Yesterday in my “Ethics in Science” class, we were discussing mentoring. Near the end of the class meeting, I noted that scientists in training have a resource nowadays that just wasn’t available during my misspent scientific youth (back in the last millennium): the blogosphere.
What does the blogosphere have to do with mentoring?
Category Archives: Tribe of Science
A possibility for those recruiting postdocs and junior faculty to consider.
In recent days, there have been discussions of conditions for postdoctoral fellows, and about the ways that these conditions might make it challenging to tackle the problem of the “leaky pipeline” for women in science.
For example, in comments at DrugMonkey’s blog, bsci opines:
Market forces, tough times, and the question of raises for postdocs.
Over at the DrugMonkey blog, PhysioProf noted that a push to increase NIH postdoctoral fellowship stipend levels by 6% may have the effect of reducing the number of postdoctoral positions available.
To this, the postdoctoral masses responded with something along the lines of, “Hey, it’s possible that there are too damn many postdocs already (and fighting for those rare tenure-track positions in a slightly less crowded field might be better),” and “Being able to pay my damn bills might significantly improve my quality of postdoctoral life.” There were also the expected mentions of the fact that, given their education and experience, the pay in a postdoctoral position is often dramatically less than in private industry.
In a number of comments, though, DrugMonkey pointed out that it is not just postdocs who are paid “less than they are worth” (with respect to education and experience) and frequently living in regions with higher-than-average cost of living. Why should postdocs be singularly worthy of a 6% bump but not PIs, technicians, and grad students, too?
Of course, such across-the-board increases would bump up the budgets required to run research projects, possibly by quite a lot. And in case you hadn’t heard, times are tough for everyone right now.
Then, in that comment thread, becca puts forth a proposal:
Basically, if you are going to argue in favor of pauperizing your lab workers, pauperize them enough so they can get on public Welfare.
Call me an idealist, but when a comparison of academic science and Walmart starts making the big-box giant look like the more humane employer, academic science may want to take a moment to examine its course.
Ask Dr. Free-Ride: Ethically, which field of science is the worst?
A reader writes:
I was in a PhD program in materials science, in a group that did biomedical research (biomaterials end of the field) and was appalled at the level of misconduct I saw. Later, I entered an MD program. I witnessed some of the ugliest effects of ambition in the lab there.
Do you think biomedical research is somehow “ethically worse” than other fields?
I’ve always wanted to compare measurable instances of unethical behavior across different fields. As an undergraduate I remember never hearing or seeing anything strange with the folks that worked with metallurgy and it never seemed to be an issue with my colleagues in these areas in graduate school. Whenever there is trouble it seems to come from the biomedical field. I’d love to see you write about that.
Thank you for doing what you do, since that time I have so many regrets, your blog keeps me sane.
First, I must thank this reader for the kind words. I am thrilled (although still a bit bewildered) that what I write here is of interest and use to others, and if I can contribute to someone’s sanity while I’m thinking out loud (or on the screen, as the case may be), then I feel like this whole “blogging” thing is worthwhile.
Next, on the question of whether biomedical research is somehow “ethically worse” than research in other areas of science, the short answer is: I don’t know.
Certainly there are some high profile fraudsters — and scientists whose misbehavior, while falling short of official definitions of misconduct, also fell well short of generally accepted ethical standards — in the biomedical sciences. I’ve blogged about the shenanigans of biologists, stem cell researchers, geneticists, cancer researchers, researchers studying the role of hormones in aging, researchers studying immunosuppression, anesthesiologists, and biochemists.
But the biomedical sciences haven’t cornered the market on ethical lapses, as we’ve seen in discussions of mechanical engineers, nuclear engineers, physicists, organic chemists, paleontologists, and government geologists.
There are, seemingly, bad actors to be found in every scientific field. Of course, it is reasonable to assume that there are also plenty of honest and careful scientists in every scientific field. Maybe the list of well-publicized bad actors in biomedical research is longer, but given the large number of biomedical researchers compared to the number of researchers in all scientific fields (and also the extent to which the public might regard biomedical research as more relevant to their lives than, say, esoteric questions in organic synthesis), is it disproportionately long?
Again, that’s hard to gauge.
However, my correspondent’s broad question strikes me as raising a number of related empirical questions that it would be useful to try to answer:
How do researchers perceive peer review?
