"Compromised science" news/opines (includes retractions, declining academic standards, pred-J, etc)

[C C]

No reading 21 pages of posts. Is this a bog-standard witch hunt?

Call it a substitute for a subforum -- since there isn't one devoted to retractions, academic integirty, the replication crisis, predatory publishing, publish or perish, decolonization of science, etc.

And invalid science is not the same thing as pseudoscience. Which is a tad ironic -- that something like the "fringe section" is represented on the board, but not awareness of and the struggle to remedy compromised science.

That said, though, it does consume a modest amount of time (though small compared to "Philosophy Updates") -- so if the majority feels that it is a "blog", then no problemo in saying adieu to it.
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[exchemist]

Call it a substitute for a subforum -- since there isn't one devoted to retractions, academic integirty, the replication crisis, predatory publishing, publish or perish, decolonization of science, etc.

And invalid science is not the same thing as pseudoscience. Which is a tad ironic -- that something like the "fringe section" is represented on the board, but not awareness of and the struggle to remedy compromised science.

That said, though, it does consume a modest amount of time (though small compared to "Philosophy Updates") -- so if the majority feels that it is a "blog", then no problemo in saying adieu to it.
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A moment’s scanning of the thread shows it is not a blog. I often read it and sometimes respond, at least.

 

[C C]

Plagiarizing papers retracted from engineering journal after Retraction Watch report
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/10...eering-journal-after-retraction-watch-report/

An Elsevier journal has retracted three papers for plagiarism after more than a year of inaction....

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Psychology journal apologizes for paper with ‘biased language’ about Tibet
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/10...s-for-paper-with-biased-language-about-tibet/

Editors of a psychology journal have published a lengthy apology for failing to identify “biased” language and information in a paper about racial prejudice of Tibetan children against Han Chinese...

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Springer Nature journal has retracted over 200 papers since September
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/10...as-retracted-over-200-papers-since-september/

Optical and Quantum Electronics, a Springer Nature journal, has retracted more than 200 papers since the start of September, and continues issuing retraction notices en masse...

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Journal pulls pesticide article a year after authors engaged lawyer to fight retraction decision
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/10...-engaged-lawyer-to-fight-retraction-decision/

A public health journal has retracted an article on unintentional pesticide poisonings a year after the authors enlisted a lawyer’s help to fight the decision...
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[C C]

Scientific papers that mention AI get a citation boost
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03355-9

Papers with titles or abstracts that mention certain artificial intelligence (AI) methods are more likely to be among the top 5% most-cited works in their field for a given year than are those that don’t reference those techniques, an analysis has found. These papers also tend to receive more citations from outside of their field than do studies that don’t refer to AI terms.

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Positive publication bias is actively harming science
https://www.uu.nl/en/news/positive-...ce-journal-of-trial-and-error-stefan-gaillard

EXCERPTS: Scientific articles often give the impression that everything works out in one go, when we all know that is not the case. What would it be like to launch a journal about failed research, we wondered. [...] Research with zero results or negative results. That in itself is not a failure you would think, but those studies are very often not published. While they do contain relevant information, think for example of drug trials. It is very relevant to know when a drug study finds no effect.

[...] How do you convince scientists who are reluctant to publish their failed research? We especially address young researchers, who are often idealistic and feel the pressure to publish. They do not yet have much to lose in terms of name or reputation, but have much to gain from changes in science. Or people who already have permanent jobs and retired professionals, who have a secure position. [...] The cultural shift is taking place, very slowly but it is coming... (MORE - missing details)

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Features and signals in precocious citation impact: a meta-research study
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.14.618366v1

(Clicking "Full Text" works for now in terms of accessing the paper.)

ABSTRACT: Some scientists reach top citation impact in a very short time once they start publishing. The current analysis defined precocious citation impact as rising to become a top-cited scientist within t≤8 years after the first publication year.

