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by roca 2337 days ago
That sounds reasonable as far as it goes, but if you were the person next in line for that UC Davis position and your research wasn't based on falsified data, I think you'd be feeling pretty unhappy about this.

(I hope that in reality there's a lot more to the author's research than the retracted papers, but of course in such a competitive job market, every bit helps.)

Look at it another way: the author sure was lucky they found out about the problem after they were securely in their tenure-track position, and not just before.
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Angostura 2337 days ago
> Look at it another way: the author sure was lucky they found out about the problem after they were securely in their tenure-track position, and not just before.

Look at it another way: The author was sure unlucky to have based their research on shoddy data from a trusted colleague. And it took guts and integrity to react in the way they did.

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roca 2336 days ago
That is also true.
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KarlKemp 2336 days ago
They have proven their integrity. That seems worth a bit more than being right on these spiders‘ specific kinks.

Not because I don’t care about spiders, but because the first is entirely within their control, while some hypothesis finding the data to support it comes down to luck far too often to use a single case a meaningful measure of an individual.

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gumby 2336 days ago
> That sounds reasonable as far as it goes, but if you were the person next in line for that UC Davis position and your research wasn't based on falsified data, I think you'd be feeling pretty unhappy about this.

Her technique was presumably (not my field) otherwise quite good and she didn't know at the time the source data were bad. Apart from her willingness to follow up to the query on an old paper, her approach to followup was excellent. And she seems to have learnt from the experience.

All in all this sounds like what you want from a good scientist. After all once you have tenure, you can just ignore all that "old stuff" if you are so inclined.

As far as not getting the position: there are more people than tenure track positions these days so "luck of the draw" is also pretty significant.

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