What’s Behind Big Science Frauds?
IN December, Science
published a paper claiming that people could change their minds about same-sex
marriage after talking for just 20 minutes with a gay person. It seemed too
good to be true — and it was.
On Wednesday, the journal distanced
itself from the study,
after its accuracy was disputed, and one of the authors could not back up the
findings. News organizations, which had reported
on the study, scrambled to correct
the record.
Retractions can be good things, since
even scientists often fail to acknowledge their mistakes, preferring instead to
allow erroneous findings simply to wither away in the back alleys of
unreproducible literature. But they don’t surprise those of us who are familiar
with how science works; we’re surprised only that retractions aren’t even more
frequent.
Remember that
study showing vaccines were linked to autism? The time scientists claimed to
have cloned human embryonic stem cells? Or
that simple, easy way that was supposed to revolutionize the creation of such
stem cells?
Those were all frauds published in
the world’s top scientific journals — The Lancet, Science and Nature. The
vaccine scare has been associated with a surge in cases of measles, some of
them deadly.
Every day, on average, a scientific
paper is retracted because of misconduct. Two percent of scientists admit to
tinkering with their data in some kind of improper way. That number might
appear small, but remember: Researchers publish some 2 million articles a year,
often with taxpayer funding. In each of the last few years, the Office of
Research Integrity, part of the United States Department of Health and Human
Services, has sanctioned a dozen or so scientists for misconduct ranging from
plagiarism to fabrication of results.
Not
surprisingly, the problem appears to get worse as the stakes get higher. The
now-discredited paper on gay marriage — by Michael J. LaCour, a graduate
student at U.C.L.A., and Donald P. Green, a political scientist at Columbia,
who requested a retraction after his co-author failed to produce the raw data
— had all the elements: headline-grabbing research, in a top journal, on a
hot topic.
But dishonest scholars aren’t the
only guilty ones. Science fetishizes the published paper as the ultimate marker
of individual productivity. And it doubles down on that bias with a concept
called “impact factor” — how likely the studies in a given journal are to be
referenced by subsequent articles. The more “downstream” citations, the theory
goes, the more impactful the original article.
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