107 Cancer Papers Retracted Due To Peer Review Fraud (arstechnica.com) 153
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The journal Tumor Biology is retracting 107 research papers after discovering that the authors faked the peer review process. This isn't the journal's first rodeo. Late last year, 58 papers were retracted from seven different journals -- 25 came from Tumor Biology for the same reason. It's possible to fake peer review because authors are often asked to suggest potential reviewers for their own papers. This is done because research subjects are often blindingly niche; a researcher working in a sub-sub-field may be more aware than the journal editor of who is best-placed to assess the work. But some journals go further and request, or allow, authors to submit the contact details of these potential reviewers. If the editor isn't aware of the potential for a scam, they then merrily send the requests for review out to fake e-mail addresses, often using the names of actual researchers. And at the other end of the fake e-mail address is someone who's in on the game and happy to send in a friendly review. This most recent avalanche of fake-reviewed papers was discovered because of extra screening at the journal. According to an official statement from Springer, the company that published Tumor Biology until this year, "the decision was made to screen new papers before they are released to production." The extra screening turned up the names of fake reviewers that hadn't previously been detected, and "in order to clean up our scientific records, we will now start retracting these affected articles...Springer will continue to proactively investigate these issues."
Sharpen the saw. (Score:2)
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Wouldn't 'doing their job' have meant that these would have been detected right away?
No, because this is a partially iterative process which requires feedback from past mistakes to correct itself.
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Detecting ones own errors and humbly correcting them are respectful virtues. Never making mistakes is beyond the capabilities of us mere mortals.
From TFA,
Tumor Biology ... open about the past instances of peer review fraud, and ... have already introduced new robust peer review practices expected from all SAGE journals.
Money corrupts (Score:5, Insightful)
You see the influence of money, and the power it commands, everywhere nowadays. Sportspeople who, 50 years ago, were forbidden to earn a penny from their talent on pain of exclusion for professionalism, can now earn millions in a few short years. Result: an explosion of drug-taking and other forms of cheating. Politicians who had no visible property and very little income when they began their careers seem to retire as multi-millionaires. Result: an explosion of dishonest practices, including treason. But the worst of all is the corrosive influence of money on science - which used to be the hallmark of reliable, objective truth. It's usually quite subtle, indirect, almost unnoticeable. But it leads to very clear and definite consequences. Scientists who challenge the established paradigms are no longer just up against intellectual inertia; they will be mocked, traduced, slandered and often find that strings are pulled to get them dismissed or ignored.
One good example (out of the thousands that could be mentioned) is the career of Dr John Yudkin, the British scientist who suggested 40 years ago that dietary fat was unlikely to cause disease, and that sugar was a much more likely cultprit. That ran directly counter to the gospel being preached (most profitably) by the American scientist Dr Ancel Keys, who told the world that fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, strokes and cancer. Keys directly libelled and slandered Yudkin, with the result that his work was disgracefully neglected. Today it is perfectly clear that, in all essentials, Yudkin was right and Keys was wrong. But guess which of them died rich and famous?
"Pure, White and Deadly" by Dr John Yudkin https://www.amazon.com/Pure-Wh... [amazon.com]
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You see the influence of money, and the power it commands, everywhere nowadays. Sportspeople who, 50 years ago, were forbidden to earn a penny from their talent on pain of exclusion for professionalism, can now earn millions in a few short years. Result: an explosion of drug-taking and other forms of cheating. ...
WTF?
I guess you're not aware that back in the 1800s, Tour de France organizers actually went through the trouble of creating posters that explicitly warned cyclists that they had to provide their own damn PEDs - Tour de France organizers weren't going to do it.
Or maybe you forget that there's sworn testimony that Willy Mays himself distributed amphetamines.
And you haven't noticed that half of the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers are already dead from diseases all strongly linked to steroid overuse.
What planet are
Money stores value (Score:1)
Did you say "Nowadays"? The colonies nearly lost the war against Britain for lack of money [allthingsliberty.com] — in the 18th century.
