How much research is fraudulent?

Discussion in 'Science' started by Jack Hays, Jul 11, 2021.

  1. Cosmo

    Cosmo Well-Known Member

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    I think your immature response concerning the stolen emails says it all.
     
  2. Jack Hays

    Jack Hays Well-Known Member Donor

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    I have always suspected the emails were leaked rather than stolen, and Ken Briffa or someone close to him was my candidate. We will learn the truth some day.
    Climategate: The Crutape Letters by Steven Mosher
     
    Last edited: Jul 24, 2021
  3. Jack Hays

    Jack Hays Well-Known Member Donor

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    The struggle against fraudulent research continues.
    Publisher retracting more than 30 articles from paper mills
    [​IMG]
    via Pixy

    The publisher SAGE is in the process of retracting more than 30 papers across three of its journals after determining that they were churned out by paper mills — prompting the company to take a closer look at its policies and procedures.

    The suspect papers were initially flagged by Elisabeth Bik and others as part of a group of some 400 articles that showed signs of having been milled. As we reported in March, a dozen of the articles were hit with expressions of concern — prompting some head-scratching from Bik, in particular, about why they weren’t being retracted outright.

    A spokesperson for SAGE told us:

    Continue reading
     
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  4. Mircea

    Mircea Well-Known Member

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    That's a product of the axiom "publish or perish."

    "Publish or perish" is a product of Academia culture.

    It works like this: Schools compete against other schools for the cream of the crop of the students. In order to compete then, schools want perspective students, both undergrad and grad, to believe the school is better than other schools and to do that, they point to the number of professors at their school who have been published.

    It also means you'll never become a Dean, or a Department Chair or Head, unless you have been published.

    But, it's gone way beyond that now.

    Being published is not good enough.

    You need to be published and cited, meaning your published work was cited by others in publishing their work.

    But, even that isn't good enough now. Being published and cited is ho-hum. You need to be cited by a whole lotta others now to make the grade (no pun intended.)

    That's why peer-review is so important. If you're gonna cite another's work in your publication, then that work must be top-notch.
     
  5. HereWeGoAgain

    HereWeGoAgain Banned

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    Precisely, if something sneaks through the peer review process it doesn't end there. There are a thousand other scientists chomping at the bit to prove it was wrong.

    The great fallacy is the illusion that the average person can tell the difference; that some guy on the internet really has the correct answers and is glad to post them in some trivial forum because he has no chance of getting published himself.

    Keep the company of those who seek the truth and run from those who have found it!
     
    Last edited: Sep 2, 2021
  6. HereWeGoAgain

    HereWeGoAgain Banned

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    In fact, retractions are examples of science doing its job.
     
  7. Jack Hays

    Jack Hays Well-Known Member Donor

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    Yes, and . . . ?
     
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  8. Nonnie

    Nonnie Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    There's a thing in science called, "The replication crisis". Peter Ridd explains it.

     
    Last edited: Sep 4, 2021
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  9. Jack Hays

    Jack Hays Well-Known Member Donor

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    There are too many holes in peer review.
    In which we ask: What exactly did peer review accomplish here?
    [​IMG]

    A retraction notice for a 2021 paper in an environmental sciences journal has us wondering if the peer review process for the publication should be declared a Superfund Site.

    The article, “Experimental study and numerical prediction of HTO and 36Cl− diffusion in radioactive waste at Téguline Clay,” appeared in Environmental Technology, a Taylor & Francis title, and was written by a group at Central South University, in Changsha.

    Evidently, little in that title was accurate.

    According to the retraction notice:

    Continue reading
     
  10. Jack Hays

    Jack Hays Well-Known Member Donor

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    High office is no guarantee of integrity.
    Leading marine ecologist, now White House official, violated prominent journal’s policies in handling now-retracted paper
    [​IMG]
    Jane Lubchenco

    A marine ecologist at Oregon State University now helping lead the Biden White House’s climate and environmental initiatives violated the conflict of interest policy at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences when she edited a paper in the journal last year.

    Jane Lubchenco, who served as administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from 2009 to 2013 under President Obama, joined the White House in March of this year as Deputy Director for Climate and Environment in the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

    Last year, while still at Oregon State, Lubchenco, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, was the handling editor for an article titled “A global network of marine protected areas for food,” by Reniel Cabral and Steven Gaines of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and colleagues. Such marine protected areas, aka MPAs, have come under scrutiny, as Yale’s E360 noted in 2019:

    Continue reading
     
  11. Joe knows

    Joe knows Well-Known Member

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    It is but in science that includes aspects of emotion it’s almost guaranteed to be altered in a way that reflects their beliefs or at the very least leans against them.

    human emotion gets in the way of almost everything. Climate change being a great example. There are studies that point to every which way and I believe there is a peer reviewed that suggests most climate studies are over exaggerated, in other words (false). When an opposing study comes out they jump on it in a fashion that’s is definitely based on emotion. To question the study of climate change in my opinion is natural being how much money it has redirected.
     
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  12. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    I don't see this happening even SLIGHTLY.

    There are large numbers of scientists throughout the world working on topics that touch climatology - atmospheric chemistry, the sun, the oceans, the poles, geology, etc., etc.

    NO single paper could possibly do what you are suggesting here. This idea of the entire world of these scientists flopping around like fish out of water is just plain ridiculous.

    The "single paper" theory of altering the root conclusions of climatology is just plain nutty. Science demands review and duplication. And, the totality of the fields of science and numbers of scientists just does not support the kind of conspiracy that keeps getting proposed - whether it is proposed to be based on money, on emotion, or on anything else.
     
