Tumor Biology retracting 107 papers after authors faked peer review process | Hacker News Reader

Tumor Biology retracting 107 papers after authors faked peer review process

arstechnica.com

76 pointsMR4D15 comments

> “When a lot of the fake peer reviews first came up, one of the reasons the editors spotted them was that the reviewers responded on time,” Wager told Ars. Reviewers almost always have to be chased, so “this was the red flag. And in a few cases, both the reviews would pop up within a few minutes of each other.”

I have submitted late peer reviews before and felt really guilty about it. But with this new information I should be proud about my late reviews -- it helped make the fake reviews stand out!

Now it is interesting to see which paper were fraudulent. Sponsored by industry or not? Specific authors, for specific institutions? Particular kinds of research?

It's going to be all over the map. The moral hazards in the peer review system are numerous, from funding source, to product marketing motives, to building prestige, right on down to the most fundamental hazard of all: quid pro quo, to mention a few. And this isn't the only field where this kind of purge needs to take place.

The point of peer review isn't primarily about finding fraud, which is rare, but about finding errors in reasoning by the authors, lack of needed experimental controls, faulty statistical analysis and so on. The retracted papers aren't necessarily fraudulent in a malicious way, but by circumventing the peer review process as the authors did, it is hard to judge the merits of the papers -- they might be great papers or they might be crap.

Bypassing the review process and saying you did it is fraud.

Yes, but a fraudulent act of publishing, not that the experiments themselves were necessarily fraudulent. I was responding to someone who was thinking there had to be something the authors were covering up rather than the more likely case that they were just lazy and unethical.

So why risk a criminal record and/or the end of an otherwise prosperous career as a scientist if you have no motive?

If I was this lazy and unethical, I'd probably not do the experiments/study in the first place and just pocket the funding.

That would be far harder and riskier. You don't just get a blank cheque for money in academic science that you could pocket. You have a pool of virtual money that you can request purchases and pay people's salaries from. Both go through university accountants who check things for anything fishy.

>The point of peer review isn't primarily about finding fraud, which is rare.

Rare? Scientific misconduct is rampant. It seems like theres a new professor every day being caught out on retraction watch.

That's like thinking crime is rampant given that every time you look at a tabloid newspaper there's a story about some robbery or murder. You have to do the math and realize that even if every story is true they still are very rare occurrences given the number of people in the community (physical or scientific)

Good point, but scientific papers can have larger ramifications in social policy,funding allocation(billions of tax dollars), even daily public life (food guidelines).

It's also far more important for science to keep its hands clean because fair or not its public relations is important. In our high technological society, we cannot allow people to lose faith in the scientific process, It would be a global disaster.

Journals are already under fire for privatizing publicly-funded research. They justify their existence by claiming to hold the research they publish to the highest standard, primarily through the peer-review process.

That this journal has now repeatedly failed in the most basic standard of quality control leaves it with zero credibility, and it therefore should immediately be shut down.

> That this journal has now repeatedly failed in the most basic standard of quality control leaves it with zero credibility, and it therefore should immediately be shut down.

Whatever your thoughts on journals, I don't think that follows logically.

From time to time a quick visit to retractionwatch.com is a good way to understand how often Research papers have issues, from very minor ones up to something so big that it seems impossible that the article managed to be published at all.

It is really sad how diffused are let's say less-than-fully-ethical practices among scientists (even if of course the cheaters are a minority).

Shouldn't at least the authors and the sponsors be named? Have their names and info posted online? A blacklist of shady researchers and their associates would perhaps deter some of the fraud.

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