Over two millennia before that, in 5th century BC, Periclean's Athens — industrious and skilled in commerce — were prevailing against Sparta's famous warriors skilled in little other than battle thanks to wealth [erenow.com]. It took Persian money for Sparta to win at the end...
"Nowadays" my tail... No, money
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The American Revolution was primarily about the initial attempts of the British Empire to implement a gold based fixed exchange rate system. As the United States had no gold, it was unable to trade competitively or pay many British taxes. The American Revolution is proof that you are wrong, as they won the war using only paper money.
One need only read Plato's Laws to understand how money was always recognized as political, and the gold fetish was alien to Civilization. Plato wrote that possession of fore
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Nope. They tried using fiat money and quickly realized, that's a losing proposition. Hence the gold standard, which lasted until Roosevelt.
Ah, I see, where you are confused... You took my post as advocacy for "gold standard" — which it was not. I merely objected to the GP
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The gold and silver clause forbids states from making anything except gold and silver legal tender. It isn't a restriction on the Federal government.
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Cheating in the Olympics extends now to even the site selection process; major league baseball didn't even have an agreement with the player's association in place to test for many PEDs until the release of Jose Canseco's book [wikipedia.org]; and US football has seen the size and speed of its athletes increase to the p
Good research (Score:2)
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A ton of research is not reproducible without cooperation from the researchers without having to spend inordinate amounts of time, perhaps more than the original research.
If the intent of publishing was to help other researchers reproduce it, it would need massive changes. The paper would be more like an abstract ... the real meat would be in the data, the software, the hardware designs and perhaps most importantly the lab notebooks.
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Taking the authors' data and applying the authors' methods should lead to the authors' conclusion. That isn't reproduction. Reproduction is doing something independently (not necessarily the exact same thing) and getting compatible results. If you don't trust people to get things right, why would you think the data was properly collected and not deliberately fudged?
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I would hope reproducing research would take longer because just reproducing it doesn't do anyone any good, you should want to use previous work to incorporate into your own hypothesis and eliminate any confounding variables the original authors may have in their discussion section. Most research papers are only 10 pages...maybe. I've come across a few that are about 40-50 pages long with no skipping on the math or setup. I think people don't go too much into detail because of the expense and time in publis
Who reviews the reviewers? (Score:2)
This is indicative of a systemic problem in the way research is funded.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh Look... (Score:4, Interesting)
The list of authors with retracted studies looks like:
Zhang, J., Xu, F ...
Chen, X., Liang
Zhang, Y. & Liu, C.
Li, CY., Yuan, P., Lin, SS. et al.
Zhang, RC. & Mou, SH.
Dong, Y., Zhuang, L. & Ma, W.
Wang, J., Xu, Y., Fu, Q. et al.
Huang, Y., Liu, X., Kuang, X. et al.
Liu, C. & Wang, H.
Li, F., Liu, Y., Fu, T. et al.
Li, W., Wu, H. & Song, C.
He, J. & Xu, G.
Wu, D., Jiang, H., Gu, Q. et al.
Yin, Y., Feng, L. & Sun, J.
Xu, JQ., Liu, P., Si, MJ. et al.
Chen, H., Tang, C., Liu, M. et al.
Tian, X., Ma, P., Sui, C. et al.
Li, ZC., Zhang, LM., Wang, HB. et al.
Jin, B., Dong, P., Li, K. et al.
Sun, HL., Han, B., Zhai, HP. et al.
Xu, W., Wang, F., Ying, L. et al.
Luo, S., Guo, L., Li, Y. et al.
Chen, H., Zhou, B., Lan, X. et al.
Lv, S., Turlova, E., Zhao, S. et al.
Liu, C., Yin, L., Chen, J. et al.
But, you know, it's totally racist to say that there is a culture of dishonesty in China, and if you don't trust products of China to be what they say they are, you're a big bad racist.
