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Comment by Blackthorn | Hacker News Reader

Disappointed but not surprised to see graduate students thrown under the bus like that. They're an easy target for blame: powerless and also by the time the retraction rolls around, not there anymore. Very easy to blame someone who can't hit back.

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Just to clarify, the only person suggesting the graduate students were responsible is the OP. Neither the retraction notice nor the Science news article (https://www.science.org/content/article/something-seriously-...) point to the graduate students.

In fact the Science article points to a more senior member of the team as also being a co-author on a recently retracted article that was retracted for reasons related to the same kind of data.

Moreover, check out the quote from Eremets at the end of the Science article regarding principal investigator Dias' more recent, even more groundbreaking claims: "How is this possible? Everything he touches turns to gold."

To be clear, in either circumstance i'm not throwing the graduate students under the bus. I'm speaking about the broader structural problems which lead to this sort of pressure-induced-error(?). Fabrication in this case can be as far as invented, to applying the wrong background separation, but it fits/looks good, and no more rigor is applied for expedience.

Other than more carefully noticing, “hmm this data looks like a polynomial curve, maybe it’s fabricated?” I’m not sure what you propose the professor do instead.

The professor is not going to duplicate all of the experimental measurements done by the students and it seems totally natural to me to trust the student is not committing fraud, until there is evidence otherwise.

Taking the professor at the word that it's those graduate students' fault (who very conveniently can't defend themselves and haven't been at the University since 2020) and not the fault of the professor is a bit strange. It might after all be their fault, but it could have easily been some manipulation done or demanded by the PI who wanted a publication.

What I'm trying to say is, I'm not willing to take the professor at their word here when their word is so extremely convenient for them.

Duplicating everything is unnecessary. Duplicating the thing which is foundational to a groundbreaking discovery is necessary. Beyond fraud there could be just an honest mistake or some fluke confounding factor.

Maybe there should be a "reproducability risk" metric, calculated with the transitive closure of all published results that reference a paper that has yet to be reproduced. This could help researchers calibrate how much they should trust a result and indicate when a foundational paper really needs to be reproduced.

Duplication of work prior to publication is standard in many experimental fields, like synthetic chemistry. In some cases the cost of an experiment is high enough to be a problem, but conductivity measurements are not really that exotic.

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