Ultra-precocious citation impact was defined similarly for t ≤5 years. Top-cited authors included those in the top-2% of a previously validated composite citation indicator across 174 subfields of science or in the top-100,000 authors of that composite citation indicator across all science based on Scopus. Annual data between 2017 and 2023 show a strong increase over time, with 469 precocious and 66 ultra-precocious citation impact Scopus author IDs in 2023.

In-depth assessment of validated ultra-precocious scientists in 2023, showed significantly higher frequency of less developed country affiliation (71%), clustering in 4 high-risk subfields (Environmental Sciences, Energy, Artificial Intelligence & Image Processing, Mechanical Engineering & Transports) (64%), self-citations for their field above the 95th percentile (31%), being top-cited only when self-citations were included (20%), citations to citing papers ratio for their field above the 95th percentile (15%), extreme publishing behavior (7%), and extreme citation orchestration metric c/h2<2.45 (15%) compared with all top-cited authors (p<0.005 for all signals).

The 17 ultra-precocious citation impact authors in the 2017-2020 top-cited lists who had retractions by October 2024 showed on average 4 of these 7 signal indicators at the time they entered the top-cited list. While some authors with precocious citation impact may be stellar scientists, others probably herald massive manipulative or fraudulent behaviors infiltrating the scientific literature.

Significance statement. Extreme performance may herald either extreme excellence or extreme inappropriate and outright fraudulent practices. Some authors reach the very top ranks in cumulative citation impact within only a few years, while even accomplished scientists take decades to reach these levels, if ever.

A science-wide analysis of the authors with the most impressively precocious citation performance reveals that most of them come from less developed countries with limited resources, they heavily cluster in some scientific subfields, and they often have multiple signal indicators that may suggest problematic behavior. Some of these scientists are unquestionably excellent, while others may be manipulative or fraudulent. Evaluation of extreme cases allows science-wide views of the penetration of massive manipulative practices in scientific publication and citation.
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[C C]

Why are successful scientists leaving academia mid-career? (occupational pressures)
https://www.the-scientist.com/why-are-successful-scientists-leaving-academia-mid-career-72266

EXCERPTS: An increasing number of successful mid-career scientists grapple with the difficult decision to leave academia for greener pastures, with almost 50 percent leaving within ten years of publishing their first paper. Universities are losing their top talent as scientists confront waning motivation, misaligned ideals, workplace toxicity, inequalities, poor work-life balance, clinical burnout, and mental health deterioration.

[,,,] Pelling described academia as lacking work-life balance. The intense focus on a specific topic is a basic requirement for driving discovery, but it is easy to get carried away. The increasingly arduous demands on professors to take on additional roles creates a slippery slope towards burnout. “It’s your identity, all the time, 24/7. It caught up with me [after] a lot of bad decisions. It's normalized, this type of life,” Pelling said. “We're trying to do research at the bench. We're not ever trained to manage people, money, and bureaucracy, or to teach. We’re thrown into these things. Some of us are good at it, some of us are not, and it just all piles on every day. For me it just got to be way too much.” (MORE - details)
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[Gawdzilla Sama]

"Wars, and rumors of wars..."

 

[C C]

eLife latest in string of major journals put on hold from Web of Science
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/10...jor-journals-put-on-hold-from-web-of-science/

Citing eLife’s unusual practice of publishing articles without accepting or rejecting them, Clarivate says it is re-evaluating the inclusion of the open-access biology journal in Web of Science, its influential database of abstracts and citations.

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Cambridge researcher pulls Cell paper five years after Nature, Science retractions
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/10...-five-years-after-nature-science-retractions/

A cancer researcher at the University of Cambridge in the UK has retracted a paper from Cell after commenters on PubPeer questioned aspects of 10 images in the article...

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Young employee’s death puts workplace culture in spotlight at publisher MDPI
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/10...place-culture-in-spotlight-at-publisher-mdpi/

The sudden death of a 27-year-old woman in the Romania offices of MDPI, a major open-access publisher with a worldwide presence, has grabbed national headlines and raised questions about the conditions under which the firm’s employees work...

