Exposing Faked Scientific Papers

Chemistry World has a good article on the problem of shaky data in journal article, and the intersecting problem of what to do about it in the chemistry blogging world. Paul Bracher's ChemBark is, naturally, a big focus of the piece, since he's been highlighting some particularly egregious examples in the last couple of months (which I've linked to from here). The phrase "witch hunt" has been thrown around by some observers, but I don't think that's fair or appropriate. In great contrast to the number of witches around (and their effectiveness), faked information in published scientific articles is very much a real thing, and can have real consequences. Time spent looking for it and exposing it is not time wasted, not when it's at its current levels. But who should be doing the looking and the exposing? The standard answer is "Why, journal editors and reviewers, who shouldn't be letting this stuff past in the first place". Quite true. But in many cases, they are letting it past, so what should be done once it's published? A quiet, gentlemanly note to the editorial staff? Or a big blazing row in a public forum, such as a widely-read blog? Even though I don't start many of these myself, I come down more on the side of the latter. There are problems with that stance, of course - you have to be pretty sure that there's something wrong before you go making a big deal out of it, for one thing. Hurting someone else's reputation for no reason would be a bad thing, as would damaging...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: The Dark Side Source Type: blogs