Cracking down on research fraud

https://undark.org/2020/07/23/cracking-down-on-research-fraud

by apsec112 • 6 years ago

331 199 6 years ago

I think one of the big things that you can do is split up the data gathering and data analysis.

Kind of like we don’t trust the companies to audit themselves, instead we have an outside firm.

In this model, a researcher would create a hypothesis and collect the data. Their team would write the background and methods sections of the paper.

Then the entirety of raw data would be sent off to a third party for data analysis and they would write the results part of the paper.

The original team would then write the discussion part discussing the implications of the study.

All papers would be required to be made public.

The idea is that there would be specialized firms that do the analysis on the raw data for everyone. These would be carefully audited and certified by the government. They have no incentive to play statistical games. If they get caught cheating, then they have to pay for all the analysis on all the papers to be done again by a competitor and if any errors are found in a paper analysis it is automatically retracted. While the this re-analysis is going on, all papers would be quarantined with a note stating the paper is having its analysis redone. This incentivizes the analysis firm to be ethical, as well as incentivizes researchers to pick ethical analysis firms.

Separating data collection from data analysis would help align incentives better.

wjn04• 6 years ago

That's an interesting idea that could stop very specific types of fraud, certainly in the life sciences. But it's not feasible for all kinds of research, and in fact could hinder lots of research.

All papers would be required to be made public.

This is more universally feasible. Publicizing the data and analysis tools (scripts, software) falls into the same category, and would go a long way to help without the need for such strong separation.

OminousWeapons2• 6 years ago

You would just get people massaging or generating the data to fit a conclusion prior to sending it out for statistical analysis. If people want to cheat they can find a way. The only way to really do what you are getting at is to construct core labs or CROs to run all experiments on behalf of the investigators. This is not infeasible in many cases (and is already done in narrow ways) but it requires hiring staff scientists to run every experiment rather than grad students or post docs and costs / complexity will explode.

The real way to defend against a lot of fraud is to force people to submit actually detailed methods sections so experiments are legitimately reproducible (they largely aren't now). This would catch a lot more fraud quickly, although even this won't fully work as some experiments are simply too costly to reproduce for validation purposes (eg animal studies).

guerby• 6 years ago

This.

And also actually fund researchers who do reproducibility work. May be even fund specialized teams that do only reproducibility work.

woofie118• 6 years ago

Basic set of checks-and-balances:

* Preregistration and adoption of open science practices

* Public access to research results, methods, and data, with some exceptions (such as PII)

* Federally-funded universities can't use NDAs or non-disparage agreements

* Federally-funded universities must respond to records requests under terms similar to FOIA (note that FOIA has requestor pay costs)

* Federally-funded universities must adopt transparent governance

* Salary caps at federally-funded universities and affiliated organizations

* Conflict-of-interest laws with hard enforcement

* Federally-funded universities must publicly publish research misconduct and alleged research misconduct. The latter is tricky, since you don't want to smear the researcher without proof, but you also don't want to trust results.

This really needs reform.

seibelj• 6 years ago

Salary caps? So the best people go into the private sector where they can actually get paid?

wjn04• 6 years ago

Agree, I don't think salary caps have much to do with the poor alignment of incentives under discussion here.

woofie118• 6 years ago

Don't think $90k. Think $300k. There are plenty of top people glad to be academics for $150-$200k, and beyond that, you don't get an increase in quality. On the other hand, you avoid a lot of problems with misaligned incentives at the top.

wjn04• 6 years ago

* Public access to research results, methods, and data, with some exceptions (such as PII)

You mentioned PII, so I'm assuming some familiarity with the health field. I'm curious about your thoughts on the position that one should not be required to immediately publicize their data, because there needs to be an expectation that a researcher can translate the capital (both time and money) they expend to acquire quality data into academic and institutional capital (in the form of research output, i.e. papers). The fear being, there might be insufficient motivation to conduct large data collection-oriented studies due to another researcher beating the data collector to the punch in terms of publishing certain findings.

woofie118• 6 years ago

My opinion is that it'd be better to handle that from the other side: incentive structures. If I generate a useful data set, I should get the equivalent of citations/publication/career credits for any work from that dataset. Enabling science is just as important as new results.

But I don't care much, so long as it gets published within a sensible timeframe.

dodobirdlord3• 6 years ago

At the very least it seems like it would be fraud not to include the original collector of the data as a co-author on the analysis paper.

aspaceman• 6 years ago

Federally-funded universities can't use NDAs or non-disparage agreements

Many companies are only willing to enter into research agreements with a lab providing that lab is willing to sign an NDA. This would prevent companies like Google, NVIDIA, Apple, and Facebook from working with research labs. This is especially short-sighted since a student who is working at a federally funded university will have to publish their work.

Federally-funded universities must respond to records requests under terms similar to FOIA (note that FOIA has requestor pay costs)

This is already true. I have known many faculty whose emails were FOIA-able and as a result, they preferred in-person communication for sensitive topics.

woofie118• 6 years ago

Many companies are only willing to enter into research agreements with a lab providing that lab is willing to sign an NDA. This would prevent companies like Google, NVIDIA, Apple, and Facebook from working with research labs. This is especially short-sighted since a student who is working at a federally funded university will have to publish their work.

There are different types of NDAs. I'm more concerned about the ones which are used to silence whistleblowers than the types used to protect pre-release product information, PII, or partner trade secrets. That's not a difficult split to make. Tools include: (1) Time bounds on NDAs. (2) Domain bounds on NDAs. (3) Publishing the agreements themselves.

This goes for a broader set of abuses too -- not just research fraud, but also sexual abuse, gross negligence, corruption, etc. A lot of this stuff goes on at elite schools, and lots of people are bullied or bribed into signing their rights to talk about this stuff away.

