6 ms·

I think it's clear that this paper has stood the rest of time over the last 20 years. Our estimates of how much published work fails to replicate or is outright

I think it's clear that this paper has stood the rest of time over the last 20 years. Our estimates of how much published work fails to replicate or is outright fraudulent have only increased since then.

tptacek 2y ago
Outright research fraud is probably very rare; the cases we've heard about stick out, but people outside of academia usually don't have a good intuition for just how vast the annual output of the sciences are. Remember the famous PhD comic, showing how your thesis is going to be an infinitesimal fraction of the work of your field.
- dekhn 2y ago
  Is incompetence fraud? Or just incompetence? I'm asking because a fair number of the molecular biologists who get caught by Elizabeth Bik for copy/pasting images of gels insist they just made honest mistakes (with some commentary about the atrocious nature of record-keeping in modern biology). I alter Ionnides's conclusion to be instead: "Roughly 50% of papers in quantitative biological sciences contain at least one error serious enough to invalidate the conclusion" and "Roughly 75% of really interesting papers are missing at least one load-bearing method detail that reproducers must figure out on their own" (my own personal observations of the literature are consistent with these rates; I was always flabbergasted at people who just took Figure 3 as correct).
  - kelipso 2y ago
    There is no one hovering over scientists all the time ready to stick a hot poker in them when they make a mistake or get careless. I was in academia and my impression is there is a reluctance to double and triple check results to make sure they are right as long as the results match your instincts, whether it's time pressure, laziness, bias, or just being human.
    - dekhn 2y ago
      At least in my own mental model of publishing a paper (I've published only a few), I'd want my coauthors to stick hot pokers in my if I made a mistake or got careless. But then, my entire thesis was driven by a reproducible Makefile that downloaded the latest results from a supercomputer, re-ran the whole analysis, and wrote the latex necessary (at least partly to avoid making trivial mistakes). It was clear everything I was doing was just getting in the way of publishing high prestige papers.
      - robwwilliams 2y ago
        All too easy to understand your situation. NIH is finally but slowly waking up and is imposing more “onerous” (aka: essential and correct) data management and sharing (DMS) document. Every grant applicant now submits following these guidelines: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-24-175.html https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-24-1... Unfortunately, not all NIH institutes understand how to evaluate and moderate this key new policy. Oddly enough the peer reviewers do NOT have access to DMS plans as of this year.
        IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
        Is this a process whereby the researcher is forced to submit the thesis (null, etc) of the research, ahead of the study and its findings?
        robwwilliams 2y ago
        I think you are referring to clinical trial registration. Different idea and process (a QA-like step). The NIH DMS mandates are about the data generated by an award.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    > I'm asking because a fair number of the molecular biologists who get caught by Elizabeth Bik for copy/pasting images of gels insist they just made honest mistakes You're talking about (almost certainly) fraudsters denying they committed fraud. The vast majority of non-replicable results have nothing to do with these types of errors, purposeful or not.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    > Is incompetence fraud? Or just incompetence? Fraud requires intent; it's a word that describes what happened, but also the motivations of the people involved. Incompetence doesn't assume any intent at all; it's merely a description of the (lack of) ability of the people involved. Incompetent people can certainly commit fraud (perhaps to try to cover up their incompetence), but that's by no means required. > ...insist they just made honest mistakes If they're lying about that, it's fraud; they're either covering up their unrealized incompetence with fraud, or trying to cover up their intended fraud with protestations of mere incompetence. If they really did make honest mistakes, then it's just garden-variety incompetence. (Or just... mistakes. To me, incompetence is when someone consistently makes mistakes often. One-time or few-time mistakes are just things that happen to people, no matter how good the are at what they do.)