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And you can't trust that guy named Al. He's a co-author on almost all of them! :)
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But, you know, it's totally racist to say that there is a culture of dishonesty in China, and if you don't trust products of China to be what they say they are, you're a big bad racist.
China isn't all bad, but there is a huge culture of doing whatever you can get away with in China. That includes cutting in line, throwing parties in the Ikea showroom, noise pollution, abusing every type of product promotion, over-hunting for food (including non-game animals and even pets), pissing in the street, salespeople cheating their clients, stores lying about the products they sell, etc.
Personally, having known a ton of Chinese people, I think the problem isn't lack of integrity but rather, the hab
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That's pretty much the definition of ethics in the real world. That's certainly the ultimate definition of corporate ethics.
You can not expect people to not be greedy. Therefore you can't expect them to be immune to temptation and corruption. You have to police people. They won't police themselves.
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I agree. They probably don't consider this to be a fraud or a big deal, because this is a kind of acceptable practice in that country at that time. I have seen citation spam from a Chinese referee: the review contained nothing but 10 suggested citations to his/her own work. I have seen a colleague professor from another country (not China but that region) copy-paste from other papers and thinking that was okay. The latter was a nightmarish scenario, I could lose my faculty position if this slipped through a
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Indeed, race is not a problem.
people shouldn't make generalizations about a whole country based on the actions of a few people
Unfortunately, when the amount of people committing an infraction is above 1%, this kind of judgment becomes hard to avoid. It's why women think men catcall and sexually harass them. (Some do! A small sample giving all of us men a bad name.) It's why a lot of Hong Kongers dislike Chinese people (racially identical): some few Chinese people (perhaps also 1%) do a lot of nasty, uncivilized stuff. The perception won't go away until the percent adds a few zeros. When 0.001% of Chin
Rodeo? (Score:2)
Can someone explain to me why TFS refers to it as a rodeo?
Re: Rodeo? (Score:1)
The phrase 'not his first rodeo' means that somebody has done something before. It has nothing to do with rodeo events themselves when used like this. You could replace 'rodeo' with some other event and get the same meaning. It's just indicating prior experience of some kind. The summary uses it to indicate that this sort of debacle had occurred earlier, too, and so this isn't the first time.
Organizations? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Peer Review is a Joke (Score:2)
Peer review is a joke. Journals barely glance at shit the reviewers all engage in favoritism and favor trading.
Fuck peer review. How about peer escrow?
Submit your paper, a full and complete set of instructions for replicating the experiment, and the complete and raw data you collected during your experiment.
The journal reads it and gives if it passes a basic bullshit test, puts the experiment into a queue.
Then the journal pulls different experiments from the queue and presents them to you (only the experi
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Requiring an exact replication of every experiment won't be doable. Reasons are multiple but to begin with this would have doubled the cost of science and slowed it down. What works in practice is that important published experiments that do not replicate eventually get noticed (as people try to build on the published results), and the reasons they do not replicate are found. Sometimes the reasons are interesting and uncover new effects and new science. Rarely the reason is fraud, in which case the group an
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Science today is having it's own religious fit of a protest march. it's truly fitting that this is being posted today. Science very much needs heretics. Zealots like Tyson and Nye don't help the cause of science by trying to be inquisitors.
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If cancer research is affected by incidents like this, what's to say that climate science isn't similarly affected?
And evolution is a hoax! I knew it!
Re:Could climate science be affected, too? (Score:5, Funny)
If cancer research is affected by incidents like this, what's to say that climate science isn't similarly affected?
Pay no attention to the research assistant behind the curtain!
Re:Could climate science be affected, too? (Score:5, Informative)
If cancer research is affected by incidents like this, what's to say that climate science isn't similarly affected?
Pay no attention to the research assistant behind the curtain!