This is already true. I have known many faculty whose emails were FOIA-able and as a result, they preferred in-person communication for sensitive topics.

This is not true in general, but it is on some specific government projects. Most normal grants (NSF, etc.), it's definitely not true on.

As a footnote, odds are if faculty weren't willing to conduct business by email, something improper was going on. That thought process is common in a corporate setting, but not in an academic setting.

Ericson23142• 6 years ago

let's add

* Portion of faculty which must be tenured.

Ericson23142• 6 years ago

The latter is tricky, since you don't want to smear the researcher without proof, but you also don't want to trust results.

IMO it's the build-up of univestaged allegations which makes them so damning. If we actually had justice the upper classes, small allegations were frequent, and investigations were de rigueur, we could actually have functioning "innocence until proven guilty" in the culture.

Relatedly, we should probably all have minor criminal records and it should be no big deal.

logicslave5• 6 years ago

The root of the problem is that we allow people with high esteemed credentials to run society. They jumped through a hoop.

"You got straight As at 14 - 18 years old and got into an ivy league school as a result? Here run this venture fund."

"You got a PhD in Economics with a good publication by P-hacking your secret data? Here take a run at the FED with power over the US Economy. Your Phd shows that you are the man for the job."

"You got a PhD in ML by making some incremental improvement on some already existing model and then doing massive hyper parameter tuning? Here, become director of research at this big corporation."

Research will never be fully productive in this system, there are too many people who have too much to gain from gaming the publication system.

Something1234• 6 years ago

Thanks for pointing out the problem with credentials.

Name a better indicator then for being competent.

ktaylora• 6 years ago

Industry kinda already has. Products launched. Teams managed. A candidate's publication record is a conversation starter during interviews, but I feel like years of experience at a company working on launching a successful project is a much more valuable currency.

SherlockeHolmes• 6 years ago

Allow me to offer some qualities other than competency that are necessary for responsible research.

1. Purpose. what is it that drives one?

2. Integrity. when does one compromise it?

3. Awareness. is one able to disengage when one's ego (fueled by credentials) is activated.

TrackerFF2• 6 years ago

For most, credentialism works fine in academia.

The problem is that you're incentivized to cheat, because it's either that or your career.

Academia suffers from incredible power asymmetry, and an obsession with prestige. It's shit culture that rots from the head and down.

Of course, the vast majority of research groups are not like that - but it seems to be a problem which has always been there, but just been swept under the rug.

Again, it's difficult to find informants. Groups are small, and most advisors have very few people under their wing. It is probably very easy to identify and black-ball whistleblowers. It gets more difficult, the more you're invested in your work/degree.

sjg007• 6 years ago

Publications really only look impressive to outsiders and gra d students.

wjn04• 6 years ago

Surely you mean the number of publications, or some other superficial metric (e.g. being the third "supervising" author on a paper with a dozen authors).

If I read a paper and have a great appreciation for the ideas, and have a sense that an author contributed significantly to the aspects I appreciate (either from explicit descriptions of the authors' contributions in the publication, or by speaking to them), why would that not be impressive to me?

rumanator4• 6 years ago

I beg to differ. Publications are impressive because they are, in the very least, an indicator of the volume of work that a research group does in a domain. Writing a paper requires time and effort and, more importantly, focused work. As anyone who works and ever worked on academia is able to tell you, finding time to do anything of value, whether is exploring a new idea or continue working on any of the ideas you might have floating around, is the biggest challenge.

killjoywashere• 6 years ago

I work with a group that got a pretty ground-breaking tech paper published in a top medical journal. They estimated it generated $100M in investment for the group. Over 2-3 years. I think the original investment for the work that produced the paper was about $1M. FWIW.

throwawayiionqz• 6 years ago

And the cherry-on-top: Once you are part of a research unit at big corporation, your annual bonus depends on your number of publications. Or why the pursuit of incremental but well marketed results never ends. Or why papers with 6+ authors among which only 1-2 substantially contributed is the new normal.

opportune4• 6 years ago

All three of those examples are missing a step of like 5-20 years in the middle. Nobody is running a venture fund as a 22 year old ivy grad (barring someone who's taking over for their family member, but in that case it has nothing to do with being an ivy grad), nobody is running the FED right out of a PhD, nobody is a director at a big corporation right out of a PhD.

Presumably once those people are in such high-power positions, they also have a track record of real accomplishments behind them; it's certainly possible they've lied and cheated their entire career but it's definitely less likely they'll make it that far that way.

bsder• 6 years ago

it's certainly possible they've lied and cheated their entire career but it's definitely less likely they'll make it that far that way.

The number of people who make "correct, active decisions" is vanishingly small.

It's less they've cheated than "Did you really make correct decisions or did your coin just come up heads 8 times in a row?" Other people may have been as smart or smarter, but if the coin flip went tails, they get politically hammered.

Success has a large part of "survivor bias" to it.

logicslave5• 6 years ago

Part of the point is that the gap in the middle often doesn't matter. I've hung around the Stanford crowd and as I enter my thirties I am awestruck by the opportunities they have regardless of what they have done since graduation. The credential is almost all that matters, as long as they dont mess up massively.

A common path is:

Graduate Stanford => Work at Mckinsey => Get hired into VC.

Graduate Stanford => Raise 15 Million dollar series A with your buddy => Doesn't matter what happens you will end up rich.

It's not a cynical opinion, I have seen it myself and I am doing very well for myself. I worked under an Economics PhD who was the number one in his class (top 5 phd program) and graduated top of his undergrad at UPenn. His incompetence relative to his credentials shattered my respect for the way that we allocate positions of power

aspenmayer• 6 years ago

That some aspects of the self-fulfilling nepotistic bureaucracies are meritocratic begs the question if those meritocratic elements only exist to justify the nepotism, and indirectly, the gatekeeping meritocracy.

anonthrowaway32• 6 years ago

Likely they will also fraud the 5-20 years in the middle. These corporations are also highly susceptible to fraud.

