Katherine et al,
On 1 June 2015 at 11:45, Katherine J Hepworth <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On May 31, 2015, at 5:32 PM, Filippo Salustri <[log in to unmask]<mailto:
> [log in to unmask]>> wrote:
> I'm curious if you and I have the same notion of "we" in this particular
> case. Given that you're in a journalism school, I wonder if your "we"
> referred to journalists.
>
> I am thinking as a design researcher :)
>
> I believe that academics are, on the whole, more ethical with respect to
> their professional activities (e.g., publishing their research) than many
> other groups; "we" have a pretty good record of regulating ourselves.
>
> This is where we disagree. Call me cynical, but I don’t think academics
> have any less a claim than others to the undesirable parts of human
> behavior or professional misdemeanor. Both the pressure to publish that
> Don, Ken and Jean mention, and the pressure to get funding (in some fields)
> act as added incentives for academics to misbehave. For further reading on
> this, see research on academic misconduct and retractions<
> http://www.pnas.org/content/109/42/17028>, and the ethical problem of
> coercive citations<http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6068/542>.
>
Academics are just humans, but my experiences have been different, I guess,
from yours. I also think that there's a broad spectrum of behaviours that
might fall under the label "misbehave" including simple errors and
momentary lapses. I'm not sure we should be lumping these relatively minor
occurrences in with the particularly egregious - and rare - cases of
systemic abuse of the system.
...or am I misunderstanding what you meant?
I'm well aware of the papers in PNAS, Science, etc. The thing that truly,
madly, deeply irks me about it is that the studies they report are
virtually always in bio-med and life-science disciplines, yet even PNAS
itself generalizes without evidence in its headline to cover all of
science. The situations in those disciplines are very different from the
situations in many other scientific disciplines - so different that there's
no way the generalization is warranted. Funding sources, funding amounts,
importance of publication as a measure of success, expectations from within
the discipline, etc. All these and others change significantly.
While retractions occur everywhere, some disciplines do better and others
worse (see for instance
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0044118).
I also draw your attention to this result: "Fifteen prolific individuals
accounted for more than half of all retractions due to alleged research
misconduct, and strongly influenced all retraction characteristics."
Clearly, we have a case of a very few bad apples here.
A whole other effect is the kind of chain-reaction triggered by a single
retraction - see
http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/131106/srep03146/full/srep03146.html. I'm
not sure whether this is a good thing, especially if good research gets
dismissed via guilt by association alone.
This is, however, no excuse to relax. We probably have this inevitable
problem contained at the moment, but only constant vigilance and decisive
action will prevent it from getting entirely out of hand.
It would also help if results like the ones in PLOS ("Despite recent
increases, the proportion of published scholarly literature affected by
retraction remains very small.") got as much attention in the press as the
more sensationalistic ones.
I also refer people to http://retractionwatch.com/, which does a good job,
IMHO, of tracking retractions, as is evidenced by articles such as
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4278466/
>
> And most of all, I worry about the public's perceptions and the potential
> to undermine trust in experts.
>
> Trust in experts is constantly being eroded, and I don’t think there’s
> much anyone can do about it. We bring a lot of this on ourselves, as Don
> points out…
>
Sorry, but to say that we bring a lot of it on ourselves *and* there's not
much anyone can do about it seems like we're throwing in the towel.
I'm certainly not, and I'm not sure I understand why anyone else would, if
that's indeed the case.
Regards to all,
\V/_ /fas
*Prof. Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng.*
Email: [log in to unmask]
http://deseng.ryerson.ca/~fil/
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