China's Scientists Set New International Record -- For Faked Peer Reviews (nytimes.com) 75
China now has more laboratory scientists than any other country in the world, reports Amy Qin in the New York Times, and spends more on research than the entire European Union.
But in its rush to dominance, China has stood out in another, less boastful way. Since 2012, the country has retracted more scientific papers because of faked peer reviews than all other countries and territories put together, according to Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks and seeks to publicize retractions of research papers... In April, a scientific journal retracted 107 biology research papers, the vast majority of them written by Chinese authors, after evidence emerged that they had faked glowing reviews of their articles. Then, this summer, a Chinese gene scientist who had won celebrity status for breakthroughs once trumpeted as Nobel Prize-worthy was forced to retract his research when other scientists failed to replicate his results. At the same time, a government investigation highlighted the existence of a thriving online black market that sells everything from positive peer reviews to entire research articles...
In part, these numbers may simply reflect the enormous scale of the world's most populous nation. But Chinese scientists also blame what they call the skewed incentives they say are embedded within their nation's academic system.
In part, these numbers may simply reflect the enormous scale of the world's most populous nation. But Chinese scientists also blame what they call the skewed incentives they say are embedded within their nation's academic system.
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A lot of civilizations just collapsed with no lasting legacy but ruins, their philosophical and technological innovations forgotten until our Civilization's archaeologists started to uncover them. We got extremely lucky by inheriting the progression of preceding civilizations instead of just letting it all be reduced to rubble. Modern civilization is a complete fluke.
Seculars have now taken over the baton for the most part, lets see if they can keep it going. I kinda doubt it, they are falling into the same
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Our present economic boom is due to the revolution in electronics and computer technology.
Our present economic "boom" is a recovery from the country being driven to the edge of bankruptcy by the real estate bubble collapse and most of those gains went to the 1% in the form of returns on cheaply purchased shares in bailed out financial institutions. The middle and lower class have less purchasing power than ever due to stagnant wages that show no sign of improving without government intervention.
In other words, congratulations on drinking the Kool-Aid. You've done an excellent job defending ri
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Incentives are skewed everywhere (Score:3, Insightful)
"In part, these numbers may simply reflect the enormous scale of the world's most populous nation. But Chinese scientists also blame what they call the skewed incentives they say are embedded within their nation's academic system."
I don't see how these skewed incentives are any different in Western countries.
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I don't give a shit who you are.
Re: Incentives are skewed everywhere (Score:1)
Incentives (Score:2)
Because the government is throwing billions of Yuan indiscriminately into research. There is incentive to get that money. Grants are somewhat less forthcoming in the US, so there is a higher requirement for better quality research.
Re:Incentives (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh... people talk about research money like the researchers themselves actually profit from it. 99% of the time, researcher salary is fixed completely independently of grant money obtained.
Instead, we could actually RTFA, the paragraph after...
As in the West, career advancement can often seem to be based more on the quantity of research papers published rather than the quality. However, in China, scientists there say, this obsession with numerical goal posts can reach extremes. Compounding the problem, they say, is the fact that Chinese universities and research institutes suffer from a lack of oversight, and mete out weak punishments for those who are caught cheating.
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"researcher salary is fixed completely independently of grant money obtained."
True. But they get to have a job, and they get to have their names on stuff.
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I would have thought the fact that they have a large number of retractions indicates their peer-review system is working, not failing.
Not exactly. Peer review happens before publication, not after. For an article to be retracted it first had to pass peer review. In the case mentioned in the story, the journal (Tumor Biology, which has a US/European editorial board), allows authors to suggest peer reviewers and trusted the contact information they received. It's pretty trivial to verify the email address of a professor in the US or Europe. The retractions happened because these authors used names of real Chinese professors - but fake email
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Re:Incentives are skewed everywhere (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe it works for Chinese publications. However, Chinese papers don't just get submitted to Chinese publications, they get submitted to journals and conferences outside China. It isn't easy reading a paper for review. Unless you are doing precisely similar research, you must learn enough about the research to know if it is good or not. I read a (Chinese) paper (written in English...well written English, I might add) on rings (mathematics). I'm not a ring theorist but I do know a bit of algebra. I decided I wouldn't just read the paper but track down every result. Marvelous paper except for the first theorem upon which all the rest were based. I couldn't prove it, and I tried hard. Many times papers do not include all the proofs because it would make the paper too long for publication or they are considered trivial in the field.