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      The legal phrase I like is "knew or should have known". If there is a situation where you should have known something was wrong, it's as bad as if you really knew it was wrong. To hold otherwise incentivizes willful blindness and plausible deniability.
      - dllthomas 2y ago
        I don't think the fact that the law (rightly, I will grant) unified two things when determining whether to punish means that we should always unify those things in our reasoning in other contexts.
    - dataviz 2y ago
      People often use incompetence as an excuse for what were actually intentional bad decisions. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Maybe someone was incompetent but also knew they were cutting corners. Should they get a pass because they claim they didn't mean to do it? We should hold people accountable regardless of intent.
      - veunes 2y ago
- kelipso 2y ago
  Research fraud is likely very rare but it's not about a few stories that show up about unreplicable studies that stick out. There was a study a few years where they tried to replicate a bunch of top cited psychology papers and the majority of the experiments were not replicated. Then people did the same for other disciplines afterwards and, while it wasn't as bad as psychology, there were plenty of papers they couldn't replicate.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Every time this topic comes up I'm reminded of what Stefan Savage, a hero of mine, said about academic papers ("studies", in the sense we're discussing here): they are the beginnings of conversations, not the end. It shouldn't shock people that results in papers might not replicate; papers aren't infallible, which makes sense when you consider the process that produces them.
    - robwwilliams 2y ago
      That is a generous interpretation. But in many cases we try our best to dress up studies and tell good stories—-preferably stories with compelling positive statistics and with slick figures. The story telling often obscures the key data.
      - mrguyorama 2y ago
        No, "Science" "Journalists" who have zero scientific training will take an extremely limited study and completely miss the point and make wild claims that the general population becomes convinced the "science" said. Scientists do not consider a study to be more than an observation. What matters to scientists is the totality of the evidence. There are several chemistry youtubers who have failed to "reproduce" papers they are working from. Does that mean chemistry is a farce and doesn't work? No, it means some chemist at some point in history failed to write something down, mostly because they didn't even know or realize it mattered. Science is incredibly difficult and we can only hope to be okay at it.
        2y ago
- jklinger410 2y ago
  > Outright research fraud is probably very rare Not sure what rare means in this context. The more important research is, the more likely there is fraud involved. So in terms of size of impact, it's probably very common. And then if you combine this with poorly done, non repeatable, or inconclusive research being parroted as a discovery...You end up with quite a bit of BS research.
giantg2 2y ago
[Please consider the following with an open mind] Just because a study doesn't replicate, doesn't make it false. This is especially true in medicine where the potential global subjects/population are very diverse. You can do a small study that suggests further research based on a small sample size, or even a case study. The next study might have a conflicting finding, but that doesn't make the first one false - rather a step in the overall process of gaining new information.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  I think it's much, much more powerful to think of "failure to replicate" as "failure to generalize." In lieu of actual fraud or a methodological mistake that wasn't represented/caught in peer review, it's still extremely difficult to control for all possible sources of variation. That's especially true as you go further "up the stack" from math -> physics -> chem -> bio -> psych -> social. It is absolutely possible to honestly conduct a very high quality experiment with a real finding, but fail to account for something like "on the way here, 80% of participants encountered a frustrating traffic jam." Their finding could be true for people who just encountered a traffic jam, and lack of replication would be due to an unsuccessful generalization from what they found.
  - scns 2y ago
    Dislike being a pedant but the stack was missing math up front
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      Haha, math strikes me as a bit different from the others... but I'll add it just for you ;)
      - gopher_space 2y ago
        Dislike being a pedant but the stack is missing philosophy up front.
    - 2y ago

