tribe of science

Especially in student papers, plagiarism is an issue that it seems just won't go away. However, instructors cannot just give up and permit plagiarism without giving up most of their pedagogical goals and ideals. As tempting a behavior as this may be (at least to some students, if not to all), it is our duty to smack it down. Is there any effective way to deliver a preemptive smackdown to student plagiarists? That's the question posed by a piece of research, "Is There an Effective Approach to Deterring Students from Plagiarizing?" by Lidija Bilic-Zulle, Josip Azman, Vedran Frkovic, and…
That post about how hard it is to clean up the scientific literature has spawned an interesting conversation in the comments. Perhaps predictably, the big points of contention seem to be how big a problem a few fraudulent papers in the literature really are (given the self-correcting nature of science and all that), and whether there larger (and mistaken) conclusions people might be drawing about science on the basis of a small fraction of the literature. I will note just in passing that we do not have reliable numbers on what percentage of the papers published in the scientific literature…
In the last post, we looked at a piece of research on how easy it is to clean up the scientific literature in the wake of retractions or corrections prompted by researcher misconduct in published articles. Not surprisingly, in the comments on that post there was some speculation about what prompts researchers to commit scientific misconduct in the first place. As it happens, I've been reading a paper by Mark S. Davis, Michelle Riske-Morris, and Sebastian R. Diaz, titled "Causal Factors Implicated in Research Misconduct: Evidence from ORI Case Files", that tries to get a handle on that…
Science is supposed to be a project centered on building a body of reliable knowledge about the universe and how various pieces of it work. This means that the researchers contributing to this body of knowledge -- for example, by submitting manuscripts to peer reviewed scientific journals -- are supposed to be honest and accurate in what they report. They are not supposed to make up their data, or adjust it to fit the conclusion they were hoping the data would support. Without this commitment, science turns into creative writing with more graphs and less character development. Because the…
Once again, I'm going to "get meta" on that recent paper on blogs as a channel of scientific communication I mentioned in my last post. Here, the larger question I'd like to consider is how peer review -- the back and forth between authors and reviewers, mediated (and perhaps even refereed by) journal editors -- does, could, and perhaps should play out. Prefacing his post about the paper, Bora writes: First, let me get the Conflict Of Interest out of the way. I am on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Science Communication. I helped the journal find reviewers for this particular…
There's a recent paper on blogs as a channel of scientific communication that has been making the rounds. Other bloggers have discussed the paper and its methodology in some detail (including but not limited to Bora and DrugMonkey and Dr. Isis), so I'm not going to do that. Rather, I want to pull back and "get meta" with the blogospheric discussion of the paper, and especially the suggestion that it might be out of bounds for science bloggers (some of whom write the blogs that provided the data for the paper in question) to mount such a vigorous critique of a paper that was, as it turns…
Back in January, at ScienceOnline2010, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Dr. Isis, and I led a session called "Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents". Shortly after the session, I posted my first thoughts on how it went and on the lessons I was trying to take away from it. Almost two months later, I'm ready to say some more about the session and the issues I think it raised. My space, your space, our space. To my mind, civil engagement is only an issue if you are engaging with other people. If you are conducting a soliloquy, rather than a colloquy, it's hard to imagine where you'd run into…
Let's say you're a book review editor for a large circulation science periodical. You receive books from publishers and you look for scientists with the relevant expertise to write reviews that really engage the content of the books they are reviewing. The thing with having the relevant expertise, though, is that it may put you right in the middle of a controversy that the book you've been asked to review is probing or advancing. In other words, it may be tricky to find a reviewer who is conversant in the scientific issues the book raises and simultaneously reasonably objective about those…
From a recent article in the New York Times considering University of Alabama-Huntsville shooter Amy Bishop's scientific stature and finding it lacking, this comment on why so many denizens of the internet think they can understand why she did what she did: Why did people who knew Dr. Bishop only through reading about her crime make excuses for her? Joanathan D. Moreno, a professor of medical ethics and the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks reactions have to do with a long tradition that goes back to Plato. The idea, he said, is that someone who is…
Abel has a thoughtful post on the horrific faculty meeting shooting at University of Alabama Huntsville this past Friday. New information seems to come out every few hours on the shooter, Dr. Amy Bishop, a biologist at the university who had been denied tenure, and I'm nowhere near ready to weigh in on the particulars of the case (at least, not with anything smarter than my viscera). But I do want to say just a little on a pair of questions Abel posed in his post: Do you think that lack of collegiality is grounds for denial of tenure for a candidate that otherwise meets the basic…
