Science Fictions links for September 2024

Case dismissed! And many other stories of science gone wrong

Hello. Every month that I send this newsletter out, I think “wow, a lot of stuff happened this month!”. That’s just because there’s a never-ending series of stories about frauds and sloppy researchers ruining science—and also of people doing their best to keep science honest.

If you want to keep up, the only way is to subscribe. You can do so below—and I’d also love it if you shared or forwarded this newsletter to someone you know who might also enjoy it.

The links

• You know how much I support the science reform movement—people doing replication studies, advocating pre-registration, all that kind of thing. It makes it all the more embarrassing, then, when prominent members of that movement collectively shit themselves in public.

  • The whole thing is such a catastrophic mess—a years-long process of bad study design, lack of transparency, backtracking, over-claiming, and eventually retraction—that you’ll probably have to read multiple articles to understand it. You can find a summary by Andrew Gelman here and one by Stephanie Lee here.

• This month’s massive new fraud story. This Alzheimer’s/Parkinson’s researcher was the head of the US National Institute on Aging’s Neuroscience Division, and is highly influential—“one of the most cited scientists in his field”. Now 132 (one hundred and thirty-two!) of his papers have been found to have suspicious images. As one interviewee put it: “There had to have been ongoing manipulation for years.”

  • And as Derek Lowe puts it: “Fraud, so much fraud”.

• More fraud, I’m afraid. An obstetrics and gynaecology researcher has had loads of his papers flagged for data integrity concerns—a “mere” 130 of them this time. And this time it’s for numbers that are suspiciously similar across multiple tables. As ever, fraudsters leave behind blatant evidence of their misconduct, if you know where to look. Or at least, the incompetent ones do. Don’t think too much about the ones who are good at covering up their misdeeds…

• This, however, is great news on the fraud front. You’ll recall that Harvard professor Francesca Gino tried to sue critics who pointed out fraud in her work. If she’d won that $25m case, it would’ve been very bad news for data sleuths and those who want to promote scientific integrity—you’d always be at risk of financial ruin if you dared to highlight fake findings. That’s why it’s fantastic news that her case against the critics was dismissed this month.

  • There’s a great summary of the story and a directly-reported account of the court hearing in this new New Yorker article.

• Relatedly, given he was one of Gino’s co-authors: “another shoe just dropped in the ongoing Dan Ariely scandal”. He seemed to think the whole thing was over; now his most-cited paper has an editorial expression of concern.

• This is cool: a database where you can match original findings from psychology with their replication attempts.

• Oh, and on that topic… yet another in a long line of attempts to discover the underlying psychological reasons why some people are liberal and some people are conservative—the idea that right-wingers have a “negativity bias”—fails to replicate.

• We knew about this one already, but the idea of “stereotype threat” on women’s maths performance doesn’t replicate either, and this has just been confirmed in a very high-quality study.

• Replication crisis “not just in psychology”, exhibit 981,345: there are big problems in the literature on using AI to solve partial differential equations (very important for understanding and modelling all kinds of physical phenomena from aircraft flight to the climate; in this case focused on fluid dynamics). Figure 1, showing reality vs. what we see in the scientific literature, is brutal.

• Famous study says black babies have better survival prospects when they’re cared for by black, as opposed to white, doctors. Re-analysis comes along and controls for low birth weight, which wasn’t included in the original analysis. The effect almost entirely goes away: there’s very little, or no, impact of the race of the doctor. More good news! The world is actually a bit less unfair and racist than we thought.

• Amusing (or would be, if it wasn’t so depressing) further investigation into the work of dodgy-as-hell researcher Nicholas Guéguen. It is unbelievable that people have to spend time debunking this obviously fake stuff posing as scientific research, when supposedly professional reviewers and editors couldn’t see it.

• You might’ve seen that there’s been an antitrust case filed against some of the biggest scientific publishers. Generally scientists hate the publishers, for many good reasons, so lots of people were saying “yeah! Awesome! Take them down!”. But Dorothy Bishop explains why the case doesn’t make sense—it attacks the publishers for doing stuff that isn’t actually bad.

• Newspapers and news websites get rightly criticised for doing “stealth corrections”—changing an article they’d previously published but without acknowledging it anywhere. Well, turns out scientific journals do exactly the same thing.

• A nice summary of the problems with science publishing and some of the tools to spot dodgy publications.

• This is bad: the Institute of Physics trying to push back against “unprofessional” reviews that hurt the feelings of the scientists who get them. Sure, it’s normally best to avoid being nasty for the sake of it, but I predict that many scientists will just use this as an excuse to shrug off genuine criticisms of their work.

  • Some of the “nasty” reviews they highlight aren’t even bad at all: “I do not like the paper as written”?! Are we supposed to feel sympathy for the poor soul (read: high-powered professor; Australia’s Chief Scientist) who received this horrifically insulting remark?

• This one is really baffling. There are dozens of papers out there that just carelessly use the wrong name for a drug used in pregnancy, replacing it with one that hasn’t been tested and could be dangerous. Who knows how many doctors have given their patients the wrong drug based on all the confusion?

• Feeling a bit lazy this month? Sorry to make you feel bad: here are the scientists who have “published at least a paper every two days in 2024”. What’s stopping you from engaging in this frankly absurd, literally unbelievable level of productivity?

P.S. The Studies Show podcast

Quite a few people have found our podcast on the scientific publication system—how it works in theory, how it works in practice—quite useful. There are also episodes where we talk about Jonathan Haidt vs. social media, the effects of alcohol, and why I’m a toxoplasma truther.

Image credit: Getty