Subscribe to read | Financial Times
www.ft.com
News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

A high-profile expert on ethics and dishonesty is facing allegations of dishonesty in her own work and has taken administrative leave from Harvard Business School.

Archive link (no paywall)

  • HubertManne@kbin.social
    5·
    1 year ago

    So I performed and experiment in a PhD program that was published. My name was not put on it but I got a nice thanks for mention at the end. That is one thing that is messed up with academic papers today. The “authorship”. Beyond that though this experiment had been done before was inconclusive and im sure I know why. I saw the data and all the points where at one minute intervals and that was the protocol but I can tell you right now that it can’t be done. You take the readings and count cells after you add a component to stop replication. You go round and round but there are a lot of steps. I recorded my time when I was able to record the data. at 55 second or 65 second or whatever the elapsed time was. I saw this a lot as a science major. Some folks just don’t have a correct mind for science. They are not intentionally being dishonest but they want to fit things into these patterns like even spaced time and such. They fudge things so the graph looks pretty. All sorts of stuff. Even if the ones who make it through the programs are good about these things the experiments are not carried out by and large at that level.

    • MiscreantMouse@kbin.social
      5·
      1 year ago

      Yep, I think the current ‘publish or perish’ pressures mentioned above lead to a lot of authorship issues, and generally have a negative impact on scientific advancement as a whole.

      It seems to me, like most modern problems, money is at the root of this, with both big journals and the ‘corporate capture’ crowd incentivizing a quantity-over-quality approach to publication.

      The big journals just want more to stuff to put behind their paywalls, and don’t give a damn about the actual science. The corporate folks like sloppy work, because it helps them generate conveniently errant results, which let them astroturf scientific support for any profitable position, and confound any financially inconvenient findings.

      On the whole, I think we’re pretty much screwed until we find a way to break away from the capitalist incentives, and focus on research quality.