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A lot of it is people over hyping their results and cherry picking their data to fit a narrative. Can you blame them? You can literally build a career off a pap

A lot of it is people over hyping their results and cherry picking their data to fit a narrative. Can you blame them? You can literally build a career off a paper or two published in Science or Nature. Meanwhile, no one controlling funding sources or faculty appointments cares that you did amazing, rigorous work if it leads to less interesting conclusions. This is especially true if you generate null results, even though this work may have advanced your field. This puts in place a dangerous incentive system. Another thing which is not mentioned is that the level of detail provided in many methods sections in papers is not sufficient for adequately reproducing the work. This can be due to word limit constraints or because people forget to include or aren't aware of key steps which are impacting their results. I've been on projects where seemingly irrelevant steps in our assay prep significantly impacted the resulting experiment outcomes.

droopyEyelids 10y ago
Do your motivations matter if you do incorrect work? In the example I gave, an accountant can definitely face _heavy_ pressure from his employer to "make the numbers work". But if the numbers superficially "work" without adding up, who cares what the motivation was? That is buffoonery or fraud.
- DanBC 10y ago
  > Do your motivations matter if you do incorrect work? YES! If I'm careless my results don't match the data and someone can catch my mistake. If I'm trying to defraud you I'll fix this problem by making the data fit, and it's much harder for people to find the mistake. If I'm a careless accountant we can audit my spreadsheets and find the errors. If I'm a crooked accountant I'll have deliberately hidden the "error" in shell companies or offshore accounts, and this will be resistant to lower levels of scrutiny.
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droopyEyelids 10y ago

Do your motivations matter if you do incorrect work? In the example I gave, an accountant can definitely face _heavy_ pressure from his employer to "make the numbers work". But if the numbers superficially "work" without adding up, who cares what the motivation was? That is buffoonery or fraud.

DanBC 10y ago
> Do your motivations matter if you do incorrect work? YES! If I'm careless my results don't match the data and someone can catch my mistake. If I'm trying to defraud you I'll fix this problem by making the data fit, and it's much harder for people to find the mistake. If I'm a careless accountant we can audit my spreadsheets and find the errors. If I'm a crooked accountant I'll have deliberately hidden the "error" in shell companies or offshore accounts, and this will be resistant to lower levels of scrutiny.

deleted 10y ago

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