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Reflecting on research misconduct: What’s next for the watcher community?
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/10...conduct-whats-next-for-the-watcher-community/

Daryl Chubin wrote that in 1985 — a time when institutions we now take for granted, like the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, did not yet exist. We asked him to reflect on what has happened in the intervening four decades...
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[C C]

RELATED: The value—and risk—of political activism in science
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Progressives should worry more about their favorite scientific findings
https://smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/progressives-should-worry-more-about

EXCERPTS: The same journal just published a reanalysis of the data. It turns out that the effect disappears once you take into account that Black doctors are less likely to see the higher-risk population of newborns that have low birth weight.

[...] All the same concerns about fraud, poor statistics, and so on apply. But now there’s something else. This sort of finding fits the ideology of most people who review papers for Nature Human Behaviour. It’s the sort of finding that improves the journal's prestige. It’s a result that ends up reported in the New York Times and The Guardian; it will get cited in briefs to the Supreme Court that support progressive policies.

These are all additional reasons, above and beyond the paper’s scientific quality—above and beyond the possibility that the finding is true—that make it more likely to be published. So, while you shouldn’t dismiss the finding entirely, you should take it less seriously... (MORE - details)

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If the science disagrees with your agenda...suppress it?
https://www.science20.com/content/if_the_science_disagrees_with_your_agendasuppress_it

EXCERPT: So ____ put the results in a drawer - despite the work being taxpayer-funded - and refuses to publish them, not because the data were flawed, but because, she says, “I do not want our work to be weaponized.”

[...] If none of that reads authentic, you see the problem for public trust in science and why scientists need to take a stand against this kind of overt nefarious behavior even if it is by a political ally. Even postmodernists in philosophy departments see the flaws in her reasoning.

If you insist negative results will be culturally weaponized, it's challenging to deny you were trying to create positive results to weaponize your cause.... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

Scholarly publishing: The elephant (and other wildlife) in the room
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org...-the-elephant-and-other-wildlife-in-the-room/

The clichéd notion of ‘publish or perish’ has gotten so deep into our scholarly DNA that we religiously follow it without questioning. Unless there is a massive mutation in our journal-based communication system, we cannot expect transformative change....

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Exposing predatory journals: anonymous sleuthing account goes public (interview with Jeffrey Beall)
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03321-5

I think the term predatory publishing doesn’t adequately capture the scope of what we’re now facing. For one thing, there’s no single definition that everybody agrees on, and there are many other areas which might be a larger threat to the scientific archive.

I think “unethical publishing” better captures these challenges, with predatory publishing being just one of them. I think the situation has gotten a lot worse. Artificial intelligence has blown the world apart in lots of ways, but certainly in publishing. Papers and peer-review reports can now be easily generated and passed off as original work. In my opinion, the only positive change is that more people are getting interested in trying to uncover unethical publishing practices...

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Scientists who object to animal testing claim they are frozen out by peers
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...ting-experiment-science-medical-b2623434.html

Researchers say they are being forced to carry out experiments with animals if they want their work to be published, after their studies were rejected because they did not include an animal test. However, a UK-based defender of animal testing said claims of a divide between scientists were being exaggerated by animal rights campaigners...

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Academic integrity—a brief history, a proposed definition, guidelines, and violations
https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj.q2303

INTRO: Although the concept of academic integrity has been long with us, and violations of it not uncommon, formal research into the topic began only in the 1990s, particularly by a pioneer in the field Donald McCabe of Rutgers University, whose main interest lay in the US collegiate system. In recent years concern about academic integrity, or rather the lack of it, has increased markedly, particularly in the area of research integrity.

Having failed to find a satisfactory definition of academic integrity, I propose the following: uncorrupted moral virtue in relation to truth, uprightness, honesty, and sincerity in the pursuit of research, education, and scholarship. Several codes of conduct outline what is expected of academic researchers, of which the European Charter for Researchers is an example.