As long as humans are involved, there will be fraud along the way. But there is one beg difference between science and the religio-political world. We seek out and correct our fraud and errors. And once the fraud is exposed, the perp is a pariah, as opposed to the other world where they are often re-elected or otherwise rewarded.
Its also good to point out that the fraud was in the review process, not the work itself. So the tools that did it were extra stupid in their laziness.
As for AC's hand wringing, climate science is not cancer research, with obscure aspects only a few people know anything about. The physics is out there, the data can be perused by anyone, it's like permanent peer review.
In fact, if we want to see intellectual fraud vis-à-vis climate science, we need only look at the denialists work. We'll have to give some rope here, because denialists tend not to publish actual papers, but "publish" on line denial.
But you do the same process. You look at the claims and walk them back to the source. You look at the graphs and check for accuracy and graphic tricks. You check references - although in denialist work, there are not many. You also check timeliness. In an ongoing field of research like climate science, is the latest data being used?
So AC need not worry, climate scientists are acutely aware of the political scrutiny of their work, and are very very careful.
Re: Could climate science be affected, too? (Score:1)
"It's like permanent peer review"
So it's as good as open source software then? ;)
That changes everything.
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"It's like permanent peer review"
So it's as good as open source software then? That changes everything. ;)
Just about!
Re:Could climate science be affected, too? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its also good to point out that the fraud was in the review process, not the work itself. So the tools that did it were extra stupid in their laziness.
That's speculation. The only KNOWN thing is that the authors of the papers perpetrated fraud to get peer reviewed and published. No research has been done into replicating methodology, experiments, or results.
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Its also good to point out that the fraud was in the review process, not the work itself. So the tools that did it were extra stupid in their laziness.
That's speculation. The only KNOWN thing is that the authors of the papers perpetrated fraud to get peer reviewed and published. No research has been done into replicating methodology, experiments, or results.
So if you are agreeing with me, fine. If you are disagreeing with me, try reading what I wrote again.
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Its also good to point out that the fraud was in the review process, not the work itself. So the tools that did it were extra stupid in their laziness.
If they didn't do the peer review, it's probably because the work wouldn't survive it.
As for AC's hand wringing, climate science is not cancer research, with obscure aspects only a few people know anything about.
Climate models are huge and complex, only a few people can truly claim to understand them. They're not lab experiments where you can easily isolate causes and exclude other factors or extrapolate how the ecosystem will respond. There's huge local variations in climate that people use as proof or counter-proof because this year was particularly cold or warm without any validity as a global phenomenon.
That said, just because
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Its also good to point out that the fraud was in the review process, not the work itself. So the tools that did it were extra stupid in their laziness.
If they didn't do the peer review, it's probably because the work wouldn't survive it.
That doesn't account for laziness. We don't know if the work itself was bad. I'm suspicious it might be, but it needs reviewed properly.
Climate models are huge and complex, only a few people can truly claim to understand them. They're not lab experiments where you can easily isolate causes and exclude other factors or extrapolate how the ecosystem will respond. There's huge local variations in climate that people use as proof or counter-proof because this year was particularly cold or warm without any validity as a global phenomenon.
Deniers often do claim that the weather outside their window is enough data to refute AGW. I have no doubt that they might have a little problem understanding the modes and the data.
But you and I both know that isn't the real issue. I don't hear anything about radioactivity not being real, and that nucs are some other process is involved. its just accepted. We don't hea
Scott Adams disagrees (Score:3)
Scott Adams would like a word with you [dilbert.com]:
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More immediate funding is at stake, more groupthink applies, it will be decades before others can prove you wrong, and unlike falsified cancer research, people won't die because you misdirected searcher.
There's more money in cancer medication than climate science.
But if you don't want to wait decades, you can simply make a competing model that matches past observations, but predicts a different outcome, and publish it.
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More immediate funding is at stake, more groupthink applies, it will be decades before others can prove you wrong, and unlike falsified cancer research, people won't die because you misdirected searcher.
There's more money in cancer medication than climate science.
