5 ms·
Mathematician withdraws preprint 24 years after initial submission
- prvc 4y agoI don't like the tone of that article, considering there is no reason to suspect that any part of this story resulted from an act of bad faith.
- BeetleB 4y agoI'm aware of Retraction Watch, and I did not sense that tone at all.
- astrange 4y agoIndeed, a publishing everything and sometimes retracting it system would work better than our actual system of peer review, which has little to recommend it, isn’t very historical, and mainly leads to unreadable papers. https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall...
- mcphage 4y agoWhat in the article did you feel implied an act of bad faith on the part of the paper author?
- boomboomsubban 4y agoI also don't feel the article was trying to accuse the author. That said, their quoting of "crucial mistake" when contacting the author makes it look like they are doubting it was actually a mistake, indirectly suggesting that they suspect some kind of misconduct. I think they actually quoted the term because that's the correct grammatical rule, at least from my memories of school. Still, the practice is so often used by accusatory journalism that it now makes the usage look suspicious.
- defrost 4y agoI read the tone of this as essentially neutral, I would have liked to have seen some numbers on the propotion of retractions. Key notes are: * arXiv allows authors to withdraw papers whenever they’d like (with as much or little detail about their reasons as they care to provide). * All prior versions remain online, without notation that the paper was withdrawn. (Without notation!!) * Roughly two-thirds of biomedical, physics, math preprints are eventually published in peer reviewed journals. The take aways are that a third of STEM preprints are never submitted (in arXiv form) for peer review, and an unknown proportion are withdrawn with no obvious indication that happened.
- abnry 4y agoMaybe the article is neutral, but the site does not come off as such. From their homepage: >The week at Retraction Watch featured: > Mathematician withdraws preprint – 24 years after initial submission > Penn says access to former Twitter employee’s thesis was ‘mistakenly closed off’ following Elon Musk tweets > PLOS flags nearly 50 papers by controversial French COVID researcher for ethics concerns > Cancer researcher banned from federal funding for faking data in nearly 400 images in 16 grant applications > ‘I never asked or expected to be included as an author’: Retired Penn State prof has three retractions for manipulated peer review The thing about mathematics papers is that, for the most part, social acceptance is _the_ test of research. I say social acceptance, because that is what it is, namely a culture of rigorous logical review of the arguments in a paper. As such, you don't really have ethics concerns relating to faked data or p-hacking in a math paper. When a math paper is retracted, it is almost certainly due to an honest mistake. Papers with such an error are likely not a very significant paper to begin with--as the error likely escaped noticed because there were fewer eyes on it--or there is a very deep and subtle error that would be hard for anyone to catch.
- lupire 4y agoWhat do you see as non-neutral?
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
- linuxdude314 4y agoThey are called preprints for a reason. If he felt it contained errors should he just leave the paper up and mislead people? This reads as manufactured outrage.
- enjoyyourlife 4y agoThe reason this is interesting is because it took him 24 years to withdraw the paper
- kevingadd 4y agoSometimes it takes a long time to find an error in some math! https://ai.googleblog.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-nearly.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about...