Retraction Watch

The Retraction Watch website does a good job of reporting on various cases of retractions and scientific misconduct [1]. Like many others, I hope that a greater focus on reproducibility in academic journals and conferences will help reduce the spread of scientific misconduct and inaccuracy. [1]: https://retractionwatch.com/

> YouTube videos are not very difficult to edit. And academic papers are not difficult to fudge up with edited fraudulent data [1]. Even Ivy League colleges are committing rampant fraud sometimes for activism sometimes just to get attention and get more papers published. It’s sad that we’re at a time where academia is as untrustworthy as random videos on YouTube. But i agree with noiseless windmills part, they should be promoted more instead of noisy ones that will discourage more clean energy initiatives. [1](https://retractionwatch.com/)

It would be great if journals published their articles as structured data. Then readers could compute a Crank Index, or do other automated citation analysis and filtering (e.g., flag excessive self-citations), using independently developed software. We shouldn't need to wait for journals to live up to their responsibility to innovate and improve their quality control. As for a list of unambiguously bad papers, we do have Retraction Watch: https://retractionwatch.com/. It's mainly a retraction tracker, but there is also associated community effort to proactively identify research misconduct.

The Retraction Watch website http://retractionwatch.com/ is one good method of highlighting retracted work. For researchers in any given field, keeping current on literature is hard work given the pace of publication but does include seeing retractions. So, the answer to your question depends on which researchers we mean. Experts in a field have the best chance of noticing relevant retractions in their own field. If you are a researcher in one field who has interests in many other fields, it is probably much less likely that you will be able to follow the retractions in those peripheral fields. That is why Retraction Watch and other mechanisms of highlighting such errors is useful.

> They aren't shortcuts for the lazy, they're shortcuts for non-scientists who aren't capable of fully evaluating the science alone. It's a shortcut fraught with potential for deception, as even a casual glance through a site like Retraction Watch will demonstrate: http://retractionwatch.com/ I'm not sure what you mean by "evaluating the science." A scientific paper should present a hypothesis, the author's best attempt to disprove the hypothesis, and an interpretation of the evidence gathered in the processes of testing the hypothesis. There's going to be a back-story, and it's likely to be quite involved. The article does a good job of presenting a method for navigating a paper on this basis. I don't see what checking credentials adds to the process. On the contrary, it may do harm.

While this is important, in many fields their are cliques of related researchers (1) on the grants committees and (2) on the journal committees. These people know who works on which problems, so blind review is a farce. Also, the concept of IF being a proxy for rigorous review and work quality is weak at best. Just read a few pages of http://retractionwatch.com/

Wow this is finally hitting the maintstream. I've been following this case for awhile now. Retraction Watch http://retractionwatch.com/ has been detailing each of the retractions of his studies. It's been entertaining to watch the growing clusterfuck.

I don’t think 50% or greater is a good standard for defining what we would consider to be a major problem with scientific fraud. I’m sure you’re well aware that “major” can refer to relative impact depending on the context of the issue being discussed. In the case of scientific publishing, I would argue that even 5% fraud rate would be grounds for labeling this as a major problem. That said, this issue has received a lot of attention in recent years. Some articles try to put a positive spin on it but the stark truth of where we are today is that there are no standards enforced requiring data publishing (“available on request” doesn’t cut it) and reproducibility. This, combined with the amount of money in this industry and the impact that it has on public policy is an acceptable situation. Some good coverage: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-revie… (Lots of links to follow on this above post) https://retractionwatch.com/ https://www.science.org/content/article/what-massive-database-retracte… (This one puts a positive spin on the editorial process but the fact remains that there is a massive flood of fraudulent papers being published. Going back to standards of open data plus verified reproducibility would go a long way to mitigate this problem.

I like Phil but around the table this morning with a few working/publishing scientists they all disagreed with his assertion that this paper has done more harm than good. Consensus was that this would lead to more people interested in the field and what actually does work. There’s heaps of sloppy science out there. There are massive structural issues in how science is done. There’s obviously not enough money or prestige in condensed matter physics if Phil thinks this is a bad hoax and it’s bad for Science. Within the space of a month this was resolved. It wasn’t even published. Go to pharma, medicine, vet, ag and you will see hoaxes that last years. Reviewers who don’t have any relevant knowledge. Journals which won’t retract until you threaten to sue them. Universities that will take no disciplinary action against hoaxers at all. LK-99 was almost debunked in a single media cycle. The people who have taken this to reduce the credibility of science rather than these fallible humans who succumbed to their impulse for fame didn’t give science any credibility in the first place. EDIT: shout out to our favourite website retraction watch. Anything you read there remember, that’s science working and some Scientist somewhere who likes being right has vanquished their enemy in the academy. https://retractionwatch.com/

IMHO, ARPA-H and other new agencies need to change how funding is allocated. Right now, in experimental sciences, lots of professors from prominent universities have a monopolistic attitude towards research. They have just become middlemen. They manage large groups, have become completely detached from technical things and use their position to secure most funds in the field and also veto others from publishing or getting funded. This is a recipe for disaster, stagnation and fiascos as we can see e.g. in the field of Alzheimer's disease. Innovative laboratories like LMB Cambridge or Cold Spring Harbor, where a great deal of work was done during the golden age of molecular biology, were at odds with this approach. All funding was internal, and the number of people managed by senior researchers was capped to a single digit. In short, we need funding policies that weed out scammers and promote good technical work. ARPA for example is quite aware of this problem, and IMHO has much better policies than, say, the European Research Council (ERC). ERC is quite infamous as they don't even bother about withdrawing funds from laboratories that are known to have manipulated research results and had to retract their publications (produced using ERC's funding!). https://retractionwatch.com and https://forbetterscience.com are full of these stories.

