Keeping an Eye on Wayward Studies (Science Friday podcast transcript)

[Glia]

Those who put faith and trust in "peer-reviewed studies" published in scientific journals should pay attention to this.

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https://www.sciencefriday.com/segmen...d-studies.html

Portside Date: July 13, 2014
Author: Ira Flatow/Ivan Oransky
Date of Source: Friday, July 11, 2014
Science Friday podcast (transcription by Portside)

[Flatow] Earlier this week a minor journal, the Journal of Vibration and Control, issued a retraction notice for 60 papers, that is six zero, 60 papers after an investigation showed that there was what has been called a peer review ring, fraudulently moving publications into print. Last week, the journal Nature retracted two papers that had gotten a lot of press. You may remember one involved a method to make ordinary skin cells into something approaching stem cells through the use of an acid bath. Those papers the journal said contained serious errors, some of which constituted misconduct. Nature said that its reviewers had taken parts of the papers on trust and could not have been expected to catch the errors. So what's what's going on? Is the publishing process so broken? Joining me now is Ivan Oransky. He wears many hats, but with us today he is wearing his hat as co-founder of the Retraction Watch Blog [1], which broke the peer review ring story.

Welcome back to program, Ivan.

[Oransky] Thanks, Ira. Always great to be here.

[Flatow] What is going on here?

[Oransky] Ah, well you know the vibration story . . . at the Vibration Control Journal, it's pretty interesting, there seems to be a lot of shakiness at this journal and maybe not too much control. I think that's kind of the headline. I think what all these stories speak to is just this tremendous pressure that scientists are under to get grants, to get tenure, to get promotions, to get prizes and all of it depends on papers, depends on publishing papers. And so, if everything you know and everything in your career depends on something, you're going to do whatever it takes to get there. Sometimes that just means, and most of the time, luckily, it just means working harder, working better, being smarter about things. Unfortunately in some cases as we've seen with these particular cases, and a number of others over the years, it means doing things that really aren't kosher, that are fraudulent, that are considered misconduct.

[Flatow] And doing it on purpose? ...

continues at https://portside.org/2014-07-14/keep...ayward-studies