When a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis was accused by federal officials of falsifying data, Blythe Bernhard...
Category: science fraud
When a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis was accused by federal officials of falsifying data, Blythe Bernhard wrote a story for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch outlining the accusations. The student, Adam Savine, who "admitted to investigators that he exaggerated his findings," would not comment, and at first she could not get comment from the professor who supervised him. The university did not release its investigation of the student. So Bernhard didn't have a lot to go on. She covered the who, what, when, where, and why, and that was about all she could do.
But when she got in touch with the student's mentor, a Washington University psychology professor named Todd Braver, he...
The whistleblower website Science Fraud has shut down under the threat of numerous legal actions.
The news was reported by Ivan Oransky at Retraction Watch...
The whistleblower website Science Fraud has shut down under the threat of numerous legal actions.
The news was reported by Ivan Oransky at Retraction Watch last week, and a day later the author of the anonymous site identified himself--he's Paul Brookes of the University of Rochester. In a post that has since been removed--but is quoted by Oransky--Brookes wrote, "Over the course of 6 months, we documented over 500 problematic images in over 300 publications, amounting to tens of millions of dollars in misappropriated research funds."
...
5Oct 2012
Here are a couple of interesting pieces I found as I was preparing to close up shop for the weekend:
Kelly Crowe, a medical reporter at CBC News, has a nice wrap-up of the recent news on...
Here are a couple of interesting pieces I found as I was preparing to close up shop for the weekend:
Kelly Crowe, a medical reporter at CBC News, has a nice wrap-up of the recent news on scientific media misconduct. "We, in the media, make a big deal over a new research finding, but when it turns out to be less exciting, or even wrong after future research, we don't tend to report that. 'Never mind' doesn't usually make it into the news," she writes.
And for those of you who don't follow The Virginia Quarterly Review, you missed a nice history of science writing, written by Robin Marantz Henig. If you didn't know Paul de Kruif was the first modern science writer (and I'm...
Carl Zimmer is up on the web today at The New York Times, writing about a study that challenges the "comforting assumption"...
Carl Zimmer is up on the web today at The New York Times, writing about a study that challenges the "comforting assumption" that scientific retractions are mostly due to honest error.
The study's authors analyzed 2,047 retracted papers in biomedicine and the life sciences and concluded that fraud and suspected fraud were misconduct was behind three-quarters of the retractions for which they could determine the cause.
This is indeed discomfiting news. You might think that science preferentially draws people who are honest and curious, and who are smart enough to recognize that cheating in science is a bad bet. Not every case of scientific cheating or fraud is uncovered, but plenty of them are. This study and Zimmer's account remind us that while...
A 3,000 word story by Alok Jha in The Guardian is a stark examination of how seriously fraud and misconduct are threatening the scientific enterprise.
We've been...
A 3,000 word story by Alok Jha in The Guardian is a stark examination of how seriously fraud and misconduct are threatening the scientific enterprise.
We've been told that misconduct is on the rise, but when Jha starts with the laundry list of recent offenses, he shows us how common it is becoming. He leads with the retractions and fabrications of the Dutch researchers Dirk Smeesters and Diederik Stapel, two separate cases in the last year, which probably attracted more attention to Dutch research than any legitimate research that's been done there in recent years.
He also looks at measures of malfeasance, such as a study in which 1.97% of researchers admitted to having "fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once." In 2006, an analysis of images in the Journal of Cell Biology...
.
Your tracker is, as...
.
Your tracker is, as journalists go, a skylark at heart. Happiness is in sharing discoveries, explaining how somebody smart did something right. Fortunately science journalism includes many - not as many as other beats, but many - with the hearts of the cops working for internal affairs. Blood in the water, perps with heads hung low, and trust in nobody until all doubt is removed are their goads and maxims.
Ergo, I've always found stories of scientific fraud, and even of mere error, fairly interesting reading, but deadly dull and disheartening to write. Who cares that some dope falsified his plots when, right down the hall, some other researcher just finished mapping a whole genome, or...
©2010 Knight Science Journalism at MIT. All Rights Reserved.