TuringNYC4• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_R._Orszag (NOTE: NOT suggesting he cheated, just noting that lots of people have fast-tracks pre-planned for them w/o the hassle of working their way up.)

Not quite running the FED, but look at the years, pretty close.

Orszag earned an A.B. summa cum laude in economics from Princeton University in 1991 after completing an 80-page long senior thesis titled "Congressional Oversight of the Federal Reserve: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives."[11] He then received a M.Sc. (1992) and a Ph.D. (1997) in economics from the London School of Economics.

He served as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy (1997–1998), and as Senior Economist and Senior Adviser on the Council of Economic Advisers (1995–1996) during the Clinton administration. Director of the OMB by 2008.

cosmodisk• 6 years ago

Can't agree more. And it's getting worse. In certain fields people are almost untouchable. Couldn't count anymore the number of discussions I had about doctors and how absolutely incompetent some of them are: the usual reaction is like 'No, you don't say! But the selection process ensures only the smartest get selected,so what are you on about?'. The second one is PhDs, and in general all sorts of professors almost elevated to god like level. You almost get a free pass to spread whatever shit you want if the credentials are right.

The corporate world is exactly the same. Since my last promotion,I now have a nice title. People now listen to what I have to say. They even take me seriously. I can now go to some guy who's got 20 times more experience and start selling my consulting services(I'm not a consultant).

logicchains• 6 years ago

Couldn't count anymore the number of discussions I had about doctors and how absolutely incompetent some of them are: the usual reaction is like 'No, you don't say! But the selection process ensures only the smartest get selected,so what are you on about?'. The second one is PhDs, and in general all sorts of professors almost elevated to god like level. You almost get a free pass to spread whatever shit you want if the credentials are right.

It's like the old joke: what do you call the worst-performing graduate from medical school (or a PhD program), the one who was at the bottom of their class? You call them "Doctor"!

alexashka2• 6 years ago

I'll trade my credential for a few million any day of the week.

Never have any takers, I wonder why.

weehoo• 6 years ago

Credentials are non transferable and non-voidable unless you are later discovered having cheated. I don’t get what point you’re trying to make here.

CannoloBlahnik• 6 years ago

This is absolutely not the reality of a PhD. On what planet do people with those backgrounds get those positions out of their PhDs? What's the basis for this entire comment?

logicslave5• 6 years ago

The basis is spending 15 years in NYC high finance and having multiple close groups of friends who graduated from Stanford, work in tech, raised VC, etc

analog31• 6 years ago

You forgot a step:

"Your parents are rich, so you have a chance."

viburnum2• 6 years ago

A friend of mine was doing a chemistry phd when he discovered his supervisor was falsifying data. If he had blown the whistle it would have ended his career, but if he had played along his dissertation would have been based on false data. Both options were bad so he just quit.

https://www.statnews.com/2016/11/25/postdocs-grad-students-f...

kovac• 6 years ago

That's some guts to do the right thing. Respect.

ramraj07• 6 years ago

I was not faced with such a shitty situation, and I probably would have done the same as well, but the right thing would have been to report it.

moralestapia6• 6 years ago

Huh? But he didn't ... he just fled.

When I started my PhD I became tangled in a similar situation. I denounced it and it got me kicked out of that program. I had to start over, but I would do it again if the situation called for it. No amount of money or "awards" compensate for having a dishonorable life.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"

oerjgoejq• 6 years ago

I was doing a robotics engineering PhD at a highly ranked university a few years ago. I contacted the dean of engineering and the office of legal affairs and informed them that my advisor had submitted falsified data to journals, falsified financial statements to his sponsors and the university, performed experiments risking serious bodily harm on human test subjects without IRB approval, committed wage theft against multiple students, and slandered several of his research assistants to keep them from getting funding and work outside of his control. They swept it under the rug and gave him tenure. This was one of the universities that was in the news for faculty members and administrators accepting bribes from celebrities a year or two ago. They added another billion to their endowment and I left with my MS.

cblconfederate2• 6 years ago

Equalize the field, radically remove research hierarchies. Liberate research funding from pointless bureaucracies and 4-year grants and instead pay scientists to work on whatever they like most. Let science be fun again

I always return to this article from David Hubel (of Hubel&Wiesel): https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(09)00733-8

I arrived at his lab around noon and found him working alone, recording from an anesthetized macaque monkey. I asked him when he had started the experiment, and he answered “in the morning”, which I finally realized was the morning of the day before. So he had worked, by himself, all the day before, all that night, and that day until noon. What was typical, in that era, was not only the long hours but the fact that the project was done by one person, single handedly. The major papers were either by Mountcastle alone or in partnership with one other person. The leader of the physiology department was Philip Bard, but the idea that Bard should have asked to have his name on any of Vernon's papers surely never occurred to anyone.

rumanator4• 6 years ago

Liberate research funding from pointless bureaucracies and 4-year grants and instead pay scientists to work on whatever they like most.

Bureaucracy exists to ensure that funds are indeed spent on research instead of jet skis and shiny toys, and hierarchies are established to focus work on specialized topics pertaining to the state of the art of a field of research.

All your suggestions do is ensure that less funds are spent on research, and the few work that is performed cannot be any form of deep dive or continuous effort on a topic, thus resulting only in low-hanging fruits.