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  13. Jack Hays

    Jack Hays Well-Known Member Donor

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  14. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    There's a lot more room for fudge in the soft sciences. That's been long recognized and some improvement has been made. I'm all in favor of people working on that. Many of these problems have come from methodology that should be disqualifying simply upon recognizing the methodology. We see p-hacking, for example.

    However, it is a SERIOUS misrepresentation to suggest that finding some papers that turn out to be wrong should move anyone to ignore science.

    And, I don't see any other objective in your efforts on this front.

    Your attacks are consistently oriented to using individual failures to smear all science - as if some failed paper is an indication that science should be disqualified as a legitimate input to policy decisions.
     
  15. Polydectes

    Polydectes Well-Known Member

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    It's rather deceptive because your average person doesn't really understand what science is. They really ever just quoted as a vehicle to support some belief they have.

    I often times come across people who are debating with that talk about trusting the science. This indicates to me someone who doesn't know what science is. Scientist is the absolute lack of trust. It is verification.
    This goes against human nature to not accept something as fact or truth without verifying it. Scientists themselves have a hard time with this that's why they go through efforts to try and compartmentalize and remove any effect of their bias.

    So if you write a research paper in a way to seem academic and it supports a belief or confirms a belief someone else held they're going to hold that up as legitimate science. Automatically going to distrust everything that goes against it. When the truth is if you have multiple studies that conflict with one another then we don't really know.

    That seems to be a pretty terrifying thing to human not knowing not having something to ground their beliefs on. That's why we have a thing called the ideology.

    Essentially most people want to be Puritans whatever they think pure is when it's different for everyone, because analyzing everything is not only a incredible struggle it's largely impossible in life you just have to assume certain things to be able to live.

    But the problem comes in when you use this puritanism or what some people have turned disgust based thinking which I refer to is the Savage mindset is exhibited by someone who's in the wrong. That's when we have hate crimes that's when we have Salem witchcraft trials that's when we have genocide.

    The Savage mindset as soon as different is wrong. I think to a degree we all have the Savage mindset it's just some of us can stop that and kind of compartmentalize it.

    People that talk about the science in my experience are just saying the word to add clout to their statements. They don't know the studies that have gone into whatever they're talking about they don't evaluate the ones that going against their viewpoint all those are just automatically considered debunked.

    So in reality it's more like a religion
     
  16. Polydectes

    Polydectes Well-Known Member

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    everyone ignores science if it goes against what they want to believe. Actually doing science is an extraordinarily humbling act. You have to accept that you have a confirmation bias and everyone does if you say you don't you are not meant to do science you probably can't even interpret it.

    That's why whenever I come across the real arrogant types automatically disbelieve anything they say they do not have the personality to not only perform science but to interpret it correctly.

    Emotional points of view such as high opinions of oneself or desire to affirm one's beliefs have absolutely zero place in the pursuit of knowledge
    Well as it has always been there are a lot of people that will try and use sciency sounding things to buttress their beliefs. A lot of it is using academic language. And people will believe it because it sounds academic and actually verifying it is extraordinarily difficult.

    Ask yourself this have you ever said I trust the science? If you say that you don't know what science is the science is verified or invalidated there is no room for trust anywhere there.
     
  17. Jack Hays

    Jack Hays Well-Known Member Donor

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    On the contrary, those of us who advocate higher standards are defending science from its slipshod practitioners.
     
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  18. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    I don't believe you are doing that. Not even slighty.

    If you were interested in people on this board learning how to consume science, you would address that directly. You would be suggesting ways for verifying results, finding related sources, going to original papers when the press is clearly failing, how to find review sites that are more trustable, how to be aware of the differences between the hard sciences and the softer sciences of investigation of society and individual human response where controls are so much harder to implement.

    Instead, you are just promoting the idea that science is crap.

    And, you are showing NO interest in improving science. You aren't identifying or promoting ways of doing that, even though there are people such as Dr. Judith Curry who have serious ideas on how that can be accomplished. You just are NOT interested in this.


    All you are attempting to do is, again, to declare that science is crap - while using methods that YOU DECRY when you see them in science. You can't even hold to your own standards.

    And, it is no surprise that your individual complaints all have to do with cases which appear to oppose your preconceived political opinions - just one more of the factors that you complain about when you see that in others, but that you yourself use constantly.
     
  19. Jack Hays

    Jack Hays Well-Known Member Donor

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    What you believe doesn't interest me.
    You should have noticed I reference Judith Curry frequently.
     
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  20. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    That's why I mentioned her.

    The catch is, you aren't prooting her ideas on how to improve science.

    Instead, you are invariably presenting individual cases which you perceive as supporting your preconceived opinion.

    And, of course you fail to divide your number of papers you don't like (for good or bad reasons) by the total number of papers in order to come up with an honest assessment.
     
  21. Jack Hays

    Jack Hays Well-Known Member Donor

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    I'm afraid that's an incoherent post.
     
  22. Hoosier8

    Hoosier8 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Much of it is because many in academia are required to publish papers.
     
  23. Hoosier8

    Hoosier8 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Peer review is often the problem. In some cases it’s been called pal review.
     
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  24. Hoosier8

    Hoosier8 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    LOL, you are the one taking the vaccine he touted.
     
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  25. modernpaladin

    modernpaladin Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Why does that matter? Are they required to come to a certain conclusion?
     
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