5 ms·

If this generalizes, seems like someone with a graph database, some basic calculus, and an archive of papers citation data could pull the rug out from under ent

If this generalizes, seems like someone with a graph database, some basic calculus, and an archive of papers citation data could pull the rug out from under entire disciplines, specifically ones that are informing public policy these days. These "data thugs," they seem like what we hoped hackers would be.

lmc 5y ago
Not that simple, and that was something missed in the original article - not all citations are equal. You have to know the context of each. Like, it could've been 1 positive citation, and 349 calling it bullshit... or vice versa.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  Indeed, the beauty of using a graph is you can see the direct citations, and then secondary and teritiery ones and then pull apart the clusters to see if there is any opportunity to pull on mathematical threads. A query like, given paper X, show papers that cite it, papers that cite those, and then ones that cite both. Cycles in the graph might show citation rings as well (as I think has happened in the past), but this would be a challenge for young people to apply their high school calculus skills to verifying claims in social science research. A breadth first search across papers using citations selects which paths you want to do your depth first validation on. We do the same thing in vulnerability research with software dependencies, and picking a bad-math vuln in a discipline and tracing its impact though, or picking clusters of tightly dependent research and finding vulns in them seems like an opportunity for an enterprising outsider who never wants a job from any of these people.
  - tunesmith 5y ago
    How can a citation ring happen if papers are written one after another?
    - smaddox 5y ago
      Preprints. It happens quite often in deep learning papers, these days.
- native_samples 5y ago
  Scientists almost never negatively cite papers, and actually never do for incompetence or bad methodologies, so this is not a problem in practice [1]. In fact they don't even notice when citing retracted papers [2] so good luck getting them to notice deeper problems. The reality is, a citation is always either neutral or a positive reference to other work. [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/112/45/13823 https://www.pnas.org/content/112/45/13823 - only ~2.5% of citations are negative. Of those virtually all are about the findings, not the methodology. [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18974415/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18974415/
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - lmc 5y ago
    Good points, and good to see there's some data behind that as well. That's how it's seemed to me in my areas. I'm not sure to what degree it applies for things like psychology - prob never as extreme as my original example, but it would be interesting to see a similar study.
native_samples 5y ago
They have done but public policy doesn't respond. For example one of the "data thugs" (James Heathers) wrote a tool that could detect impossible numbers in psych papers, like means/std devs that couldn't possibly have been the result of any allowable combination of results. Some very high percentage of papers failed, I think it was 40%. And of course psychology isn't the worst. Epidemiology is worse than psychology. The methodological problems there are terrifying. Good luck getting public policy to even accept that it's happened, let alone do anything about it.
- nicoty 5y ago
  For anyone curious, this seems to be a re-implementation of said tool: https://github.com/QuentinAndre/pysprite https://github.com/QuentinAndre/pysprite .
- bagels 5y ago
  What is an example of a kind of impossible statistic?
  - native_samples 5y ago
    https://peerj.com/preprints/2064v1/ https://peerj.com/preprints/2064v1/ - note that Nick Brown also worked on this. e.g. "Specifically, the mean of the 28 participants in the experimental condition, reported as 5.19, cannot be correct. Since all responses were integers between 1 and 7, the total of the response scores across all participants must also be an integer in the range 28–196. The two integers that give a result closest to the reported mean of 5.19 (which will typically have been subjected to rounding) are 145 and 146. However, 145 divided by 28 is 85714217.5, which conventional rounding returns as 5.18. Likewise, 146 divided by 28 is 42857121.5, which rounds to 5.21. That is, there is no combination of responses to the question that can give a mean of 5.19 when correctly rounded." (that example is a fictional one but the same issue arises elsewhere)
    - bagels 5y ago
      Thanks for that. It's statistics that are impossible given the data, makes a ton of sense. Copy paste didn't come in 100%, but meaning was clear, the values are: 5.17857... and 5.2147...

lmc 5y ago

Not that simple, and that was something missed in the original article - not all citations are equal. You have to know the context of each. Like, it could've been 1 positive citation, and 349 calling it bullshit... or vice versa.

motohagiography 5y ago
Indeed, the beauty of using a graph is you can see the direct citations, and then secondary and teritiery ones and then pull apart the clusters to see if there is any opportunity to pull on mathematical threads. A query like, given paper X, show papers that cite it, papers that cite those, and then ones that cite both. Cycles in the graph might show citation rings as well (as I think has happened in the past), but this would be a challenge for young people to apply their high school calculus skills to verifying claims in social science research. A breadth first search across papers using citations selects which paths you want to do your depth first validation on. We do the same thing in vulnerability research with software dependencies, and picking a bad-math vuln in a discipline and tracing its impact though, or picking clusters of tightly dependent research and finding vulns in them seems like an opportunity for an enterprising outsider who never wants a job from any of these people.
- tunesmith 5y ago
  How can a citation ring happen if papers are written one after another?
  - smaddox 5y ago
    Preprints. It happens quite often in deep learning papers, these days.
native_samples 5y ago
Scientists almost never negatively cite papers, and actually never do for incompetence or bad methodologies, so this is not a problem in practice [1]. In fact they don't even notice when citing retracted papers [2] so good luck getting them to notice deeper problems. The reality is, a citation is always either neutral or a positive reference to other work. [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/112/45/13823 https://www.pnas.org/content/112/45/13823 - only ~2.5% of citations are negative. Of those virtually all are about the findings, not the methodology. [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18974415/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18974415/
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lmc 5y ago
  Good points, and good to see there's some data behind that as well. That's how it's seemed to me in my areas. I'm not sure to what degree it applies for things like psychology - prob never as extreme as my original example, but it would be interesting to see a similar study.

native_samples 5y ago

They have done but public policy doesn't respond. For example one of the "data thugs" (James Heathers) wrote a tool that could detect impossible numbers in psych papers, like means/std devs that couldn't possibly have been the result of any allowable combination of results. Some very high percentage of papers failed, I think it was 40%. And of course psychology isn't the worst. Epidemiology is worse than psychology. The methodological problems there are terrifying. Good luck getting public policy to even accept that it's happened, let alone do anything about it.

nicoty 5y ago
For anyone curious, this seems to be a re-implementation of said tool: https://github.com/QuentinAndre/pysprite https://github.com/QuentinAndre/pysprite .
bagels 5y ago
What is an example of a kind of impossible statistic?
- native_samples 5y ago
  https://peerj.com/preprints/2064v1/ https://peerj.com/preprints/2064v1/ - note that Nick Brown also worked on this. e.g. "Specifically, the mean of the 28 participants in the experimental condition, reported as 5.19, cannot be correct. Since all responses were integers between 1 and 7, the total of the response scores across all participants must also be an integer in the range 28–196. The two integers that give a result closest to the reported mean of 5.19 (which will typically have been subjected to rounding) are 145 and 146. However, 145 divided by 28 is 85714217.5, which conventional rounding returns as 5.18. Likewise, 146 divided by 28 is 42857121.5, which rounds to 5.21. That is, there is no combination of responses to the question that can give a mean of 5.19 when correctly rounded." (that example is a fictional one but the same issue arises elsewhere)
  - bagels 5y ago
    Thanks for that. It's statistics that are impossible given the data, makes a ton of sense. Copy paste didn't come in 100%, but meaning was clear, the values are: 5.17857... and 5.2147...