And by the way, the minute a researcher complains he needs help with his research is the moment you get a hierarchy.

cblconfederate2• 6 years ago

bureaucracy cannot guarantee the quality of research beyond the jet ski bar

hierarchies are established to ensure that the PI gets citations from the work of postdocs and postgrads

typical grants encourage shallow trend-chasing or incremental continuation of the research of - often disinterested - senior PIs who simply get grants because they have gotten a lot of grants.

The chase of the state of the art is just another incremental step - that 's shallow

a research partner is not necessarily a subordinate

wombatpm• 6 years ago

Bureaucracy exists to ensure the university gets their cut. When I was there the university took 40% off the top for overhead.

DanielleMolloy• 6 years ago

I've read that before 2003, the whole of humanity has published as many scientific papers as from 2003 to 2016.

So what happened around 2000? Who has turned the scientific mission into a blind competition for superficial metrics? So many people in science I meet (apart from the few who benefited from this system, and therefore were selected by it) are frustrated by publishing for the sake of publishing (not science) and the bad incentives this system creates.

Who has thought that these superficial metrics would improve anything about science and why?

sgillen• 6 years ago

I think it’s mostly a numbers game, more PhDs, roughly the same number of research position. This means most scientists don’t know most other scientists in their field, and so the metrics people use to select become more important. That and the increased competition, means a bigger rat race, more pressure to publish, etc.

lrnStats2• 6 years ago

My guess is the education bubble. Loans are subsidized, universities have bigger budgets and want more studies done.

nitrogen• 6 years ago

With any exponential growth curve, you can point to some semi-recent point on the curve and say 50% is on the right side of that point. If the population is growing exponentially (it is), and the percentage of the population in academia is consistent or growing (that I'm not sure), then you could reasonably expect the quantity of research to be growing exponentially as well. Maybe it's just a curve with a doubling period of 13 years.

amcoastal• 6 years ago

I imagine the internet has done a lot to increase the speed of research, communication, and writing. I imagine it also speeds up peer review and has expanded the amount of available places to publish your work. I agree though, it would be nice to spend more time sciencing and less time writing about it.

fock• 6 years ago

0) the internet has made citing (and the expectations on knowing everything) so much easier. 1) China entered the game en force 2) everyone else has to step up 3) companies entered the market 4) in some areas, an arxiv (which is good) full of errors/hand-waving gets some 100 citations. Peer-reviewed work not.

BaronSamedi• 6 years ago

Academia is not unique in this regard. Superficial metrics have been introduced into many fields with similar results. Warnings about the danger of metrics have been ignored.

Campbell's law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." (1979)

tlb• 6 years ago

Estimating from my own reading, 1% of research is fraud and 80% is worthless for other reasons. Numbers vary between fields.

If that's the case, what's the argument for why we should spend time doing something about the 1%? Solving 100% of the 1% wouldn't change the overall situation much.

Possible arguments include:

- Fixing the 80% is hard, but fixing the 1% is satisfying (to the aggressively conventional-minded, at least.)

- The 1% is wrong in a more harmful way than the 80%. Perhaps falsifying data is worse than hand-waving conclusions.

So if the maximum upside is 1% of wrong research removed, and the downside is quenching some fraction of the good 19%, it's probably better to leave it alone.

ameliaquining• 6 years ago

The author is arguing for an expansive definition of fraud that includes things like p-hacking. Probably a lot more than 1% of research is p-hacked; that general category of problem might even account for a majority of your 80%.

opportune4• 6 years ago

I'm guessing throwing out "bad data" happens in a lot more than 1% of cases as well.

ketzo• 6 years ago

I think the disproportionate harm argument is a big deal. A single high-profile case of fraud undermines trust in the entire field, and that’s critical to maintain.

galimaufry• 6 years ago

I don't think that's true. There have been frauds in materials science, but people still trust it. The fields that are untrusted are the ones that are so hard that it's plausible that the conventional wisdom might be wrong even if everyone is honest.

sillysaurusx• 6 years ago

It's hard to know that a worthless research paper will always be worthless.

TuringNYC4• 6 years ago

Also, who decides what is worthless?

moralestapia6• 6 years ago

1% of research is fraud

You are way, waaaaaay underestimating the extent of the problem.

exmadscientist2• 6 years ago

I think you didn't understand the grandparent poster's point. They're arguing, basically, that only 1% of research is deliberate fraud, but 80% is simply useless garbage. The reasons for the garbage are varied, but any way you slice it, it's worthless. So why worry so much about the maliciously useless when there's so much incompetent uselessness?

That matches my experience back when I was an active researcher. Intentional fraud is rare (and highly damaging). Garbage research and garbage papers are everywhere. And even most of the non-garbage research is useless! The core differentiator there is that we just don't know which things will be useful without hindsight. But we can identify plenty of things that were not helpful to anyone and we knew it... yet we still funded those programs.

I think we're mostly in agreement that the size of the problem is vast, even if we might disagree on labelling.

jcahill• 6 years ago

Certain groups have been serious the replication crisis for 10-15y, but academic culture at large is simply not cut out to discuss fraud in a 'street epistemology' sort of way, such as the way security researchers might discuss cybercrime.

There's a wild amount of pushback to any amount of meta-criticism. But once you get past that point, many roadblocks remain.

In particular, there's extreme bias for meta-statistical methodologies that infer QRPs over other methods of investigation. Often, these methods aren't strictly necessary in context, and afford the opportunity to turn the metasci discourse into endless bikeshedding about the meta-framework rather than the object of dispute.

Many interested parties will participate/perform in this discourse, but few will sit down and really look at things as simple as the logical structure of the paper's claims, or even simpler problems with its content.

In the case of social psych, for instance, many problems lie with (a) stimuli and (b) unexamined assumptions on the part of the researchers that a certain manipulation holds, so these are important to assess. But extending critique to these things is seen as "reviewer 2" behavior — uncollegial, unfair, sniping, waaah etc.