But if you don't want to wait decades, you can simply make a competing model that matches past observations, but predicts a different outcome, and publish it.
Exactly. Now that climate research is being actively suppressed, and even the word is verboten, and the leader of the free world wants the names and workplaces of all of the scientists who don't agree with the USA's now official truth that Climate change is a plot by the Chinese - exactly what awesome advantager to the climate scientists have?
Now that politics and ideology have once again shown that the laws of physics are no match for the triumph of will, in much the same way as communism proved that Ly
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He'd never get the funding for that...
There are plenty of deep pocketed interest groups that would like to be able to deny climate change with a legitimate model. The oil & coal industry, and the new administration, for instance.
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You're making that up. The US is not the world, and the political positions here aren't reflected worldwide. Even if US climate science was somehow corrupted, there's plenty of institutions all over the world that aren't subject to US politics. There is no worldwide conspiracy, and there is a worldwide consensus.
Some journal would find work debunking AGW to be worth publishing, because anyone involved in publishing a paper that significant would gain immensely in reputation. Other scientists would jo
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Most claims about the difficulty of publishing papers against AGW are based on the political climate of the US, so I may have jumped to a false conclusion about your reasoning, in which case I apologize.
I followed your link, and found nothing I could readily understand. There was a list of papers, claimed to be in peer-reviewed journals, mostly classified as "rebutted", with no context. If these are anti-AGW papers, then it would seem that anti-AGW papers can be published, contrary to what you were say
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Scott Adams would like a word with you
I've received my comeuppance, by no less than the ultimate authority on all things.
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Its also good to point out that the fraud was in the review process, not the work itself.
So it turned out the papers weren't really peer reviewed at all. So much for science then. Good they were retracted.
Yes, it was good they were retracted. That's science working to expose the people who don't follow the rules.
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> Yes, it was good they were retracted. That's science working to expose the people who don't follow the rules.
That only works if you are allowed to be a heretic. If you are expected to always follow blindly (like Tyson and Nye suggest), then such investigation isn't going to occur.
That attitude should be encouraged NEVER. It doesn't even matter if you're a "mere layman" expected to just passively swallow whatever the current scientific establishment comes up with.
If a middle school teacher or a museum c
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If a middle school teacher or a museum curator can't manage not alienating people, try employing a magician.
I suggest getting all our science information off of politicians who are paid for their votes and beliefs. Hard to go wrong that way, and its proven by history to be the only sure fire path to the truth.
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The climate is one of the biggest ethical and moral issues facing humanity.
Now a question is, what is the biggest motivator to ethically minded scientists, money or morals?
Given the heavy moral weight resting on climate scientists and their work, do you think they can remain objective about all data and findings?
Being humans, some will and some won't. Does not change the laws of physics however. Certainly we understand what happens to morality when money is involved. And if an immoral person goes into a field like climate science, which is currently being eliminated in one country of note, the idea that they are doing it for money is amusing to say the least.
As well, you do realize that the scientist doesn't pocket that money. You have someone hwo is making a decent, but in most cases doesn't fit into Mitt Romne
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I think these are general talking points and they don't prove anything either way.
But I don't understand the claim that it is basic physics. Yes, a part of it is basic physics. But the rest of it is not. I gather many skeptics accept that CO2 on its own gives you about a degree of warming. Everything after that is largely modelled feedbacks.
How any why any particular scientific field and speciality might have gotten the theory wrong is a matter for sociologists and philosophers. We KNOW that particular fiel
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I think these are general talking points and they don't prove anything either way.
But I don't understand the claim that it is basic physics.
