Weekend reads: Views on the "grievance studies" hoax; universities play "pass the harasser;" what next for NEJM?
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The week at Retraction Watch featured questions about what should happen to a paper published by Theranos; a replication of a famous paper on treatment of writer's block that led to — well, you'll see; a researcher joining our leaderboard's top 10; and a data faker who became chief scientific officer of a cannabis product company. Here's what was happening elsewhere:
They're at it again: A group of authors has undertaken a "project to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research." In other words, a sting. (Areo Magazine)
"We've learned that when you send in a convincing paper full of fake data, you can get it published. But we've known that for decades." Our Ivan Oransky weighs in on the "grievance studies" hoax. And so does Dan Engber of Slate.
What happens to taxpayer money when scientists are faced with accusations or findings of wrongdoing? (Francie Diep, Pacific Standard)
What's next for the New England Journal of Medicine, as its longtime editor Jeffrey Drazen is retiring?
It's "neither wise nor fair to expect self-motivated data vigilantes to police scientific flaws," writes Keith Baggerly, who was instrumental in uncovering the issues in work by Anil Potti. (Nature)
"Who Says You Need Permission to Study Yourself?" The Karolinska Institutet does, reports Emily Mullin. (NEO.LIFE)
A project aims to determine, among other things, "how can society as a whole maintain confidence in a sector more and more suspected of treachery and how is this reflected in funding programs and policy as a whole?"
"Dr. Oransky said that while Dr. Wansink's behavior was egregious, it is not something that is isolated to nutrition." (Anahad O'Connor, New York Times)
"Editors of book series stop publishing with Springer Nature to protest its acquiescence to Chinese government censorship demands." (Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed)
When Elsevier and Springer Nature work together on retractions.
A group of authors has written an open letter "to highlight editorial bias at the [British Journal of Sports Medicine] evidenced by a lack of robust and transparent governance of the decision-making processes of the Editor in Chief."
"A leading London university is planning to publish annual data on harassment, bullying and sexual misconduct after investigations by the Guardian and the Observer revealed the scale of these issues at top British institutions." (Sarah Marsh and Hannah Devlin, The Guardian)
"Around 20% of the articles were written about women, with the highest share of 24% in Arts and Humanities. Both male and female authors write more often about men than about women, a stable situation for the last 70 years." (Scientometrics)
Bad Science: PeerJ's Jason Hoyt talks to Corina Logan.
"We find that between 1974 and 2014 0.1% of publications in the top 50 economics journals were replication studies." (Research Policy, sub req'd)
"I reached out to both the authors and the editors of PLOS, but to date, there are no updates or corrections on the article itself." Zad Chow on why it's so difficult to correct the scientific record.
The CNRS is punishing two scientists for misconduct. (Jef Akst, The Scientist)
"For most but not all papers in the literature there is only one α-author." A new way to measure scientific leadership? (J.E. Hirsch, arXiv)
Six months after the U.S. ORI announced findings in the Murthy case, and almost a decade after the University of Alabama said he likely fabricated a dozen protein structures, Biochemistry has retracted two of Murthy's papers.
Sometimes, apparently, retractions need to be corrected. (Cancer Biotherapy & Radiopharmaceuticals)
"How a failed psoriasis study pushed a whole field forward." (Sam Herron, Salon/Massive)
"Science has big plans for the social sciences, including an increased emphasis on interdisciplinarity, methodologically rigorous research, and increased transparency." Of note: Tage Rai, the incoming editor of the subject for Science, posted this in PsyArXiv.
CERN has suspended a physicist "after he allegedly denied that physics suffers from a male gender bias and criticized affirmative-action policies," Davide Castelvecchi reports. (Nature)
"Must academic evaluation be so citation data driven?" Steve Fuller says "we might wish to consider whether the tail is wagging the dog in the case of academia's fixation on citations as a measure of intellectual value."
When it comes to using the h-index to judge research, "Unfortunately, Indian regulatory and funding agencies have institutionalised such misuse," writes Vimal Sinha. (Research Matters)
A social worker was struck from the UK's Health and Care Professionals Council after "it was found she had plagiarised a colleague's assignment and lied to her employer about completing and passing the task." (Luke Haynes, Community Care)
"I think there are a lot of reasons why researchers should be very hesitant to invoke The Incentives as a justification for why any of us behave the way we do." (Tal Yarkoni, Citation Needed)
"I have done reviews on Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, and pretty much every other day of the year." And Jay Van Bavel says he is not alone. (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Undark)
Tilburg University is investigating a recently awarded PhD to see if "there has been a violation of generally accepted principles of scientific integrity and good scientific practice." (university statement)
"In the original version of these 14 articles the reference list was unfortunately not represented according to the journal's new bibliographical style, which should have been implemented from January 2018." (Food Science and Biotechnology)
Could a universal database of conflicts of interest be in the works? (Joyce Frieden, MedPage Today)
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Posted on October 6, 2018 Author Ivan OranskyCategories weekend reads
8 thoughts on "Weekend reads: Views on the "grievance studies" hoax; universities play "pass the harasser;" what next for NEJM?"