Dr. Isis considers a downside to having coauthors and an ethical question it raises: Imagine a hypothetical postdoc that has just left graduate school, although this could easily be an assistant professor that has just left a postdoc. She has some minor publications either published or in press. The draft of her major publication from her thesis work is written, ready for submission, and has been sent to the coauthors for their approval. Her major advisor has approved the work. Of the additional four coauthors listed on the paper, three have replied to the postdoc that they approve of the…
Five years ago today, I put up the first post on a blog that was mean to capture the overflow of discussions and ideas from my "Ethics in Science" class. Back then, I wasn't entirely sure that I'd manage to maintain the blog through the end of the semester. It just goes to show you that you can't always tell which of the things you try will become sustainable practices (although maybe the ones that don't involve exercise equipment have better odds). On the occasion of my fifth blogiversary, I'm reflecting on a question posed by BlogHer upon BlogHer's 5th anniversary: What are five…
Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session's wiki page.) The session was led by John McKay and Eric Michael Johnson. John posted the text of his presentation and Eric posted his presentation a la YouTube. I'm going to take this as permission to skip doing a proper recap here. Instead, I'm going to write about the big ideas this session raised for me. First, I'm struck by how easy it is for those of us who were trained to do science to know very little about where scientific practices come from --…
In my earlier post about the findings of the Penn State inquiry committee looking into allegations of research misconduct against Michael Mann, I mentioned that the one allegation that was found to merit further investigation may have broad implications for how the public understands what good scientific work looks like, and for how scientists themselves understand what good scientific work looks like. Some of the commenters on that post seemed interested in discussing those implications. Others, not so much. As commenter Evan Harper notes: It is clear that there are two discussions in…
There was one session at ScienceOnline2010 which I did not Tweet as it was going on -- the session I led with Sheril Kirshenbaum and Dr. Isis. Here's how that session was described in the conference program: Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents - Janet Stemwedel, Sheril Kirshenbaum and Dr.Isis Description: Janet, Sheril, and Isis regularly write about the role of civility in dialog with the public and other scientists. In this session, we will discuss the definition of civility, its importance in the communication of science, and how the call to civility can be used to derail…
Session description: We will be talking about how the history of science and the history of the open-access movement have intersected. Steven Johnson touches on this theme in his latest book, The Invention of Air, in that 18th century British polymath Joseph Priestley was a strong advocate of publishing scientific data widely in order to create a greater dialogue between scientists. While Johnson only mentions this briefly in the case of Priestley, this theme runs strongly through the history of science and is what makes the debate over the patenting of genes or the availability of open-…
Back before I was sucked into the vortex of paper-grading, an eagle-eyed Mattababy pointed me to a very interesting post by astronomer Mike Brown. Brown details his efforts to collaborate with another team of scientists who were working on the same scientific question he was working on, what became of that attempted collaboration, and the bad feelings that followed when Brown and the other scientists ended up publishing separate papers on the question. Here's how Brown lays it out: You would think that two papers that examine the same set of pictures from the Cassini spacecraft to map…
On my earlier post, "Dialogue, not debate", commenter dave c-h posed some interesting questions: Is there an ethical point at which engagement is functionally equivalent to assent? In other words, is there a point at which dialogue should be replaced by active resistance? If so, how do you tell where that point is? I think many activists fear that dialogue is a tactic of those who support the status quo to co-opt them into a process that is unlikely to lead to any real change because the power is unevenly divided. What the commenter says about the activists' fears sounds about right to me…
At the end of last week, I made a quick trip to UCLA to visit with some researchers who, despite having been targets of violence and intimidation, are looking for ways to engage with the public about research with animals. I was really struck by their seriousness about engaging folks on "the other side", rather than just hunkering down to their research and hoping to be left alone. The big thing we talked about was the need to shift the terms of engagement. The mode people seem most used to -- and the one that seems to make the least difference -- is the debate. In a debate, the point is…
The other day, while surfing the web, my better half came upon this semi-official looking symbol for psychohazards: The verbiage underneath the symbol seem to indicate conditions that might have serious consequences for one's picture of the world and its contents, or for one's ability to come to knowledge about the world. A philosopher who was so inclined could go to town on this. However, while this particular icon was new to me, this isn't the first time I've seen the term "psychohazard" in use. A long time ago, I was an undergraduate with an internship working in a cancer pharmacology…