Since "researcher x produces bad research, but evidence of fraud is only circumstantial" isn't sufficient grounds for doing much of anything, little comes of these efforts. When an investigation does nail a fraudster to the wall, well, so? The papers remain, the poisoned citation tree remains, the culture remains.

More than anything, the pushback in the form of tone-policing is what gets me. "Methodological terrorism" this, "reviewer 2" that. It shows how far from consequences the gatekeepers are. If you're a young person, whole branches of the academy have been pre-bankrupted for you. There's no hope there, short of a research path that manages to avoid citing any prior literature. But don't get tetchy with the grantlords!

Meanwhile, all around the US, real effects of this dogshit excuse for scientific inquiry can be seen every single day. Police departments are adopting new policies around known-bad implicit bias papers. These won't work. We know they won't work. We've known this for years.

What would make it stop? Every time cops kill an unarmed person, academics who still haven't retracted their implicit bias papers get fined?

There's the rub. You can't do much to force the point. Effective, timely measures would be fairly brutal ones, and academics aren't ready to admit this to themselves. In some ways, COVID-19 may end up being one of those measures, though it will disproportionately affect younger researchers.

OminousWeapons2• 6 years ago

I'd argue that a lot of what the authors describe isn't actually "fraud", it's more exploitation of an intentionally broken system.

I've definitely had authors on my papers who didn't do work. I've definitely written papers for people who didn't do work. I've definitely done peer reviews on behalf of PIs. Why do people do this? Because the regulators allow it and they want the system that way. Why should who wrote the paper have any impact on review? Why should it matter who the journal editors are? Why should it matter where the paper is from? Etc...

MattGaiser• 6 years ago

Because we use heuristics instead of actual analysis.

How many people citing a paper or reading it actually have time to think that deeply about it?

The alternative to a world of trust and heuristics is a world where we are all bogged down trying to make decisions.

This is heavily demonstrated in recruiting. Resume reading is about 7 seconds a person. How long would it take if they spent a minute for each?

lettergram2• 6 years ago

I think there is outright fraud and subtle fraud.

For instance, most mouse studies specifically as it relates to aging, drug safety, and cancer research should be thrown out. This is well covered here:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCzZp1J0v0

That’s not the only issue, but it’s a known issue, everyone is ignoring as it relates to all studies with the most common mice

Gatsky6• 6 years ago

This Weinstein mouse model thing is blown completely out of proportion, and is only so prominent because his own brother Eric put it on The Portal.

The point is that everyone knows mouse models are imperfect, but they are still useful. Pointing out one of the ways they are imperfect is fine. Pretending this is a nobel prize winning earth shattering discovery that is suppressed by the establishment is just annoying. Research about how mouse models are imperfect comes out all the time, eg there was a paper about how the relatively sterile lab environment changes the murine microbiome and immune system. Why aren't these researchers on Joe Rogan's podcast?

aaron6953• 6 years ago

He specifically mentions comments like yours are not helpful. This is the researcher fraud that is the problem in science that we are talking about, issues at hand are ignored or twisted so the paper mill can continue.

The concept is all mice in the USA come from one laboratory and have a common attribute that's different from wild mice and European suppliers.

And it's spelt out how in theory this different attribute could change medical results.

To come back with we don't care, without proof it's not a issue, is a deeply broken system, but is exactly how current universities work.

Here's the actual segment (18 mins) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve4q-1D_Ajo

Related (12 mins) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ygLNOt43So

lettergram2• 6 years ago

I generally agree people understand mouse models are imperfect.

The issue here, is that you have to understand how they are imperfect if they have any value at all. In this case, doing drug research on a mouse model is fine. Unless the goal of that study is to see damage to organs or dna. Unfortunately, that’s what was not being controlled for or understood. Effectively, the DNA has more protection from damage in the lab micr used for models than normal mice or humans.

This implies most of our drug evaluations look better on paper than reality. Huge deal if true And there’s evidence (long term) to support this.

The reason it’s on the portal and Joe Rogan is no one in the scientific community is evaluating it (on the surface). What’s more baffling is working in and around this space, I can see the effects first hand (which I won’t dive into, for the same reason no one is saying anything about this in the scientific community).

jpeloquin• 6 years ago

The link provided is a three hour video and the speakers are pretty vague about what exactly they're talking about. By 2:20 one of the them is claiming that "we're staring at many scenarios that end in some kind of civil war", which seems extreme if the video really is about mouse studies. Is there really any useful scientific content in there? If so, a timestamp would be appreciated.

Moving on to other sources, are you referring to lab mice having extra long telomeres and thus unusually high capacity for cellular renewal, as in [1]?

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11909679/

ZephyrBlu• 6 years ago

They go over multiple topics. Check the top comment for timestamps.

If you want to hear the full story I suggest listening to this podcast episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s.

It's long, but I found it very interesting.

IceCreamJonsey• 6 years ago

Coincidence for me to see this here, as a book by Dr. Stuart Ritchie was just published about this very thing.

https://www.amazon.com/Science-Fictions-Negligence-Undermine...

lrnStats2• 6 years ago

Similar to research fraud, I want the medical field examined for anti-science fraud.

I caught my Physician recommending an expensive and dangerous surgery that could be done by a dentist or surgeon. I asked if there was data, she said yes. There was no data. And the trend was using lasers rather than surgery since it's safer. I confronted her and she said-

"If you ask a physician, they will recommend a physician. If you ask a dentist, they will recommend a dentist."

This physician used factionalism rather than science.

I imagine this has happened on a massive scale.