A companion publication, the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity, which deals in greater detail with the principles outlined in the European Charter for Researchers, and which itself refers to many other codes of practice, also outlines a range of possible violations of academic integrity, i.e. matters of academic dishonesty or misdemeanours. These include fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism, misuse of statistics, concealing the use of AI, withholding information, and selective or inaccurate citation.

Other matters of concern include predatory journals, paper mills, and the large increase in the numbers of papers being retracted after publication...

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Unveiling scientific integrity in scholarly publications: a bibliometric approach (paper)
https://edintegrity.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s40979-024-00164-5#Abs1

EXCERPT: These findings should raise concerns about the potential outcomes of embracing assessment systems that gauge research accomplishments based on bibliometric measures and that encourage a publish-or-perish mindset. Such strategies are the prime catalyst for fostering the spread of research misconduct.

The consequences of scientific misconduct can be severe and damaging for both the researchers and the scientific community. These misconducts may result in losing funding, restrictions to supervised research, job loss, failure to receive promotions, drying up of research grants, and undermine the researchers and the public’s trust in science (Poutoglidou et al. 2022).

This study is a part of a research project of ‘Factors influencing scientific integrity of the university research scholarly publishing’ in the latest five-year duration. The objective of this research is to identify the top sources and most cited documents, analyze collaboration networks, and explore themes and trends related to scientific integrity in scholarly publishing over the last 20 years...
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[C C]

The Cass Review: Are we experimenting on kids? (politically undermined science)
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2024/10/the-cass-review-are-we-experimenting-on-kids/

EXCERPTS: The conclusions drawn [from the Cass Review] put a yellow caution sign in front of any rush to medicalize treatment for minors who are having gender-identity issues.

[...] This was not what the trans-activist community wanted to hear. There were denunciations of the Cass Review (WPATH and USPATH 2024) and, more prominently in the United States, a determined effort to ignore it.

I give a lot of credit to New York Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul, who has been willing to draw attention to the issue. Her piece in July titled “Why Is the U.S. Still Pretending We Know Gender-Affirming Care Works?” punctured the mainstream media’s radio silence that had greeted the Cass Review in the United States since its publication in April.

[...] other countries did pay attention and took strong actions... The United States is an outlier among Western nations in part because anything that touches on transgender issues has been so politicized. It is hard to raise concerns about early interventions, because to do so makes it seem like you are making common cause with anti-transgender bigots. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.

It is not only an act of compassion to worry about the medical and psychological health of children with gender identity issues; it is a medical responsibility to establish which interventions are safe and effective and at what ages... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

Science over Party: Five tips for the Left and Right
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2024/10/science-over-party-five-tips-for-the-left-and-right/

Democrats and Republicans have accused each other of waging a “war on science”. Unfortunately, they both have a point. Mistrusting science is often a bipartisan endeavor. ... Evidence for this phenomenon can be found in survey data. ... Proof that partisans will accept certain scientific claims while rejecting others has also been demonstrated experimentally. ... Many Democrats and Republicans inconsistently follow the science because they consistently follow their party. ... when the political parties decide to improve their political prospects by denying the science, many of their faithful supporters will simply follow along...

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Polarizing scientific information can be harmful. A study published in JCOM tries to identify it
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1062355

EXCERPTS: “Vaccines are 100% safe, and anyone who doubts this is ignorant”: Have you ever come across messages like this during the pandemic crisis a few years ago? If you often feel that certain public debates—such as those on vaccines or the climate crisis—boil down to a black-and-white clash between two sides demanding, with harsh tones, unquestioning allegiance to their view, you're not entirely wrong...

[...] As Cruvinel explains, simplifying and polarizing scientific information is not always the best approach, as it can limit critical thinking. Presenting scientific agreement as unquestionable may unite supporters but push away skeptics, making the issue even more divisive. When one dominant view takes over, it can hold back scientific progress by discouraging people from challenging existing ideas, which is a key part of advancing science.

