Nobel Prize-Winner Tallies Two More Retractions, Bringing Total To 13 (retractionwatch.com) 30
Retraction Watch: A Nobel prize-winning genetics researcher has retracted two more papers, bringing his total to 13. Gregg Semenza, a professor of genetic medicine and director of the vascular program at Johns Hopkins' Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore, shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for "discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability." Since pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis and others began using PubPeer to point out potential duplicated or manipulated images in Semenza's work in 2019, the researcher has retracted 12 papers. A previous retraction from 2011 for a paper co-authored with Naoki Mori -- who with 31 retractions sits at No. 25 on our leaderboard -- brings the total to 13.
Bad for Science (Score:2)
A philosophy of science prof on the Theories of Everything podcast recently described the gravitational wave community and the major impact to transparency and the scientific process that are caused by scarcity, competitiveness, and striving for a Nobel Prize.
The incentives turn out to be opposite of the intended ones.
That's fine - good try - but a good scientist would look at the result and end the program.
Re:Bad for Science (Score:4, Insightful)
A philosophy of science prof on the Theories of Everything podcast recently described the gravitational wave community and the major impact to transparency and the scientific process that are caused by scarcity, competitiveness, and striving for a Nobel Prize.
The incentives turn out to be opposite of the intended ones.
That's fine - good try - but a good scientist would look at the result and end the program.
From a rational perspective, 100% this. From a human perspective, it is hard to shut down the project which feeds your kids and pays your mortgage. :)
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Re:Bad for Science (Score:5, Insightful)
Even without a Nobel prize there are still grants and university positions to compete over. Perhaps those systems pervert the incentives just as much (or more as they're more realistically attainable) as the Nobel prize, but I doubt getting rid of it would change much. Is this particularl scientist only under scrutiny because he won? If so, it did some good, even if the manner in which it was accomplished was unintended.
I've often thought that some of this could be a natural result of the problem space getting larger while results are more difficult to obtain. The low-hanging fruit in physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, these are all long-since gone even if the movers and shakers who solved these problems are in some cases still alive currently.
What remains are mostly harder problems, but the system which rewards researchers is unchanged, so they engage in ever more ridiculous feats of one-up-manship and play looser and faster with the rules to out-compete their peers.
It is also a thing that more and more kids are pressed into Universities who really have no aptitude, preparation or personality for it, so those few positions are not only being fought over with more and more opaque and esoteric concepts, but also by a larger pool of people with more widely varying skills, capabilities and grasps of professional ethics.
A sticky situation for everybody.
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You left out the problem of increasing specialization making it so that a smaller and smaller percentage of the evaluators understand what is being evaluated.
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And that is completely fucked up. Science is supposed to be a meritocracy. It stops working when it becomes this form you describe.
Return a Nobel? (Score:2)
Has such a thing ever happened? I know it's been warranted before in the sciences (and most the peace prizes), but not done. Was his prize winning work found to be plagiarized? I could prolly make a list offhand without even having to google it of Nobel sciences awards (peace is too easy) that should be retracted because the person's work was either completely false or plagiarized / false attributed.
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Other problems with Nobel (Score:3)
Nobel's intention was that the prizes would allow the give the recipients the financial independence to work on what they wanted rather than being dependent on grants or other outside sources of money. Given the cost of modern research that is not a practical idea anymore.
A further consideration is their inherent fear of responsibility, causing them to push off making the awards until much later in the researcher's life. They're so afraid of making a mistake that they hold off on awarding the prize until the discovery has been vetted and used in industry, at which point the researcher is on the doorstep of retirement.
For example, Peter Higgs proposed the Higgs Boson in 1964, and won the Nobel prize in 2019.
Ages for receiving the prize have been going up, originally recipient
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Fraud was not necessarily involved, just poor science.
Somehow I read that as: Freud was not necessarily involved, just poor science.
Freudian slips eh.
Return or taken back? (Score:2)
I can see the person voluntarily returning the award, or the group snatching it back (retracting their name, even if they never get anything else back).
It's sad to me you think you know of enough other people to create a list already. It's not something I can remember hearing about, though I don't focus on the Nobel's a ton.
They kind of feel like lots of other awards (Grammy, Oscar, etc), and without being an expert in the group too I don't think I can know why each person was or wasn't recognized. I'd al
Retract ALL papers he was (Score:1)
...involved with. Everything he ever touched is tainted. No need to review them piecemeal after count 13.
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Science should always work on evidence. What does it mean to retract a paper? The work is still available (as it ought to be), except it has the word "Rectracted" stamped on it. I'd say the works for which we have no evidence of plagiarism should have the stamp "Note: This author has had 13 out of X number of published papers retracted for plagiarism". Then anyone reading the work can make their own decision whether to build on the findings or what.
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Science should always work on evidence. What does it mean to retract a paper?
One effect is that the citation count for a retracted paper should drop precipitously. For good conferences with high-level reviewers, citing a retracted paper would be a bad thing for a paper submission.