The basic physics behind this all is energy. A body in orbit around an energy source like the sun will receive energy from the star. This energy transfer might be used to perform work, or heat. A body such as Mercury, which gets a lot of energy for the sun, but has no storage other than it's rocky surface, will show huge differences between it's daytime temperature of 700 Kelvin, and it's nighttime temperature of 100 Kelvin. The amount of insolation that Mercury receives is understood, and the temperatures
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The science is open to scrutiny. What it is not open to is unreasoning carping and nitpicking. The "deniers" are people who refuse to accept that AGW is happening, and are immune to evidence to the contrary. They typically look for little inconsistencies and things that sound odd, and libel climate scientists. (After all, if climate scientists are virtually unanimous in saying AGW is going on, and the denier wants to claim it isn't, something has to be wrong about virtually all climate scientists.)
Th
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The parent comment should not be -1. Can somebody please mod it up.
It raises a very important question: just how far does this go?
Over 100 papers were involved in this incident alone, according to the summary. The summary also mentions "seven different journals" were affected in some way last year, too.
We aren't talking about some minor field here, like gender studies or art history. Cancer research is one of the most prominent and important areas of research today, with very serious implications and conseq
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you like a conspiracy theory don't you... why do you "have to assume" that everything else is as bad?
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Because this is only the last of a series of revelations that research papers have been fraudulently produced?
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I guess you don't believe in gravity either?
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I can and have replicated the experiments in that area. This is part of any decent public school education. What you are suggesting is that we should take anything on faith that is more complex than that.
I became an atheist not so much of my disbelief in the supernatural but of my mistrust of mere mortals that were the gatekeepers of the relevant knowledge. I knew that they were fallible and corruptible.
Why should I hold science to a lower standard than religion?
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Religion isn't objectively verifiable. You can look at source documents, but there's no reason to think they're more accurate than, say, Aristotle's physics. If you trace what people say and write back, you'll find that there isn't any sort of objective standard. You may have some sort of spiritual sense, and you can evaluate religious claims based on that, but that's hardly objective.
Science is objectively verifiable. You can look at source documents, and you'll be told what the observations were an
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107 incidents in one journal isn't just 'relatively few'.
One journal is not a huge number.
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It's not just one journal. It's many of them
Seven out of how many journals ?
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107 incidents in one journal doesn't indicate a serious systemic problem. How many papers in that journal were examined? How typical is that journal out of how many journals? How much influence do these papers have? If influential, how long before someone gets conflicting results and throws things into doubt that will eventually be resolved?
Re:Could climate science be affected, too? (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, if we're truly practicing anything resembling science, we can have only one hypothesis in this situation: all peer-reviewed research may have been affected by faulty peer review processes.
Ah yes, the oft forgotten rule of science; we are only allowed to have one hypothesis. Oh wait, you just made that up.
Over 100 papers were allegedly improperly reviewed in this one journal alone. The only assumption we can realistically make is that this problem is far more widespread than we may believe.
This is like saying that since someone is found to be a serial murderer, we should assume that their neighbors are also serial killers. Even if we have no actual murders to tie them to, the only assumption we can realistically make is that this problem is far more widespread than we may believe.
So you have your hypothesis, that's fine. The next step is to find evidence that supports it, which comes before you assert that your hypothesis is the One To Rule Them All.
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The authority of science is based on the trust that is vested in the peer review.
I am speaking about science the method, where the only "authority" is empirical evidence gained through repeatable experiments. The authority you are speaking of is the institution (or community) of science.
Peer review is not a fundamental part of the scientific method. You are more than welcome to distrust all peer reviewed research and attempt to repeat or falsify the results yourself. Strictly speaking, the scientific method demands that we do just that, but we generally don't because it's highly impract
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I'm a scientist and I don't give two shits about any "authority" of science and have little unreserved trust in peer review. Likewise for "true science", whatever that is. Those are terms that apply more to religion or politics, which you can keep for yourself.
Science, as far as I'm interested in it, is all about well controlled variables and repeatability. I've seen plenty of published work that I'm skeptical about and what I take away from those works is that they can't be trusted. Implying that all of sc
Re: I'm a scientist (Score:2)
I didn't say that all of science is phony.
What I meant to say is that apparently we can not put blind trust in the papers 'because they are peer reviewed'.