[...] “Our codification system is grounded in a framework that encompasses 20 distinct codes, categorized into four key dimensions: sideness, criticism, emphasis, and discordance," explains Cruvinel. “This structured approach enables a nuanced analysis of the underlying elements contributing to polarization within scientific discourse.”

PAPER: https://jcom.sissa.it/article/pubid/JCOM_2308_2024_A01/

PDF download: https://jcom.sissa.it/article/1401/galley/3125/download/

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New report demands greater understanding of the impact of change on academia
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1062542

A new report from Digital Science looks at how changing attitudes and behaviors towards research are affecting traditional research models and dynamics. Key themes to emerge from the findings relate to areas of open research, impact and evaluation, tech and AI, collaboration and research security.

The objective of the report – titled Research Transformation: Change in the era of AI, open and impact – was to learn more about how the research world is experiencing transformation, what’s influencing change and how roles within it are being impacted. Digital Science conducted a survey, reaching out to the research community through questionnaires and in-depth interviews.

Findings from the report may make sobering reading for those involved in academia, as the lightning pace of technological change appears at odds with the traditionally slow-moving nature of the research ecosystem...
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[C C]

Social scientists cling to simple models, with disastrous results. They should embrace chaos theory
https://aeon.co/essays/without-chaos-theory-social-science-will-never-understand-the-world

EXCERPTS: The core principle of the theory is this: chaotic systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions. That means these systems are fully deterministic but also utterly unpredictable. As Poincaré had anticipated in 1908, small changes in conditions can produce enormous errors.

[...] In the mid-20th century, researchers no longer sought the social equivalent of a physical law (like gravity), but they still looked for ways of deriving clear-cut patterns within the social world. ... in the 1980s and ’90s, when cheap and sophisticated computers became new tools ... Suddenly, social scientists – sociologists, economists, psychologists or political scientists – could take a large number of variables and plug them into statistical software packages ... to help explain how groups of humans change over time. A quantitative revolution was born.

[...] There is just one glaring problem: our social world isn’t linear. It’s chaotic...

[...] The deeply flawed assumptions of social modelling ... persist because economists and political scientists [...have...] not ... meaningfully updated for decades. It is true that some significant improvements have been made since the 1990s. ... However, these approaches can’t solve many of the lingering problems of tackling complexity and chaos....

[...] The drawbacks ... mean that social research often has poor predictive power. ... We produce too many models that are often wrong and rarely useful. ... Social scientists should be drawing on these innovations from complex systems and related fields of research rather than ignoring them.... (MORE - missing details)

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Large language models reflect the ideology of their creators
https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18417

ABSTRACT: Large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data to generate natural language, enabling them to perform tasks like text summarization and question answering. These models have become popular in artificial intelligence (AI) assistants like ChatGPT and already play an influential role in how humans access information.

However, the behavior of LLMs varies depending on their design, training, and use. In this paper, we uncover notable diversity in the ideological stance exhibited across different LLMs and languages in which they are accessed.

We do this by prompting a diverse panel of popular LLMs to describe a large number of prominent and controversial personalities from recent world history, both in English and in Chinese. By identifying and analyzing moral assessments reflected in the generated descriptions, we find consistent normative differences between how the same LLM responds in Chinese compared to English.

Similarly, we identify normative disagreements between Western and non-Western LLMs about prominent actors in geopolitical conflicts. Furthermore, popularly hypothesized disparities in political goals among Western models are reflected in significant normative differences related to inclusion, social inequality, and political scandals.

Our results show that the ideological stance of an LLM often reflects the worldview of its creators. This raises important concerns around technological and regulatory efforts with the stated aim of making LLMs ideologically `unbiased', and it poses risks for political instrumentalization. (MORE - details)

VIDEO LINK: A breakdown of the AI research paper

 

[C C]

Researchers ‘in a state of panic’ after RFK Jr. says Trump will hand him health agencies
https://www.science.org/content/art...-f-kennedy-jr-says-trump-will-hand-him-health

Concerns about what a second Donald Trump (R) presidency could mean for public health and biomedical research ratcheted up this week after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told supporters Trump has promised to give him “control” over agencies at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
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[C C]

How an article estimating deaths from hydroxychloroquine use came to be retracted
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/11...-hydroxychloroquine-use-came-to-be-retracted/

An article estimating how many people might have died during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the off-label use of hydroxychloroquine in hospitals was retracted in August after advocates for the drug launched a campaign criticizing the study. ... the journal stood by its decision to retract the article due to “some clear fatal flaws” identified in letters to the editor, which it said it declined to publish due to their tone it deemed “not suitable for publication in a scientific journal.”