Gatsky6• 6 years ago

Research fraud gets a lot of attention because it is so black and white. But it is a symptom of larger problems. One issue is that the pace of progress is slowing, and as a result incremental gains are more prominent. This is fertile ground for fraudsters, as they can produce results which are plausible enough while seeming to be an important contribution to the field. All fraud fits into this category. Nobody makes a new grand unified theory of everything which they know is bogus. That would be too much work for a start.

The other issue is the huge expansion in university size. Most of the fraud I've seen or heard about all happens in university research departments. This shows you the importance of their incentive structure. One can make things up and not only succeed, but do better than your competitors in this research setting, AND get a tenured position with life-long security. All competitive fields where achievement recieves external and highly persistent rewards suffer from this problem, whether it be sport and performance enhancing drugs or Ivy league univesrity admissions or even venture captial funding (Theranos).

The natural response is to ask for more regulation and structural change in how research is conducted eg pre-registration, different statistical standards etc. But this has the major disadvantage of making life harder for the honest people. It also requires the creation of some parallel work force to handle all the checking. Research is already so difficult. Paradoxical effects, where such measures increase fraud, are definitely possible.

There will never be zero fraud. The aim should be to change how research is done to make the experience more humane, train and mentor young scientists carefully and avoid perverse incentives. As far as I can tell, nobody has any idea how to do this. Instead they want to create investigatory bodies which will siphon off money that could be used for research, and then ruin lives pursuing some key performance indicator like N successful fraud cases per quarter. This experiment was already run in the USA with the Office of Research Integrity, and it failed. Malcolm Gladwell, who I am not a fan of in general, has a good podcast about it [1].

[1] http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/28-the-imaginary-crim...

DrNuke• 6 years ago

Bluntly put, peer review is an overwhelming, unpaid, unsatisfying, time-expensive task. The only step forward is to force the release of both data and implementation, at least for the highest ranked journals, this possibly opening more unpredictable cans of worms. It is the elitist academy model on one side, not working any more, against the democratisation of research, still and just a torrential flow of noise.

gwerbret3• 6 years ago

These issues of research fraud come up often, but the root of the problem is a bit more subtle.

In North America at least, biomedical research labs operate largely as fiefdoms of the individual principal investigators (PIs). The actual research work falls almost entirely on the backs of grad students and postdoctoral fellows. The grad students need to generate "good" data in order to graduate, the postdocs need the same in order to gain real employment (with only about 10% gaining faculty positions themselves after many years of postdoctoral training). The PIs need such "productivity" from their trainees in order to gain the funding that keeps the labs going. The PIs themselves face success rates in grant applications that are often 10% or lower and, particularly early in their careers, their job security depends almost entirely on their ability to secure grant funding.

These competitive pressures create enormous incentives for otherwise conscientious people, all the way along the hierarchy described above, to fudge their research data. Research fraud is thus a direct outcome of a fundamentally-broken approach to the structure of research funding.

There are exceptions to that approach, however. The not-for-profit Howard Hughes Research Institute [1], and to an extent the intramural research programs of the NIH [2], offer funding for PIs to do what they do best, without the pressure of competing for scant funds. Coincidentally, some of the best science comes out of these sites.

1: https://www.hhmi.org/scientists 2: https://irp.nih.gov/about-us/what-is-the-irp

martincmartin• 6 years ago

What do you suggest as an alternative?

cscurmudgeon• 6 years ago

Research publication, funding, and jobs should not be tied to outcomes of research.

They should be tied to how systematic, logical, and well-documented the research is. We need a system wide change from funding bodies, job committees to publishing criteria.

gwerbret3• 6 years ago

1) I think the idea of funding "people, not projects" (the Howard Hughes Research Institute's byline; I'm not affiliated with them in any way) is a great one. It would probably involve changing the structure of research programs in other fundamental ways, such as by

2) Limiting the number of graduate students. The current relatively-low barrier of entry into grad school provides cheap, motivated labor for PIs who are trying to stretch their research dollars to the limit. The outcome today is far more PhD graduates than jobs, and for those who get jobs, far too many of them for the research funds that are available. The overall quality of research drops when PIs focus what is fundable, rather than what is important.

3) Shifting the burden of the bulk of research work from trainees to salaried research associates/assistants/lab techs.

4) Change the focus of research output from novelty and volume (of papers published) to quality and significance of work done. Good research is often slow and careful, and doesn't fit well with the demands of grant funding agencies.

Fewer grad students means more resources available for their training, and better career prospects. Shifting the bulk of the research benchwork to salaried professionals removes the incentive to commit fraud. None of this has to come at the expense of research quality; as an example, the NIH/HHMI already have approaches to vetting research programs for quality, even if the PIs aren't competing for grant funding.

adminprof4• 6 years ago

This entire thread is really frustrating for me to read. A lot of these ideas are one-liners from people who have had very little experience with different parts of academia, except maybe being a student. Every single idea here are debated to death by academics already (not just university academics, but funding agencies, academic societies, award panels, journal editors and conference organizers), with changes happening all the time.

If it was this simple that a random person here could come up with how to "solve" academia, we'd have already done it decades ago. The ideas also lack nuance and when you get into the definitions of things (for example, p-hacking), then things become a lot more grey; are you allowed to look at a dataset that you spent 2 years collecting if your first hypothesis does not pan out? The clear cut cases are obvious to everyone, it's the grey area that takes 99% of the time to figure out.

Imagine reading a thread where everyone is proposing "solutions" to software development. It'd go something like "software development is a cesspool and 80% of it fails (see voting systems, MySpace, electronic health records, Theranos. Here's what software companies need to do:" [yes I'm being intentionally stupid to demonstrate how annoying this is]

1) stop releasing before the bugs are fixed. Software and games are rushed out. Companies need to take their time to fix the bugs so the users don't have to encounter them.