Hmm, I wonder if it's also possible to retract a citation? Or maybe to calculate an h-index that accounts for retracted papers and associated citations. Such a modified h-index wouldn't affect many people, except a few at the top with very high citation counts.
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> Science should always work on evidence
Then retract first and only reinstate when it's soundly confirmed via evidence.
Is there something in-between comparable to a baseball asterisk?
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This would probably have the added perk of disincentivizing putting too many names on a paper.
If you're reputation is at risk for having your name next to someone else's, you'll likely want to make sure you only get added to papers you're really involved in.
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I agree. Also remove his PhD for massive disservice to his discipline. That is typically possible, but the awarding university has to do it.
190 Citations (Score:2)
One of the papers that has been retracted has been cited 190 times in other cancer research. I'm not a researcher, so maybe this question is obvious:
If a paper has been retracted because of issues, how come all papers that build upon this research are not automatically retracted?
Re:190 Citations (Score:5, Informative)
Re:190 Citations (Score:4, Insightful)
Especially since sometimes the reference is, "While BogusPaper93 concluded that the sky is 'plaid with a green tint on March 96th of this year', our work found otherwise. We do not feel this is relevant to our conclusions in this paper."
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Just because the paper is cited, does not mean that the new work depended on it. The paper being retracted does not even mean that the conclusions were wrong, only that there is a question of whether the data provided supports it.
Not only that, but without reading the citing papers, it's not clear how the citation was used in the latter paper. Often, it's just filler background material that is not directly related to the paper's results or conclusions. A few times, the citation is presented as a negative example or motivation.
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One of the papers that has been retracted has been cited 190 times in other cancer research. I'm not a researcher, so maybe this question is obvious:
If a paper has been retracted because of issues, how come all papers that build upon this research are not automatically retracted?
It would depend on whether the cited work would be considered meaningful to the results of the other study and publication. However, those other papers will likely need to be reviewed now to make that determination.
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If the paper is wrong, does that invalidate the other papers that cited it? MAYBE, There's no simple way to tell.
And, of course, as another poster noted, retracting the paper doesn't mean that the claims are wrong, merely that the data doesn't sufficiently support them. (Also most papers make multiple claims, and some can be wrong without others being wrong.)
I don't see any easy way to solve this.
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There's an easy way to solve it. Just as it is now.
Cited sources getting retracted doesn't have any bearing on a paper.* Published papers aren't Truth with a capital T, they're just fancy lab reports. They might be wrong for all sorts of perfectly ordinary reasons, and often are.
* Unless they're math papers, and the current one specifically assumes something erroneously proved in the cited one.
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If the paper is wrong, does that invalidate the other papers that cited it? MAYBE, There's no simple way to tell.
And, of course, as another poster noted, retracting the paper doesn't mean that the claims are wrong, merely that the data doesn't sufficiently support them. (Also most papers make multiple claims, and some can be wrong without others being wrong.)
I don't see any easy way to solve this.
The easy way to solve this is to popularize h-index and other citation count metrics to adjust to retracted papers. This is easy because no cooperation of authors or conference/journals is needed and can be done in a mostly automated manner. And it hits only the main culprits and does so in a way that arguably matters to them.
The system rewards cheating (Score:3)
We teach scientists in their very first class in university that you have to fake your results and give what was expected. My very first university chemistry class was a demonstration on how to analyze a substance. 60 minutes later the prof finished the math and triumphantly explained what the substance was. The problem was that to get the result he needed to have weighed the material to an accuracy of 0.02%. The bouncy of air would cause a 0.1% error.
I've worked for companies that have gotten National Research Council of Canada grants and been at the demonstrations knowing my product couldn't work because the chip set didn't support the protocol specified in the grant. Everyone else at the demonstration had the same chips (only one vendor supported the frequency needed), hooked up to PCs that did support the protocol and passed the test. The auditors didn't care when I pointed out that we didn't meet the requirements, they were told to hand the money out.
The grant was to support encourage narrow band cellular connections in IoT devices and we had to demonstrate an MQTT client in an embedded product over narrow band cellular. Some of the applicants just had the $50 chipset dev kit plugged into a laptop and got $50,000 grants.
as long we been together / still dunno what u mean (Score:2)
Science fraud for purposes of prestige is just comical. The best case scenario for a scientist is that your work is cited in hundreds of other papers. And, if you score enough cites, you win the Nobel Prize! (I know that's not one of the actual criteria for winning, but it's probably a pretty good proxy.) But when your scientific paper gets passed around like a dutchie from coast to coast for decades, sooner or later one of the million professional dutchie inspectors involved is bound to notice that it'
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There quite a few high-intelligence morons around. Often you find them in positions of power. The scientific establishment is no different, unfortunately.
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Well, to put it in perspective Semenza is listed as an author on something like over three hundred pages; he is also a medical school professor, runs a major research program in vascular medicine. Apparently he also practices as a pediatrician. Given the inhuman volume of work he's supposed to have done it's probably not surprising some of those papers have serious shortcomings. Realistically nobody could vouch for the quality of that many papers.
It's interesting retracted papers seem come fairly late in