to prevent post-hoc reasoning, and that they have their results checked by algorithms during and after the publishing process.” When new fraud-detection programs are deployed they will flag up some very real instances of fraud, as well as many unintentional errors and false positives – and present all of the results in a messy pile for the scientific community to sort out, which he described as “a bit like leaving a loaded gun on a playground”.[5]
3 Predatory Publishing
We should mention here the practice of predatory publishing — churning out 'fake science' for profit. A recent investigation
by the Guardian
and three German publishers found "more than 175,000 scientific articles have been produced by five of the largest 'predatory open-access publishers', including India-based Omics
publishing group and the Turkish World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, or Waset."
The investigators noted that "the vast majority of those articles skip almost all of the traditional checks and balances of scientific publishing, from peer review to an editorial board. Instead, most journals run by those companies will publish anything submitted to them – provided the required fee is paid." To demonstrate the lack of peer review the investigators successfully submitted an article created by SCIgen, a website which automatically generates gibberish computer science papers. The paper was accepted for discussion at a Waset
conference and the event filmed. [6]
4 The IgNobel Prize
We shouldn't complete this section without reference to the Ig Nobel Prizes, a parody of the Nobel Prizes, which are awarded every autumn to celebrate ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. Genuine Nobel Laureates present the prizes at a ceremony at the Sanders Theater, Harvard University, and the winners give public lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The 2016 Ig Nobel Prize
for Reproduction
went to the late Ahmed Shafik, for testing the effects of wearing polyester, cotton or wool trousers on the sex life of rats, and for then conducting similar tests on the human male. The Ig Nobel Prize for Chemistry
went to Volkswagen, for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electro-mechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested. [You will find a full list of prize winners here.]
5 Global Climate Coalition
The Global Climate Coalition
(GCC) was an international lobbyist group of businesses that opposed action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and publicly challenged the science behind global warming. It operated from 1989 to 2001.[7]
The Coalition was the largest industry group active in climate policy and the most prominent industry advocate in international climate negotiations. It was involved in opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, and played a role in blocking ratification by the US. The GCC
knew it could not deny the scientific consensus on climate change, but sought to sow doubt over the scientific consensus and create manufactured controversy. The GCC
dissolved in 2001 after membership declined in the face of improved understanding of the role of greenhouse gases in climate change and of public criticism.
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Notes
1 It can be difficult to know whether an author has intentionally ignored a highly relevant prior work or key citation. Publication of the same content with different titles and/or in different journals may also be considered misconduct. [See Wikipedia
for a more detailed analysis ]
2 In this study
of 100 studies, research teams from around the world each ran a replication of a study published in three top psychology journals – Psychological Science; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. The researchers note that "almost all of the original published studies (97%) had statistically significant results... What we found is that when these studies were run by other researchers, only 36% reached statistical significance... Put another way, only around one-third of the rerun studies came out with the same results that were found the first time around. That rate is especially low when you consider that, once published, findings tend to be held as gospel."
3 Realisation that the retractions of scientific papers is not generally announced, nor the reasons for retractions publicised, led in 2012 to the setting up of Retractionwatch. One result is that other researchers or the public who are unaware of the retraction may make decisions based on invalid results. For example, a paper that reported that a certain molecule could cause some types of breast cancers to respond to a drug that would otherwise be ineffective, led to a company
being established to make use of the reported discovery.
4 The significance of the bona-fide
fossils that were being found was suppressed for decades because they disagreed with the preconceived notions behind the Piltdown Man hoax. The prominent palaeontologist Arthur Smith Woodward spent time at Piltdown each year until he died, trying to find more Piltdown Man remains. Moreover, the misdirection of resources kept others from taking the real fossils more seriously and delayed the reaching of a correct understanding of human evolution. [The image shoes the Piltdown Man cranium and mandible as reconstructed by Dr Arthur Smith Woodward (L) and Professor Arthur Keith (R).]
5 Stephen Buranyi [2017] 'The Hi-tech War on Science Fraud' The Guardian.
6 You can find on the internet a list of publishers
"that may be engaging in predatory practices". We are clearly not in a position to evalute such claims and recommend caution. [The Stop Predatory Publishing site was "built by an independent group which wishes to remain anonymous in order to avoid the harassment suffered by the creator [of an earlier site that got shut down after harassment]."
7 For a discussion of the work of the GCC see DeSmog
and DeSmokUK. DeSmog exists to "clear the PR pollution that is clouding the science on climate change." It was set up in 2006 and describes itself as "the world’s number one source for accurate, fact based information regarding global warming misinformation campaigns."
Peter Pomerantsev has produced an excellent series 'How They Made Us Doubt Everything', which aired on the BBC in July/Aug 2020. It's a 10 part series (of 15 min. episodes) which explores how powerful interests and sharp PR managers engineered doubt about the connection between smoking and cancer and how similar tactics were later used by some to make us doubt climate change. With the help of once-secret internal memos, it takes you behind boardroom doors where such strategies were drawn up and explores how the narrative changed on one of the most important stories of our time - and how the marketing of doubt has undermined our willingness to believe almost everything.