Regarding the PhD thesis under investigation at Tilburg University, it is perhaps relevant to note that there is a wider investigation going on, related to several staff members who seemed to have been promotor for a rather large number of external PhD theses. This includes the current PhD thesis under investigation (promotor Ruben Gowricharn). Also, there were some rather odd financial arrangements related to these theses.
See: https://universonline.nl/2018/09/20/dismantling-tilburgs-phd-factory
Sylvain Bernès says:
Thanks for the link. The following excerpt caught my attention:
"Professor of evolutionary social psychology Bram Buunk of Groningen University reviews six of these dissertations and states that they do not qualify as dissertations at all. "None of those dissertations contain any kind of research data." "
Does that mean that the dissertations were not reviewed before the Thesis defences? Where are the evaluation reports delivered by the jury members?
I've worked at a PhD thesis factory university, and there are lots of ways to avoid meeting minimal standards of a PhD dissertation while giving the appearance of rigor.
One way was to write a thesis "incorporating publications". This entails publishing 3 or 4 articles and bundling them together into a "thesis". The published articles would include literature reviews and perhaps a minor descriptive study. Other theses "incorporating publications" would have a few salami-sliced publications of a single under-powered study with a sample of 6 or 7 people, for example.
These published papers would not meet the PhD criteria of being "original and significant" research, but the thesis would be an impressive 80,000 words and contain 3 published articles.
In practice, thesis defense processes in this thesis factory university were nominal despite the rhetoric of excellence. PhD theses were examined by two examiners who were hand-picked by the supervisor and student, so there was not much risk of the thesis being deemed inadequate.
Australian universities get significant government funding for every completed PhD and PhD completions increase the prestige of departments and supervisors. This is what underpins the PhD thesis factory mindset.
I feel badly for the conscientious students who spend years conducting rigorous original research who end up with the same qualification as those who had done little more than write a couple of literature reviews or run a bunch of t tests on a preexisting database, published in low impact journals.
The evaluation reports are not public. The theses will have been reviewed, though.
There's a story in Dutch that gives some indication of what went on for most of the theses – google translate gives a quite reasonable translation:
https://universonline.nl/2018/10/02/rijsman-komt-op-voor-kwaliteit-verdachte-proefschriften
Then there is the way the promotor defends the thesis mentioned specifically in this overview (again, in Dutch):
http://religionresearch.org/closer/2018/09/29/institutionalisering-salafisme-ruben-gowricharn/
I'll quote the most disconcerting part:
"De tweede mogelijkheid is dat de onderzoeker niet alles heeft verzonnen, maar wel een deel. Laat de proportie 'verzinsels' de helft zijn van het logboek, dan nog blijft er genoeg materiaal over voor een stevige empirische fundering van het onderzoek. En zelfs als het overgebleven materiaal betrekking zou hebben op één moskee, is het onderzoek valide, vergelijkbaar met veel promoties die betrekking hebben op één dorp, één etnische groep, één wijk of één iets anders."
Translated:
"The second possibility is that the researcher did not make everything up, but a part. If the proportion of 'fabrications' is half the logbook, there is still enough material left for a solid empirical foundation of the research. And even if the remaining material would relate to one mosque, the research is valid, comparable to many promotions that relate to one village, one ethnic group, one neighborhood or one thing else."
In other words, who cares if some or half of it is just made up, as long as some of it is right, it still has validity.
Lee Rudolph says:
An excellent opportunity to deploy the rather dated joke (from an era when hens' eggs were not always as fresh as they might be—cf. also "last one in is a rotten egg!") from England (referring to a lowly assistant clergyman eating breakfast with his superior): "Like the curate's egg, 'good in parts'."
Can we read the dissertations online somewhere?
I ran the Dutch pieces through Google Translate: these "diary dissertations" sound alwfully similar to the "grievance studies scandal"…
Not sure if they are online. Some departments at Tilburg University (try to) publish all theses. I'd need a few names of the PhDs to search.
"In the original version of these 14 articles the reference list was unfortunately not represented according to the journal's new bibliographical style, which should have been implemented from January 2018."
Not sure whether that issue is really worth of our attention…
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