Science is supposed to be a project centered on building a body of reliable knowledge about the universe and how various pieces of it work. This means that the researchers contributing to this body of knowledge — for example, by submitting manuscripts to peer reviewed scientific journals — are supposed to be honest and accurate in what they report. They are not supposed to make up their data, or adjust it to fit the conclusion they were hoping the data would support. Without this commitment, science turns into creative writing with more graphs and less character development.
Because the goal is supposed to be a body of reliable knowledge upon which the whole scientific community can draw to build more knowledge, it’s especially problematic when particular pieces of the scientific literature turn out to be dishonest or misleading. Fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism are varieties of dishonesty that members of the scientific community look upon as high crimes. Indeed, they are activities that are defined as scientific misconduct and (at least in theory) prosecuted vigorously.
You would hope that one consequence of identifying scientists who have made dishonest contributions to the scientific literature would be that those dishonest contributions would be removed from that literature. But whether that hope is realized is an empirical question — one taken up by Anne Victoria Neale, Justin Northrup, Rhonda Dailey, Ellen Marks, and Judith Abrams in an article titled “Correction and use of biomedical literature affected by scientific misconduct” published in 2007 in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics. Here’s how Neale et al. frame their research:
Category Archives: Communication
Common ground and deeply held differences: a reply to Bruins for Animals.
In a post last month, I noted that not all (maybe even not many) supporters of animal rights are violent extremists, and that Bruins for Animals is a group committed to the animal rights position that was happy to take a public stand against the use of violence and intimidation to further the cause of animal liberation.
On Wednesday, Kristy Anderson (the co-founder of Bruins for Animals), Ashley Smith (the president), and Jill Ryther (the group’s advisor) posted a critical response to my post. In the spirit of continuing dialogue, I’d like to respond to that response.
They write:
AR activists can rightly accept praise and credit for encouraging the two sides to come together in what was an unprecedented public and civil dialogue. However, one glaring and rather twisted irony too often overlooked is the fact that those very same participants who speak against aggressive campaigns against the animal experimentation industry and who are quick to praise AR advocates’ stance on nonviolence are themselves engaged in (or are supporters of) violence and intimidation towards sentient beings on a daily basis.
What’s the point of peer review?
Once again, I’m going to “get meta” on that recent paper on blogs as a channel of scientific communication I mentioned in my last post. Here, the larger question I’d like to consider is how peer review — the back and forth between authors and reviewers, mediated (and perhaps even refereed by) journal editors — does, could, and perhaps should play out.
Prefacing his post about the paper, Bora writes:
First, let me get the Conflict Of Interest out of the way. I am on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Science Communication. I helped the journal find reviewers for this particular manuscript. And I have reviewed it myself. Wanting to see this journal be the best it can be, I was somewhat dismayed that the paper was published despite not being revised in any way that reflects a response to any of my criticisms I voiced in my review.
Bora’s post, in other words, drew heavily on comments he wrote for the author of the paper to consider (and, presumably, to take into account in her revision of the manuscript) before it was published.
Since, as it turns out, the author didn’t make revisions addressing Bora’s criticisms that ended up in the published version of the paper, Bora went ahead and made those criticisms part of the (now public) discussion of the published paper. He still endorses those criticisms, so he chooses to share them with the larger audience the paper has now that it has been published.
Do you want people to discuss your published work?
There’s a recent paper on blogs as a channel of scientific communication that has been making the rounds. Other bloggers have discussed the paper and its methodology in some detail (including but not limited to Bora and DrugMonkey and Dr. Isis), so I’m not going to do that. Rather, I want to pull back and “get meta” with the blogospheric discussion of the paper, and especially the suggestion that it might be out of bounds for science bloggers (some of whom write the blogs that provided the data for the paper in question) to mount such a vigorous critique of a paper that was, as it turns out, authored by a graduate student.
So, let’s consider the situation more generally:
#scio10 aftermath: Continuing thoughts on what civil engagement could mean, online or offline.
Back in January, at ScienceOnline2010, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Dr. Isis, and I led a session called “Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents”. Shortly after the session, I posted my first thoughts on how it went and on the lessons I was trying to take away from it.
Almost two months later, I’m ready to say some more about the session and the issues I think it raised.
Objectivity, conflicts of interest, and book reviews.
Let’s say you’re a book review editor for a large circulation science periodical. You receive books from publishers and you look for scientists with the relevant expertise to write reviews that really engage the content of the books they are reviewing.
The thing with having the relevant expertise, though, is that it may put you right in the middle of a controversy that the book you’ve been asked to review is probing or advancing.
In other words, it may be tricky to find a reviewer who is conversant in the scientific issues the book raises and simultaneously reasonably objective about those issues. If you know enough to grok the horse race, you may actually have a horse in that race.
The question, however, is whether large circulation science periodicals are offering book reviews with the tacit promise that they are objective (or as objective as an individual’s own assessment of a book can be).
To get a quick sense of your expectations on this, here’s a poll:
Some modest proposals for animal rights supporters looking to make their case without resorting to harassment, intimidation, or violence.
I take it that a good number of animal rights supporters feel that their position is philosophically well-grounded, intuitively appealing, and compatible with the flourishing of humans as well as of non-human animals.
As such, I would argue that animal rights supporters can, and should, advance their position without resorting to tactics that depend on harassment, intimidation, or violence. (At least some animal rights supporters agree.) Especially since the hope is to win the hearts and minds of the larger public to the cause of animal rights, supporters of this position might want to hold on to the moral high ground.
How can they do this? Here are four options that leap to mind:
Our cause is good, so our tactics don’t need to be?
Earlier this week, I related a situation I found alarming in which a scientist and his children were targeted for harassment because he dared to express the view that research with animals plays an important role in answering scientific questions that matter to scientists and to the public. I was not alone in decrying these tactics. At least one animal rights group also condemned them.
Given that the post was pretty clearly directed at the question of tactics, I am frankly puzzled by this comment from Douglas Watts:
When I see mainstream “science” commit itself to a program which phases out vivisection by date certain, this post would have credibility. Without such a pledge and plan, you are basically saying that scientists are separate from the rest of society and should not be held to the standards the rest of society must live up to. In doing so, you are making the anti-vivisectionists point for them: scientists are unwilling and unable to clean up their own house.
If I’m understanding it, the logical structure of what Douglas Watts is claiming here is something like this:
There are animal rights supporters who take a public stand against violence and intimidation.
We don’t have to agree about whether animal research is ethical or scientifically valuable to agree that some tactics for pursuing your view are harmful to civil society.
Bruins for Animals, the student organization at UCLA that was instrumental in organizing the recent dialogue about the science and ethics of animal based research, understands this, and they are not afraid to call out the people “on their side” who opt for threats and intimidation:
Time to get mad. Ways to speak up.
When I told you about the infuriating tactics extreme animal rights activists are turning against Dario Ringach for even daring to express his view that animal research can be important, a number of you asked in the comments, “What can we do besides signing petitions and writing blog posts?”
David Jentsch offers some concrete ideas about where to start making your stand: