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Comment by manfredo | Hacker News Reader

I think you're missing the series of events. The authors never submitted any false data. They claimed that this was what their research found, and when the journal asked for the actual research data the authors claimed that they had written the finding on pen and paper and lost the only physical copy. The journal published the paper anyway, without ever even seeing the data.

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What you're saying now is that you think it's standard practice for peer reviewers to request the raw data for papers they're reviewing? The paper authors signed an actual contract affirming that they hadn't fabricated the data.

It's normal practice for publications to publish papers from authors who explicitly say that they don't even retain the data used to produce the paper? If that's the case what's even the point of peer review?

At this point it seems like you're saying that peer review doesn't actually involve any sort of review. Fortunately, though, other academics don't share your experience that peer review is incapable of identifying faulty research. Because if it did, then there'd be little to no reason to put trust in academia.

Adversarial review with respect to the veracity of the paper author? Unless you're making claims that would upend the field, no, it does not involve any of that sort of review. "I spent 1000 hours taking notes in a dog park" is not an extraordinary claim.

We're saying the same things back and forth to each other at this point and can probably wrap it up.

I didn't say adversarial review. I said publishing papers from authors who explicitly disclaim that they do not have access to their own data any more. Because that's what this publication did. They asked for the data, the hoaxsters claimed that they lost the data, and the journal published the paper anyway.

If what you say is true, that reviewers don't bother reviewing the actual data, then mistakes like missing a decimal point and reporting figures an order of magnitude off would not be caught. That would be astounding, but fortunately most of my coworkers who have experience in academia do not corroborate your claim that reviewers don't bother to look at the data used to produce the paper.

I work in academia in a STEM field. I've never seen or heard of a reviewer asking for access to the raw data used to produce a paper. Reviewers typically operate under the assumption that you're not trying to deliberately mislead them about how you collected and evaluated your data (and I think they have to, at least with how the system currently works).

What often happens is that, although the time they get to spend on a single paper is limited, reviewers still come up with important criticisms that end up leading to substantial changes (sometimes multiple rounds of them) or even an outright rejection.

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