[tptacek]

Endemic means "regularly occurring". How many examples of this kind of misconduct are you aware of? Ok, now, what's the denominator? How much research is actually conducted? I'm personally familiar with 3 fields (CS, bio, and geology) and what I've learned is that the number of labs --- let alone projects --- is mind-boggling. If your examples constitute 1% of all research conducted --- which would represent a cosmic-scale fuckload of research projects --- how much should I care about it?

[bhk]

BMJ: Time to assume fraud? https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-hea...

Study claims 1 in 4 cancer research papers contains faked data https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/06/study-claims-1-in-4-...

[cycomanic]

So let's talk about misleading headlines and citations in journal articles. I would argue that arstechnica is one of the better news sources. Despite that, if we go to the article there is a link to that there has been "a real uptick in misconduct". Now if we click through that link, it does claim that there has been an increase in fraud as a lead in (this time without a link) but the article is about something completely different (i.e. that almost half the retracted papers are retracted due to fraud).

As an aside, the article cites that there have been a total of 2000 retracted papers in the NIH database. Considering that there are 9 Million papers in the database overall, that is a tiny percentage.

[bhk]

> ... if we click through ...

So you deflect from the entire content of the article with that distraction? And then an additional misdirection regarding retraction? Why?

[cycomanic]

> > ... if we click through ...

> So you deflect from the entire content of the article with that distraction? And then an additional misdirection regarding retraction? Why?

What do you mean? I take issue with the headlines and reporting. And I believe if one claims lack of evidence, sloppy evidence or fraudulent evidence one should be pretty diligent about ones one evidence.

Regarding the claims in the article. If you look at the 1 in 4 article you find that the reality is actually much more nuanced, which is exactly my point. The reporting does not necessarily reflect the reality.

If you call that deflection...

[bhk]

The ArsTechnica article was about a paper by Morten Oksvold that claimed that 25% of cancer biology papers contain duplicated data.

One nuance is that his approach only focused on one easily identifiable form of fraud: Western blot images that can be shown to be fraudulent because they were copies of images use in different papers. Of all the potential opportunities for fraud, one must think that this must represent just a small portion.

If there are other nuances you care to mention, I'm all ears.

Instead, you refer to an entirely different article, as if the article I cited has no relevant content, which misleads casual readers of this comment stream. To paraphrase your comment in a less misleading way: "Inside this article you can find a link to an entirely different article whose content does not support the headline of the original article."

[tptacek]

Well, one thing you might want to do before doubling down on the Oksvold study is work out the percentage of those papers that were likely to have misused western blot images (it's the bulk of the paper, impossible to miss), and then read the part of the Ars article (again: the bulk of the article) that discusses reasons why different experiments might have identical western blot images (one obvious one being that multiple experiments might get run in the same assay).

Instead, you're repeatedly citing this 25% number as if it was something the paper established. Even the author of the paper disagrees with you.

[zzzeek]

devil's advocate - '1 in 4 studies are fake, says "study"'