You don’t have to look far to find mutterings about the peer review system, especially about the ways in which anonymous reviewers might hold up your paper or harm your career. On the other hand, there are plenty of champions of the status quo who argue that anonymous peer review is the essential mechanism by which reports of scientific findings are certified as scientific knowledge.
So how do scientists feel about anonymous peer review? A 2008 paper in Science and Engineering Ethics by David B. Resnik, Christina Guiterrez-Ford, and Shyamal Peddada, titled “Perceptions of Ethical Problems with Scientific Journal Peer Review: An Exploratory Study”, attempts to get a preliminary handle on that question. They write:
Preventing Plagiarism.
Especially in student papers, plagiarism is an issue that it seems just won’t go away. However, instructors cannot just give up and permit plagiarism without giving up most of their pedagogical goals and ideals. As tempting a behavior as this may be (at least to some students, if not to all), it is our duty to smack it down.
Is there any effective way to deliver a preemptive smackdown to student plagiarists? That’s the question posed by a piece of research, “Is There an Effective Approach to Deterring Students from Plagiarizing?” by Lidija Bilic-Zulle, Josip Azman, Vedran Frkovic, and Mladen Petrovecki, published in 2008 in Science and Engineering Ethics.
To introduce their research, the authors write:
Academic plagiarism is a complex issue, which arises from ignorance, opportunity, technology, ethical values, competition, and lack of clear rules and consequences. … The cultural characteristics of academic setting strongly influence students’ behavior. In societies where plagiarism is implicitly or even explicitly tolerated (e.g. authoritarian regimes and post-communist countries), a high rate of plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty and scientific misconduct may be expected. However, even in societies that officially disapprove of such behavior (e.g. western democracies), its prevalence is disturbing. (140)
Here, there is some suggestion of potentially relevant cultural factors that may make plagiarism attractive — and not the cultural factors I tend to hear about here in California, on the Pacific Rim. But maybe we can extend Tolstoy’s observation about how each unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way to recognize the variety of cultural contexts that spawn dishonest students.
And this is not just a matter of the interactions between students and teachers. Bilic-Zulle et al. point to plagiarism in school as something like a gateway drug for unethical behavior in one’s professional life — so potentially, reducing academic dishonesty could have important consequences beyond saving professors headaches.
In any case, the big question the researchers take on is how to reduce the prevalence. Is it effective to emphasize the importance of academic integrity, or to threaten harsh penalties if plagiarism is detected?
Problems in the scientific literature: vigilance and victim-blaming.
That post about how hard it is to clean up the scientific literature has spawned an interesting conversation in the comments. Perhaps predictably, the big points of contention seem to be how big a problem a few fraudulent papers in the literature really are (given the self-correcting nature of science and all that), and whether there larger (and mistaken) conclusions people might be drawing about science on the basis of a small fraction of the literature.
I will note just in passing that we do not have reliable numbers on what percentage of the papers published in the scientific literature are fraudulent. We may be able to come up with reliable measures of the number of published papers that have been discovered to be fraudulent, but there’s not a good procedure to accurately count the ones that succeed in fooling us.
Set that worry aside, and the legitimate worry that “little frauds” that might not do too much to deform the shape of the scientific literature might end up having significant effects on the scientific career scorekeeping. Let’s take on the big question:
How much of a problem is it to leave the scientific literature uncorrected? Who is it a problem for?
What causes scientific misconduct?
In the last post, we looked at a piece of research on how easy it is to clean up the scientific literature in the wake of retractions or corrections prompted by researcher misconduct in published articles. Not surprisingly, in the comments on that post there was some speculation about what prompts researchers to commit scientific misconduct in the first place.
As it happens, I’ve been reading a paper by Mark S. Davis, Michelle Riske-Morris, and Sebastian R. Diaz, titled “Causal Factors Implicated in Research Misconduct: Evidence from ORI Case Files”, that tries to get a handle on that very question.
The authors open by making a pitch for serious empirical work on the subject of misconduct:
[P]olicies intended to prevent and control research misconduct would be more effective if informed by a more thorough understanding of the problem’s etiology. (396)
If you know what causes X, you ought to have a better chance of being able to create conditions that block X from being caused. This seems pretty sensible to me.
Yet, the authors note, scientists, policy makers, and others seem perfectly comfortable speculating on the causes of scientific misconduct despite the lack of a well-characterized body of relevant empirical evidence about these causes. We have plenty of anecdata, but that’s not quite what we’d like to have to ground our knowledge claims.
How hard is it to clean up the scientific literature?
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:
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.