After writing and Latexing 15 pages of notes and proofs on the rest of the paper, I radioed back I wanted to see their proof of that theorem. What I got back was a reference and how it was a trivial conclusion from the reference. I found the reference and read it (yet another paper I had to read after tracking down and reading some of their previous refs). I couldn't see it. I radioed back I wanted to see an honest proof, not invocation to a Higher Authority. After 2 months, they retracted the paper. The total time from my first seeing the paper to that retraction was 8 months and several long days of my time....on one paper...
My point is that few reviewers are going to dig in their heels and properly review a paper, few have that kind of time. After that, I'll be damned if I'm not going to read another paper the same exact way. It will cost me in time, but I'll learn new things and maybe another piece of shit won't make it into a journal.
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I don't see how these skewed incentives are any different in Western countries.
Presumably you have performed research in both China and in the West and your comment is drawing on your deep knowledge of the educational systems of both countries? No? The ability of slashdotters to hold strong opinions on subjects which they know next to nothing about never ceases to amaze. In China, Master's students must publish a certain number of papers above a certain impact factor in order to graduate. For PhD students, the bar is set higher. Principal investigators are given cash sums - which can
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The GP was likely making a redundant snarky remark about there being a strong incentive to cheat both in the West and in China without details on the Chinese pressures. Based on your details there is even greater incentive to cheat in China although it also remains true that there is a great deal of incentive in the West as well.
Even worse than incentive to outright fake data is incentive to be selective about researched topics and slant in the d
Not just about large population (Score:3)
In part, these numbers may simply reflect the enormous scale of the world's most populous nation.
That is probably part of it, but it is worth emphasizing that that is definitely not all of it. The per a capita retraction rate for China is much higher than it is for other large countries.
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Genuinely interested, but what about per academic? I suspect it would be high too since much of the Chinese population won't ever get anywhere near a university.
"a new international record" (Score:2)
Keep in mind that this only means that China is in first place, not that this is the only place this is happening.
sounds familiar. (Score:5, Insightful)
Chinese scientists also blame what they call the skewed incentives they say are embedded within their nation's academic system.
It sounds like they have a similar problem to the US's collapsing "publish or perish" paradigm. People should be less focused on what the scientists are doing and focus on the cause of such behavior.
To change the behavior of a group you must correct the feedback loops that control them.
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Chinese scientists also blame what they call the skewed incentives they say are embedded within their nation's academic system.
It sounds like they have a similar problem to the US's collapsing "publish or perish" paradigm. People should be less focused on what the scientists are doing and focus on the cause of such behavior.
To change the behavior of a group you must correct the feedback loops that control them.
In the US, gross misconduct (like impersonating other scientists in order to review your own papers) is a career death sentence, in part because "publish or perish" is administered by a tenure vote of the people you work with (and compete with), instead of a bean-counting administrator somewhere. There are lots of incentives to do semi-unsavory things - e.g. splitting your work into "least-publishable units", or "P-hacking", where you try every combination of data to see if one of them supports your conclus
Re:sounds familiar. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh please spare me. I'm involved in nutrition research and I see the contortions others go through to support whatever conclusion is best for the corporation helping fund said study. It's no accident, statistically, when Corporation F funds Study U, that Study U will have an 80% chance to put Corporation F's dubious products in a good or at least neutral light.
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In the US, gross misconduct (like impersonating other scientists in order to review your own papers) is a career death sentence, in part because "publish or perish" is administered by a tenure vote of the people you work with (and compete with), instead of a bean-counting administrator somewhere.
https://science.slashdot.org/story/15/02/13/2113248/unearthing-fraud-in-medical-trials [slashdot.org]
you new to the research thing?
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Sorry, I'm used to my area of research - computer science - which is a hell of a lot less shady, at least in the US. (probably because almost all the money is being made totally outside of academic and research settings)
The article you link makes me wonder whether there's a way that publishers (e.g. NEJM and JAMA) could force clinical trial data out into the open. If it were a requirement for publication in the top venues, then the drug companies would have to either 'fess up or work with second-rate resear
97% of scientists agree (Score:1)
that "peer review" sounds infinitely more sophisticated and credible than "mutual back-scratching."
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Editor: "Please suggest 8 people to review your work"
Researcher: "Okay, I suggest WellKnownResearcher, their mailing address [POBox that I own], and their E-mail address [WellKnownResearcherTopic@yahoo.com, an E-mail I just registered]"
Editor: "To:WellKnownResearcherTopic@yahoo.com Body: Dear WellKnownResearcher, what do you think of this paper?"
Researcher: "Wow. What great results. You should totally 100% publish this in your journal because it is, like, totally legit. Here are some ways in which it
Can't fake everything... (Score:5, Funny)
Gotta love this quote from one of the linked articles:
"When a lot of the fake peer reviews first came up, one of the reasons the editors spotted them was that the reviewers responded on time"
And in a related story (Score:2)
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Yea. TMI. Gotta learn to get to the point or punch line. Or in this case, have one.
More fake biology/medical research (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing I see when I look at faked research and retractions of papers is that it often is in biology and medical research or things like sociology. In the hard sciences like physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, meteorology and dare I say it climatology it doesn't seem to happen nearly as often. Maybe it's harder to fake the data in those sciences or maybe there's just more variability open to interpretation in the results from biology/medicine.
Re:More fake biology/medical research (Score:4, Insightful)
One thing I see when I look at faked research and retractions of papers is that it often is in biology and medical research or things like sociology. In the hard sciences like physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, meteorology and dare I say it climatology it doesn't seem to happen nearly as often. Maybe it's harder to fake the data in those sciences or maybe there's just more variability open to interpretation in the results from biology/medicine.
I think a big part is that when it's medicine the media is more likely to pick up the story. Jan Hendrik Schön was one of the biggest scandals - but it didn't really make a big splash in the news because solid state physics just isn't something most people get worked up about. Ditto for Adrian Maxim. So unless you are a regular at Retraction Watch, you hear about Wakefield and Hwang Woo-Suk (cloning), but not about physics or engineering fraud.
I also wonder if the problem is really that much worse than it was in the past. Granted, academia is more competitive than it used to be. But really, the big change is that it is so much easier to find fraud than it was in the past. You're right - it is not that hard to make some fake data for a biology paper. You photoshop the picture of your gel (a technique for showing which proteins are present in a sample and whether they are interacting with each other) to show the results you want. 30 or 40 years ago: same thing, though you would have had to do it manually. But now image analysis can catch that easily. Ditto for plagiarism. Ditto for analyzing sets of numbers to see if they were observed or invented. And because it is easier to examine for fraud, and fraud is actually routinely talked about, more people are looking for it than in the past. Now, fraud stands a good chance of being caught. Back then: not so much.
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It always surprises me that smart guys like most scientists are think they can get away with stuff like that. After all sooner or later some one else is likely going to try and use their results and discover their fraud especially it it appears to be ground breaking research.
Also it's true that sometimes retractions are a result of honest mistakes that weren't caught by peer review rather than by attempted fraud.
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In the hard sciences there are few companies that make money off of the success or failure of an academic research project.
That doesn't explain sociology; however searching through retractionwatch.com I'm not sure how much misconduct there is in that field (at least within the US and western Europe) as opposed to just plain errors. Which shouldn't be surprising in a field with small sample sizes, poor funding, and high noise.