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Meet the founder of a 100,000-strong Facebook group driving change in scientific integrity in Vietnam
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/10...ng-change-in-scientific-integrity-in-vietnam/

We asked Van Tu Duong, a researcher at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, USA, who founded the group, to tell us more about the history of the effort. This email interview has been lightly edited for flow and clarity...

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Highly cited engineer offers guaranteed publication, citations in return for coauthorship
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/10...ication-citations-in-return-for-coauthorship/

We emailed Shariati to ask how he was able to guarantee publication and citations even before seeing the manuscripts he suggested coauthoring. We have not heard back...

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Declaration of Helsinki revision adds nod to research misconduct
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/10...nki-revision-adds-nod-to-research-misconduct/

The Declaration of Helsinki on ethical principles for research involving human participants now includes a statement on scientific integrity and research misconduct...
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[C C]

What a rise in common spelling errors says about the state of research culture
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoc...ors-says-about-the-state-of-research-culture/

Based on an analysis of over 32 million abstracts published over the last fifty years, Adrian Barnett and Nicole White find a marked rise in common spelling errors. Evidence they suggest of a culture of quantity over quality in academic writing. Many academics feel pressure to publish lots of papers every year because demonstrating their productivity is key for securing jobs and promotions...
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[C C]

Medical trials are not the whole truth
https://iai.tv/articles/medical-trials-are-not-the-whole-truth-auid-2989?_auid=2020

INTRO: We need to know whether drugs and other healthcare treatments work. The field of evidence-based medicine developed important tools, like randomised controlled trials, to do this. While they have helped drive huge advances in medical science, we should be cautious about relying solely on trials to evaluate new healthcare interventions. Although valuable, they can be misleading if badly designed, and they aren’t intrinsically superior to all other evidence. Evidence-based medicine should use real-life observations alongside trial data to get richer and more accurate answers for patients... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

Vegas, CSICon, sex and nooz
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/10/26/vegas-csicon-sex-and-nooz/

INTRO: I’ve been busy at the CSICon conference, which included giving my own 30-minute presentation this morning. I had to modify it to take into account the misguided views of Steve Novella, who gave a talk yesterday about “When Skeptics Disagree.”

It turned out to be largely a diatribe about how sex in humans is not binary, and in fact isn’t even to be defined by morphology or physiology. As far as I can see, Novella’s view of sex is that one is born with a “brain module” (which of course is biological) that determines which sex you are. No, not gender, but actual biological sex. You can have a “female” module or a “male module”, and regardless of gametes, hormones, genitalia, and so on, you are whatever sex your module dictates to your self-identification.

That makes no sense, because of course there are plenty of people that have ideas, right or wrong, about what they are, but in the end merely feeling something about your self doesn’t make it objectively true... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

Complaint from engineering software company prompts two retractions
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/11...ing-software-company-prompts-two-retractions/

An engineering journal has retracted two papers after a company complained the authors of the articles used its software without a valid license. Both retracted papers were published by "Ain Shams Engineering Journal" in the last couple of years by different authors based in Egypt....

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Another Springer Nature journal has retracted over 300 papers since July
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/11...nal-has-retracted-over-300-papers-since-july/

Soft Computing, a Springer Nature title, has retracted at least 335 papers this year, many from issues with guest editors. The mass retractions began in July, with the latest appearing November 4...