2) no more technical debt. Programmers are sloppy and introduce technical debt because they are not incentivized to do high quality programs. [yes, see how triggering that is]

3) cap team sizes. Everyone knows that large teams fail more spectacularly. Gmail and Napster and the original version of Google were made by a group of 4 people. Software teams need to be 4-5 people max.

4) programmers must use a transparency scorecard. Software companies like Oracle and IBM charge ridiculous amounts for their work. They hide costs and cut corners. Programmers should be transparent about the work they are doing each day, what data they access, and which functions they are writing.

These changes need to happen. derp derp

dasudasu4• 6 years ago

The topic of funding is a recurrent one in these types of discussions. There are always more people wanting to do science than what is available in funding. There needs to be a process to allocate resources that takes into account competency for the job. Just granting it at random or equally is probably very very far from optimal if it means that an exceptional PI cannot even do the things to push his/her research to the next level. Research funding is a bit like a command economy in that there are no market forces that can be drawn upon to just sort it naturally, so of course it ends up being especially thorny.

asciimov• 6 years ago

There are always more people wanting to do science than what is available in funding.

So why not just fund them?

Any process you could create or that currently exists just ends up being gamed by people who understand how to get funding.

jasonhong• 6 years ago

To followup, I believe there's a subtle problem with funding in general, which is that increasing the funding available means that more research positions will be created, which means that eventually grant proposals go back to the same dismal funding rates they were before.

wisty• 6 years ago

Just granting it at random or equally is probably very very far from optimal if it means that an exceptional PI cannot even do the things to push his/her research to the next level.

What does "far from optimal" mean? Let's pretend the allocators are not god-like decision makers (if they are, let's fire all the scientists because our god-like decision makers can do the research for them).

Let's just accept that if we have a large bunch of diverse potential researchers, and limited funding, the best way to get a breakthrough is by funding a random sample of these researchers.

Maybe this sample should be stratified, but it should not be stratified in such a way that it incentives chasing grants (effectively making the grant-allocators the real PIs - with all their flaws and biases systematically driving the process, but without any accountability or management effort on their behalf).

We can't get optimal without unlimited wisdom, and if we had unlimited wisdom we wouldn't need scientists.

voxl2• 6 years ago

I think there should be two pools of money, one that is granted at random to anyone who has obtained a professorship at a university, let that be the first filter for competency. The second pool of money can be given to projects that have immediate social interest and impact, and the government can, in this case, be very selective as there should be some social weight to succeeding here.

The first pool is for idea generation, failure is an option. The second pool is to direct invention for social benefit.

Beldin• 6 years ago

There needs to be a process to allocate resources that takes into account competency for the job.

Counterpoint: the current system doesn't do this. It optimises for competency to attract funding. This occasionally overlaps wroth competency to perform good research, or competency to perform research well, or competency to oversee, nurture and guide research in others. But that is far from given.

Gatsky6• 6 years ago

I have to disagree with this 'good people gone bad' analysis. None of the research fraud I have witnessed fits this model.

caterama• 6 years ago

Could you give more details on other causes of research fraud you've seen?

canjobear• 6 years ago

Another variant of the incentive problem is more insidious. Many academics are driven by ego, and specifically a desire to be influential. One way to be influential is to have great, original, and correct ideas. This can be a good incentive, but coupled with our human ability to deceive ourselves, it can become pathological. I’ve seen researchers get convinced that their ideas are so beautiful and right-feeling that they just can’t be wrong, and they will torture the data and run experiment after experiment it appears to work. Sometimes this crosses into outright fraud without the researcher even realizing it——after all, the theory is right, so if the data don’t match it they must be wrong!

This problem seems much harder to fix than research funding, because the question is how to allocate prestige and influence, not just money.

prionassembly2• 6 years ago

I’ve seen researchers get convinced

Where have you seen them?

moralestapia6• 6 years ago

labs operate largely as fiefdoms of the individual principal investigators

To add to the injury, you wouldn't believe the extent of the actions to which some PIs become engaged in order to attain/preserve their 'power'. Illegal, unethical and pathetic.

The core problem is that PIs are human, and humans are flawed. The solution (if there is one) should take this into account, and somehow try to reduce it systematically, at an institutional level. The problem is that the ones that make the rules are not going to fight against themselves ... I wish I had something more to add, but that's it, that's the state of the field.

rscho• 6 years ago

The core problem is that PIs are human

Actually, the problematic behaviours you describe are encouraged at the institutional level, because institutions also get more funding if they output more/better research. The fact that postdocs don't want to commit scientific suicide for the sake of morals in that context should surprise no one.

The ground truth is that scientific research has been turned into a poorly regulated industry, and we are all poorer for it.

There's a very simple solution to alleviate this pain: be much more selective starting at the undergrad level. But that generates less money, so baaaaad...

rapjr9• 6 years ago

This is also why you see announcements of new "breakthroughs" and then nothing further ever happens. The experience is so unpleasant for many people (often compared to slavery) that they leave when they get their degree and never work on that project again. The PI's also get bored and want to do something new to keep building their reputation (so onward to the next grad student or post doc). Patents are sometimes generated, but new ideas are very difficult to take to market successfully so those that can afford to buy or license them do so very carefully (unless they want the patent to attack some competitors product.) In general there is rarely any follow through on new ideas, unless you work on projects with DARPA funding where they insist on "technology transfer", and even then many ideas turn out to be unworkable because they require additional extensive engineering for the practical aspects.

etrautmann2• 6 years ago

HHMI does fund some of the most enormously successful work in biomedical science, but they start with the very best of the best. It's not clear how much of these labs success is the result of the precise funding structure, although it's obviously helpful to spend less time writing grants (or just have additional resources).

