Studie over "Retracted Science and the Retraction Index" – overraskende eller ikke, og hva kan/bør eventuelt gjøres?
https://iai.asm.org/content/79/10/3855/figures-onlyMeget interessant og for meg umiddelbart overraskende resultat i studie over "Retracted Science". Etter meget rask skumming oppfatter jeg at studien umiddelbart viser at jo større "annerkjennelse" "publiserer" nyter, jo høyere er antallet tilbaketrekninger. Cell, Lancet, Nature, og Science lar seg i denne forbindelse bare slå av New England Journal of Medicine. Andre vil kanskje mene at resultatet ikke på noen måte er overraskende, men kjør gjerne debatten under klar oppfordring til å holde tonen sivilisert.
Personlig kommer jeg neppe til å delta veldig mye i tråden her, men er mest interessert i å se hvilke tanker andre forummedlemmer gjør seg på dette punkt. Det bør også sies at jeg kom over undersøkelsen i forbindelse med betydningen av, og ikke minst utfordringer knyttet til, kvalitetsnivået av fagfellevurdert (som blant annet er svært sentral i klimadiskusjonen). I dette tilfelle i tråden "Sacked for speaking out about Climate Change"
https://www.terrengsykkel.no/ubb/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=2584273&page=1I midlertid tror jeg undersøkelsen også være relevant eller av interesse for andre områder, og for de som ikke interesserer seg for klimadebatten. Dette er grunnen til at jeg synes den fortjener å bli løftet ut i en - selvstendig tråd - hvor hovedfokus kan/bør være på være kvalitet på (publisert) forskning, samt eventuelt hvordan kvaliteten og prosessen kan forbedres.
"Articles may be retracted when their findings are no longer considered trustworthy due to scientific misconduct or error, they plagiarize previously published work, or they are found to violate ethical guidelines. Using a novel measure that we call the “retraction index,” we found that the frequency of retraction varies among journals and shows a strong correlation with the journal impact factor. Although retractions are relatively rare, the retraction process is essential for correcting the literature and maintaining trust in the scientific process"
ADDENDUM IN PROOF
"It has recently been brought to our attention that previous independent analyses have also concluded that articles in journals with higher impact factors are more likely to be retracted"
Innledningsposten blir beklageligvis omfattende, men jeg slenger likevel på noen sitater fra artikler fra The Guardian:
"Peer review is flawed but the best we've got.
Peer review – where articles submitted to an academic journal are reviewed by other scientists from the same field for an opinion on their quality – has always been recognised as problematic. It is time-consuming, it could be open to corruption, and it cannot prevent fraud, plagiarism, or duplicate publication, although in a more obvious case it might. The problem with peer review is, it's hard to find anything better."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/sep/12/bad-science-peer-review-goldacre"The way we fund and publish science encourages fraud. A forum about academic misconduct aims to find practical solutions. (Peer review happens behind closed doors, with anonymous reviews only seen by editors and authors. This means we have no idea how effective it is.)
Science is broken. Psychology was rocked recently by stories of academics making up data, sometimes overshadowing whole careers. And it isn't the only discipline with problems - the current record for fraudulent papers is held by anaesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii, with 172 faked articles.
These scandals highlight deeper cultural problems in academia. Pressure to turn out lots of high-quality publications not only promotes extreme behaviours, it normalises the little things, like the selective publication of positive novel findings – which leads to "non-significant" but possibly true findings sitting unpublished on shelves, and a lack of much needed replication studies."
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/nov/02/scientific-fraud-good-science#comment-19217655Som nevnt imøteser en sivilisert og forhåpentligvis opplysende debatt.