What I also meant to say is, that people who postulate that peer reviewed published science can be generally trusted are wrong, because look: here is one example that falsifies their theory.
Thanks for making me clear that my explanation was lacking clarity.
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OK. I see what you're saying and I agree with you.
As the other reply said, though, disproving the postulation that peer review can be generally trusted isn't exactly a revelation. After taking part in the peer review process from either side, even with the high-end journals, you really lose a lot of faith in the process. Statistically, it's certainly better than no peer review at all, but there's no guarantee that a paper will be improved by the process. In a lot of these fly-by-night journals, it's a total
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(snip)
Over 100 papers were allegedly improperly reviewed in this one journal alone. The only assumption we can realistically make is that this problem is far more widespread than we may believe.
No that's what _you_ can make. However your understanding of logic and science is obviously lacking. The evidence doesn't support your conclusion.
We'd like to trust research scientists. They're considered some of the most intelligent, educated, and trustworthy people around. But after incidents like this, we can't help but have many questions and lots of doubt.
Reasonable people expect them to be people. Anti-scientist idiots paint them as greedy lying bastards that want to turn people from God. Very few ordinary people have your idea of angels in flesh...
In fact, if we're truly practicing anything resembling science, we can have only one hypothesis in this situation: all peer-reviewed research may have been affected by faulty peer review processes.
That's not even remotely related to being scientific. Using the same train of thoughts would lead to the conclusion that because homosexual behavior is widespread in na
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"Until proven otherwise, I think we'll have to take any and all academic research with a really big grain of salt."
Ah, yes, guilty until proven otherwise. We humans do seem to like working in that mode. (As a sidebar, I do appreciate that some govts make it illegal to do that, in some cases.)
I read on the internet that AC's rape their pets. Until proven otherwise, I think we'll have to assume that any and all AC's are screwing the pooch.
Re: Could climate science be affected, too? (Score:2)
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> There were around 2.5 million papers are published in 2015. So if you are going to freak out over this, you're probably the same type of guy who thinks it safer to drive a car than fly somewhere.
If this were a controversy over some regional carrier completely dropping the ball on their maintenance and inspections, then such a conclusion would be entirely warranted. The entire FAA inspection regime would be called into question.
The same is actually true for the USDA if you actually have half a brain cel
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If you would like to use this as evidence for a sweeping and universal hypothesis, shouldn't you at least have a brief look at the retraction notice that the story is based on?
https://link.springer.com/arti... [springer.com]
From a first glance, all of the papers come from China (click on affiliations to see which institutes they work at). China and India have been notorious as paper mills for decades. So why are you extrapolating this to work from countries where peer reviewers are ,a, very easy for editors to directly
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If you're talking about individual papers, that's the right attitude. If you're talking about science more generally, it isn't. Science, like all fields, has always had its little corruptions. Science, however, has ways of dealing with these and finding things out regardless of mistakes and fraud. Some researchers will always screw up, some will be positively deceptive, and the majority are
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If cancer research is affected by incidents like this (fraud), what's to say that climate science isn't similarly affected?
Actually, you're right in both senses of the word. For example, the eminent scientist Frederick Seitz, a true genius, fought scientific evidence and spread disinformation and doubt about smoking. He was paid to keep doubt alive about the causal link between cancer and smoking in order to keep the tobacco industry safe from litigation and regulation. He went on to use these same techniques in the employ of other industries, spreading doubt about acid rain, CFCs, pesticides, and, yes, global warmi
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You are an idiot. They didn't say all cancer research articles were suspect, just a minute fraction of the total number published. And no one brought up climate research except you. But as an AC, you were just yanking people's chains without having the guts to say who you are. Pitiful. Log in next time, and try and say something intelligent, if that is possible.
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If cancer research is affected by incidents like this, what's to say that climate science isn't similarly affected?