These labs are up for renewal from HHMI every 5 years, and as such, do face the same pressure to continue publishing high-impact work.

obmelvin2• 6 years ago

HHMI is crazy, it has definitely had a positive impact on my girlfriends PhD experience and allowed her to take on a 'post doc killer' project. It's taken her almost 3 years, but she's gotten great quality data, and just got a great review back from Nature Chem with proposed experiments as expected.

Also, the period can increase as time goes on. Her lab doesn't have to renew for 9 years I think (they renewed last summer), if not 7.

Just my 2c, it seems to me like these funding structures do have a positive impact on the research environment. That said, it's obviously a model that really requires them to select the best of the best labs as you mention, because one org (or even the gov) quite simply can't give blank checks to every lab.

raister• 6 years ago

with only about 10% gaining faculty positions themselves after many years of postdoctoral training

There are no (steady) places for everyone, sadly. That's the way things are, where they demand postdocs to be extra productive, promising a permanent position somewhere (or a letter of recommendation, whatever).

Currently, the postdoc 'experience' has multiple names: research associate, research fellow, research engineer like it is a 'career' to pursue, with minimal benefits, salary attached to research projects (so it could stop at the end), etc.

henriquemaia3• 6 years ago

I agree with the subtle point behind the fraud crisis: misaligned incentives.

However, that doesn't excuse the individuals doing it. "Because jobs" is a terrible ethical excuse.

Nevertheless, you have an interesting point there.

hhas01• 6 years ago

Rest assured it’s not just North America.

https://forbetterscience.com/2020/03/26/chloroquine-genius-d...

Balgair• 6 years ago

Aside: To give readers an idea of the financial pressures I have an example. One of my former professors told me that the lab spaces costs ~$45/sqft/mo from the university, 300sqft minimum. That's ~$160k/year just for the floor space in just the lab, not the office space either. Now, electrical, heat, vivarium, elevators, janitors, security, etc. are all rolled up into that. Bit that's not specific equipment costs, reagents, grad students, and the profssor's own salary. Granted, every university is different (just look at patent ownership clauses).

It's not cheap and you must win grants just to pay rent for your own apartment. Especially early on in your career, it's a real struggle.

owenshen24• 6 years ago

Interesting notes from the paper mentioned in the article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/174701611989840...

- "only 39 scientists from 7 countries have been subject to criminal sanctions between 1979 and 2015 (Oransky and Abritis, 2017)" That seems...very low.

- "The Retraction Watch database—the largest of its kind—currently includes more than 18,500 retracted articles (Retraction Watch database, 2019). A recent analysis of 10,500 retracted papers up to 2016 showed that 0.04% of papers are retracted." This is once again a lower-bound; presumably if you account for additional authors and p-hacking the numbers go up a lot.

Pushing for replication and improved methodology can help, but some of these issues seem to be related to scale. There are many more people outputting papers than there are people willing to vet them (outside of peer review). Furthermore, when you have many people researching hot fields, you should expect false positives and overestimates to dominate published results, even when everyone is trying to practice good statistical hygiene. (https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...)

jostmey• 6 years ago

I’ve seen lots of “questionable” research, so much, that I rarely read papers published by other researchers because chances are the data is junk, and I’m in academic biomedical research!!

BurningFrog2• 6 years ago

Starting to think it's time to close down the university system and start a new one...

pas• 6 years ago

Sure, but how would you organize the new one?

BurningFrog2• 6 years ago

I'd just hope new alternatives would emerge as the old system gets out of the way.

Then we'll see what develops.

Not a selling argument, I know :)

DoreenMichele• 6 years ago

So, some years ago, Temple Grandin wrote a set of standards and McDonald's adopted it and they buy so much beef that it became the de facto new standard for the beef industry. And it's a set of standards that helps beef producers succeed rather than a "gotcha" trying to find who is guilty.

And that's the way you make the world a better place. Not by looking for new and creative ways to nail "bad guys" to the wall after you started from an assumption of guilt.

I don't like this article. I don't like it at all. My feeling is that it was written as an emotional response to the pandemic and it is getting traction on HN for the exact same reason.

People are stressed out and they are looking for a villain to go after. It won't fix the real problem -- the pandemic -- but that's how people tend to behave in a crisis.

And it's a slippery slope towards a more draconian world. It doesn't make things better.

_Microft2• 6 years ago

The McDonald's story reminds me of the Brussels effect [0] where legislation in the EU is extending (not by law but in its effect) to other parts of the world because it is easier or cheaper to comply with it for all customers than to treat EU costumers and others differently.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect

haihaibye• 6 years ago

So that's why I have to accept cookies all the time.

hlfy_hn• 6 years ago

Makes me think of Hans Lehrach. Dunno why

https://www.molgen.mpg.de/hans-lehrach

brownbat• 6 years ago

You can't really improve this until the lead author doesn't have a final say on how to treat outliers.

In any given study, there are going to be hundreds of special cases in the data that you didn't anticipate, and you have to decide whether to include or exclude them.

Any researcher will subconsciously be more sympathetic to arguments to exclude subjects that go against the principal theory, and less so to subjects that confirm it.

And it's a battle of reasonable arguments, most of the cases aren't bright line fraud or misconduct, they're just humans finding some arguments more compelling and the impossibility of escaping our own biases. (And yes, sometimes it's fraud, but fraud is just the tip of the iceberg if we're talking about genuinely improving the reliability of scientific findings.)

Prepublication is helpful, but more and more I'm convinced that the only way to do proper science would be to completely disaggregate study design from study execution.

AtOmXpLuS• 6 years ago

Everything in [AtOmXpLuS](https://www.atomxplus.com)

Cracking down on research fraud

Related Stories