4 ms·
Ha. I have a lot of those papers too, but none that are BS in such a high tier, congrats! (or "congrats") At this point I am cynical enough to believe people i
by cgiles 7y ago
Ha. I have a lot of those papers too, but none that are BS in such a high tier, congrats! (or "congrats")
At this point I am cynical enough to believe people include analysts on their papers as an insurance policy to have the "licensed" person to give the seal of approval, and take the blame if necessary, for their shitty data. Which they will never listen to concerns about before publication.
Just today I am working on a qPCR array (yes people still use those) with one "housekeeping" gene replicated 4 times for ddCt normalization. 80 miRs go up, none go down, out of 400. No one sees any problem with this, the data is the data.
Them: Oh, and can you, cgiles, also tell us about the genes regulated by these miRs?
Me: Not really in any principled way, especially when the underlying data is incredibly fishy, and even if I did, we would be saying all the target genes go down. Don't you think people will find that odd? Do you think perhaps there could be a problem with your "housekeeping" gene?
Them: Who cares? Just run the algorithm.
Thank you for this tale. I'm glad I'm not the only one in this situation.
- astazangasta 7y agoThis sort of stuff, the general lack of interest in method in the drive to publish, has really killed a lot of my faith in the idea of a scientific method. It can't work, we can't produce good, useful knowledge if even the best scientists at top flight institutions just regard it as a shell game where the facsimile of a result is as good as a real result, as long as you can sneak it past publishers, who are playing the same game with the public.