tptacek 2y ago

Outright research fraud is probably very rare; the cases we've heard about stick out, but people outside of academia usually don't have a good intuition for just how vast the annual output of the sciences are. Remember the famous PhD comic, showing how your thesis is going to be an infinitesimal fraction of the work of your field.

dekhn 2y ago
Is incompetence fraud? Or just incompetence? I'm asking because a fair number of the molecular biologists who get caught by Elizabeth Bik for copy/pasting images of gels insist they just made honest mistakes (with some commentary about the atrocious nature of record-keeping in modern biology). I alter Ionnides's conclusion to be instead: "Roughly 50% of papers in quantitative biological sciences contain at least one error serious enough to invalidate the conclusion" and "Roughly 75% of really interesting papers are missing at least one load-bearing method detail that reproducers must figure out on their own" (my own personal observations of the literature are consistent with these rates; I was always flabbergasted at people who just took Figure 3 as correct).
- kelipso 2y ago
  There is no one hovering over scientists all the time ready to stick a hot poker in them when they make a mistake or get careless. I was in academia and my impression is there is a reluctance to double and triple check results to make sure they are right as long as the results match your instincts, whether it's time pressure, laziness, bias, or just being human.
  - dekhn 2y ago
    At least in my own mental model of publishing a paper (I've published only a few), I'd want my coauthors to stick hot pokers in my if I made a mistake or got careless. But then, my entire thesis was driven by a reproducible Makefile that downloaded the latest results from a supercomputer, re-ran the whole analysis, and wrote the latex necessary (at least partly to avoid making trivial mistakes). It was clear everything I was doing was just getting in the way of publishing high prestige papers.
    - robwwilliams 2y ago
      All too easy to understand your situation. NIH is finally but slowly waking up and is imposing more “onerous” (aka: essential and correct) data management and sharing (DMS) document. Every grant applicant now submits following these guidelines: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-24-175.html https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-24-1... Unfortunately, not all NIH institutes understand how to evaluate and moderate this key new policy. Oddly enough the peer reviewers do NOT have access to DMS plans as of this year.
      - IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
        Is this a process whereby the researcher is forced to submit the thesis (null, etc) of the research, ahead of the study and its findings?
        robwwilliams 2y ago
        I think you are referring to clinical trial registration. Different idea and process (a QA-like step). The NIH DMS mandates are about the data generated by an award.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  > I'm asking because a fair number of the molecular biologists who get caught by Elizabeth Bik for copy/pasting images of gels insist they just made honest mistakes You're talking about (almost certainly) fraudsters denying they committed fraud. The vast majority of non-replicable results have nothing to do with these types of errors, purposeful or not.
- kelnos 2y ago
  > Is incompetence fraud? Or just incompetence? Fraud requires intent; it's a word that describes what happened, but also the motivations of the people involved. Incompetence doesn't assume any intent at all; it's merely a description of the (lack of) ability of the people involved. Incompetent people can certainly commit fraud (perhaps to try to cover up their incompetence), but that's by no means required. > ...insist they just made honest mistakes If they're lying about that, it's fraud; they're either covering up their unrealized incompetence with fraud, or trying to cover up their intended fraud with protestations of mere incompetence. If they really did make honest mistakes, then it's just garden-variety incompetence. (Or just... mistakes. To me, incompetence is when someone consistently makes mistakes often. One-time or few-time mistakes are just things that happen to people, no matter how good the are at what they do.)
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    The legal phrase I like is "knew or should have known". If there is a situation where you should have known something was wrong, it's as bad as if you really knew it was wrong. To hold otherwise incentivizes willful blindness and plausible deniability.
    - dllthomas 2y ago
      I don't think the fact that the law (rightly, I will grant) unified two things when determining whether to punish means that we should always unify those things in our reasoning in other contexts.
  - dataviz 2y ago
    People often use incompetence as an excuse for what were actually intentional bad decisions. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Maybe someone was incompetent but also knew they were cutting corners. Should they get a pass because they claim they didn't mean to do it? We should hold people accountable regardless of intent.
    - veunes 2y ago
kelipso 2y ago
Research fraud is likely very rare but it's not about a few stories that show up about unreplicable studies that stick out. There was a study a few years where they tried to replicate a bunch of top cited psychology papers and the majority of the experiments were not replicated. Then people did the same for other disciplines afterwards and, while it wasn't as bad as psychology, there were plenty of papers they couldn't replicate.
- tptacek 2y ago
  Every time this topic comes up I'm reminded of what Stefan Savage, a hero of mine, said about academic papers ("studies", in the sense we're discussing here): they are the beginnings of conversations, not the end. It shouldn't shock people that results in papers might not replicate; papers aren't infallible, which makes sense when you consider the process that produces them.
  - robwwilliams 2y ago
    That is a generous interpretation. But in many cases we try our best to dress up studies and tell good stories—-preferably stories with compelling positive statistics and with slick figures. The story telling often obscures the key data.
    - mrguyorama 2y ago
      No, "Science" "Journalists" who have zero scientific training will take an extremely limited study and completely miss the point and make wild claims that the general population becomes convinced the "science" said. Scientists do not consider a study to be more than an observation. What matters to scientists is the totality of the evidence. There are several chemistry youtubers who have failed to "reproduce" papers they are working from. Does that mean chemistry is a farce and doesn't work? No, it means some chemist at some point in history failed to write something down, mostly because they didn't even know or realize it mattered. Science is incredibly difficult and we can only hope to be okay at it.
      - 2y ago
jklinger410 2y ago
> Outright research fraud is probably very rare Not sure what rare means in this context. The more important research is, the more likely there is fraud involved. So in terms of size of impact, it's probably very common. And then if you combine this with poorly done, non repeatable, or inconclusive research being parroted as a discovery...You end up with quite a bit of BS research.

giantg2 2y ago

[Please consider the following with an open mind] Just because a study doesn't replicate, doesn't make it false. This is especially true in medicine where the potential global subjects/population are very diverse. You can do a small study that suggests further research based on a small sample size, or even a case study. The next study might have a conflicting finding, but that doesn't make the first one false - rather a step in the overall process of gaining new information.

llamaimperative 2y ago
I think it's much, much more powerful to think of "failure to replicate" as "failure to generalize." In lieu of actual fraud or a methodological mistake that wasn't represented/caught in peer review, it's still extremely difficult to control for all possible sources of variation. That's especially true as you go further "up the stack" from math -> physics -> chem -> bio -> psych -> social. It is absolutely possible to honestly conduct a very high quality experiment with a real finding, but fail to account for something like "on the way here, 80% of participants encountered a frustrating traffic jam." Their finding could be true for people who just encountered a traffic jam, and lack of replication would be due to an unsuccessful generalization from what they found.
- scns 2y ago
  Dislike being a pedant but the stack was missing math up front
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Haha, math strikes me as a bit different from the others... but I'll add it just for you ;)
    - gopher_space 2y ago
      Dislike being a pedant but the stack is missing philosophy up front.
  - 2y ago