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University of Newcastle investigating top melanoma researchers
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/11...astle-investigating-top-melanoma-researchers/

Commenters on PubPeer have posted questions about the data in 42 papers by Peter Hersey and Xu Dong Zhang, both well-known in Australian melanoma research. So far, two of the papers have been retracted and four corrected...

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Embattled rocket scientist loses paper following Retraction Watch report
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/11...oses-paper-following-retraction-watch-report/

A controversial rocket scientist in India earned his fourth retraction in October after an investigation at a physics journal found a core part of his work was “inaccurate and paradoxical.”...
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[C C]

Book review: Why the Medical Establishment Often Gets It Wrong
https://undark.org/2024/11/01/book-review-blind-spots/

Despite subsequent research confirming that appendectomies can often be avoided, Makary estimates only about half of surgeons have accepted the idea.

“That means whether or not you go under the knife for appendicitis today in America depends on who’s on call when you walk into the emergency department,” he writes in “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.”

In detailed behind-the-scenes case studies, Makary, a surgeon and public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University, reveals how and why physicians often salute bad science and baseless opinions at the peril of their patients...

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Peer review is broken
https://joelniklaus.substack.com/p/peer-review-is-broken

EXCERPTS: With the rise of ChatGPT and the unprecedented surge in NLP/ML/AI submissions (see NeurIPS and ICLR statistics), review quality seems to be declining further. This is understandable – reviewers are overwhelmed with competing priorities, and the work is both anonymous and unpaid.

While the field's growing popularity is exciting, the record-breaking submission numbers each year intensify the peer review challenges. Currently, submitting a paper requires minimal effort. There are only few checks allowing for desk-rejecting low-quality papers leading to lower reviewing load. Some venues like ARR and CVPR have attempted to address reviewer shortages by requiring authors to serve as reviewers...

[...] Other proposed improvements to the peer review system include providing more recognition for reviewers and incorporating AI-assisted tools. Beyond these suggestions, I haven't seen much public discourse on this topic, except this recent tweet from Jakob Foerster.

While there appears to be broad consensus in academia that the current peer review system falls short of its goals, concrete proposals for systemic reform seem to be lacking. I believe that lasting improvements will require deeper, more fundamental changes to the existing structure...

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Fundamental problems in the peer-review process and stakeholders' perceptions of potential suggestions for improvement
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/leap.1637

ABSTRACT: Academic papers are essential for researchers to communicate their work to their peers and industry experts. Quality research is published in prestigious scientific journals, and is considered as part of the hiring and promotion criteria at leading universities.

Scientific journals conduct impartial and anonymous peer reviews of submitted manuscripts; however, individuals involved in this process may encounter issues related to the duration, impartiality, and transparency of these reviews. To explore these concerns, we created a questionnaire based on a comprehensive review of related literature and expert opinions, which was distributed to all stakeholders (authors, reviewers, and editors) who participated in the peer-review process from a variety of countries and disciplines.

Their opinions on the primary issues during the process and suggestions for improvement were collected. The data were then analysed based on various groups, such as gender, country of residence, and contribution type, using appropriate multivariate statistical techniques to determine the perceptions and experiences of participants in the peer-review process.

The results showed that unethical behaviour was not uncommon and that editors and experienced reviewers encountered it more frequently. Women and academics from Türkiye were more likely to experience ethical violations and perceived them as more ethically severe. Incentives and stakeholder involvement were seen as ways to enhance the quality and impartiality of peer review.

The scale developed can serve as a useful tool for addressing difficulties in the peer-review process and improving its effectiveness and performance.
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[wegs]

Researchers ‘in a state of panic’ after RFK Jr. says Trump will hand him health agencies
https://www.science.org/content/art...-f-kennedy-jr-says-trump-will-hand-him-health

Concerns about what a second Donald Trump (R) presidency could mean for public health and biomedical research ratcheted up this week after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told supporters Trump has promised to give him “control” over agencies at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
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I don't know enough about Robert F. Kennedy's background in general, but I'm getting a vibe that this isn't a wise choice.