Perhaps but when I hear about incidents like this it seems like it nearly always involves the medical field or something like sociology or psychology, seldom the harder sciences. When I hear about it in climate science it usually seems to be the contrarians who are the ones being called out.
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Yeah, I bet it doesn't even get hot inside greenhouses, it's just a ruse to sell more glass. ~
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The effects of vaccination and global warming are things you can look into yourself. You don't have to take those things on faith. Look into them as much as you like. There is no religious war of AGW acceptance, although there seems to be one for denial (which is less than the political war against it in the US). There is no religious war for vaccination. It's all a matter of people looking at the evidence and drawing conclusions. If you don't like the conclusions, you're welcome to look at the evide
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You can look at the evidence for yourself. The basic physics behind AGW is dead simple. If you don't bother, and just go on vague generalities, don't expect us to pay attention to your opinions.
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The basic physics says that, when we burn fossil fuels and raise the CO2 content of the air, we'll warm up without a corresponding decrease in solar input and/or an increase in what we radiate into space. The naive conclusion is that burning lots of fossil fuels creates global warming. This should be comprehensible to most people. Some of the other things are understandable: more energy in the atmosphere causes more severe weather, the melting of land ice increases sea level (there's also the increase
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You describe a mechanism that would heat up the earth, but you assume there isn't a mechanism that counteracts it. There are too many instances where climate scientists find mechanisms which they hadn't found before, but that still doesn't keep them from communicating definitive conclusions, although they don't have yet a totally comprehensive insight in what's exactly and totally going on.
If you want to exercise 'science', then you have to excl
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I've described a simple mechanism that heats things up. Therefore, since we are burning fossil fuels, we'd expect the planetary surface to heat up. That's also what our thermometers tell us, and we see other effects that we'd expect from global warming. It's conceivable that there would be some sort of effect to counteract the warming, but we haven't found one.
Your argument seems to be that we should ignore basic science and obvious conclusions, since there are possible ways the conclusions could be w
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Do we fully understand how the climate works, and do we understand the non-linearities that will affect the current theories once things have heated up 1 degree?
No, we don't. So there's no certainty that all those doom predictions will actually come true.
Yes, there are some nice elaborate simulations, but they are limited by the incomplete knowledge they are based on.
Political interests and greed are too much driving this discussion, so I smell a rat and say:
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There can be negative feedback, sure.
However, the basic science has the planetary surface heating up. That's the naive result. Clearly, it's more complicated than that, but given no clear evidence to the contrary the assumption has to be that we'll continue to heat up, not necessarily regularly, as we burn more fossil fuel.
Political interests and greed wouldn't affect approximately every climate scientist in the world similarly.
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Political interests and greed wouldn't affect approximately every climate scientist in the world similarly.
No, but if you're in the right position you can manipulate them all, or almost all.
Take for instance Michael Hulme, head of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Studies at the University of East Anglia, when it was formed in the 1990's. It's members constitute numerous participants in the IPCC.
In his recent book 'Why we disagree about climate change', he wrote:
The idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identities and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us.
Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs.
We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilize them in support of our projects.
These myths transcend the scientific categories of 'true' and 'false'.
So, according to one of the 'important' and authoritative persons in the climate change discussion, it's ok to let climate change work for your 'personal
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In other words, instead of addressing any part of the science, you're going to pick out individual climate scientists and base your opinions on bad things you hear or read about them.
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But the behaviour I see from leading climate scientists and non-scientists, together with the faults in logic regarding modeling and incompleteness of the theory, give me rat's smell and fishy feeling.
My main scientific argument however, is that the models *can not* predict parameters outside their range of calibration, that the theory isn't complete, the feedback loops aren't all understood or not even invented yet, and
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If we weren't biased and flawed, we wouldn't need the process of science at all. Every anecdotal observation could be implicitly trusted.
What you are witnessing is the iterative scientific process attempting to correct for the flaws and biases.
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In cancer terms, this is like calling a Bone Marrow Transplant "prevention".