Elisabeth Bik has done some amazing work catching these kinds of errors. I occasionally follow Retraction Watch which cites her efforts regularly, [0] about 500 times or so. However, as she points out, she doesn't get compensated for this work: > We need this to be a career that people can make money and use their talents in. [1] Journals, IMO, should adopt something like a Knuth reward check [2] as an actual system. They, after all, are the ones profiting the most from our present system of scientific publications. I'm not sure what's fair; maybe 100 USD for catching a major post-publication error? It's currently a system where most of the incentives operate in opposition to self-correction. [0] https://retractionwatch.com/ [1] https://retractionwatch.com/2019/05/07/meet-elisabeth-bik-who-finds-pr… [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check

I remember some of the same overhyped news stories the science journalist who wrote the article submitted here remembers. I especially remember the breathless (and false) reports about a "gene for" this or that human behavioral trait. The science news cycle[1] frustrates journalists, because every new study with an incremental finding (which may not even be replicable) has to be hyped up by research organization press offices, in the interest of obtaining more funding. The author's follow-up on a famous science story from early in his career is thought-provoking. Indeed, editors are more nervous about publishing stories, even very well reported stories, that question good news and expose hype or even fraud than editors are about publishing stories on the latest science hero. On the whole, it's good news that more and more scientists and journalists are alert to the possibility that a preliminary research finding may be false and overhyped besides. Here on Hacker News, we can keep one another alert by remembering the signs to look for whenever we read a new research finding news story.[2] Hacker News readers who want to learn more about how research articles become retracted may enjoy reading the group blog Retraction Watch[3] compiled by two veteran science journalists with lots of help from tipsters in the science community. I think I learned about Retraction Watch from someone else's comment here on HN. [1] http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174 [2]…

Would be great if you'd lose job for plagiarism! Here's example [0] from Cambridge where they actually defend person that plagiarized A LOT. [0] https://retractionwatch.com/2026/07/27/cambridge-jason-arday-plagiaris…

Link to site: https://retractionwatch.com One of the recent posts: "A study claiming a tenfold decrease in bugs splattered on evolutionary biologist Anders Møller’s windshield over two decades has been retracted."

The blog RetractionWatch investigates accusations of problematic papers across scholarly disciplines and tracks superlatives like most retractions and retractions for Nobel Prize Winners. Posts are published daily on issues ranging from plagiarism, fraud, conflicts of interest, errors, and misconduct more generally. https://retractionwatch.com/

This is a common misconception in discussions about scientific fraud. You don't have to be able to do a thing correctly to detect when it's being done incorrectly. You shouldn't trust any claims by scientists about global trends in mean temperatures. We can say this with confidence, without being able to compute a better timeseries, by just looking to see if the basics of the scientific method are being followed by those who do it. If we do that check we find that they don't follow the scientific method. Specifically, they edit past observations to bring them into line with theory instead of deriving theory from data believed to be robust. https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest-month-on-…

There is probably a reasonable amount of retractions to expect in your career- if you work for 40 years doing research and publish a couple papers per year, then I will allow that a researcher might have become involved in a study that was deeply flawed, and the related papers need retracted. But to stay in good standing with the community, the researchers should admit the flaws (as some of the authors of this paper did). Didier Raoult is on a whole other level. He refuses to admit any issues with the study. He has been under criminal investigation for this. This isn't the first time this has been a big deal (scroll through here to see the issues he's had for the last few years https://retractionwatch.com/?s=Didier+Raoult).

I'm not sure that content exists any more in any reasonable quantity. Occasionally a video will pop out which is interesting from someone but generally it's all below average. The attention dynamics have focused all content onto retaining viewers and reinforcement metrics around that. This normalised everything into mediocrity and delivering longer content with no meat. The only thing notable left in my mind which I await with interest is Ken Shirriff's blog: http://www.righto.com ... oh and Retraction Watch: https://retractionwatch.com

Your incredulity tells me you haven't been following the issue at all. You assume people always want to put out a legitimate paper. Read Retraction Watch for examples of researchers who don't. https://retractionwatch.com/papers-and-peer-reviews-with-evidence-of-c… has a list of papers where a generative AI was almost certainly used, but it use wasn't reported, and some of the papers were clearly not legit. For example, https://pubpeer.com/publications/CAABBF887348FB2D1C0329E0A27BE6 . The first sentence of the introduction starts "Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic", and commenters also discovered that the authors reported the same data for multiple papers.

You mean like https://retractionwatch.com, the site that this very article is on? It's pretty popular on HN too: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=retractionwatch.com

Good. What on earth is going on in the scientific community? Science needs to take a serious look at itself. I have noticed research paper quality declining over the years. We need better rules to force researchers to release all the data they use so peer reviewers can duplicate the outcomes. retractions are increasing every year. Paper fraud is on the increase Career scientist not bothered about quality and exacting standards dodgy editors allowing this rubbish into the public realm https://footnote.co/fake-papers-a-symptom-of-more-serious-problems-in-… https://retractionwatch.com/

The review process is generally garbage for everything below Tier 1 journals. The original point stands. https://retractionwatch.com is a good one to read occasionally.

Macchiarini conducted research on human subjects without MoH ethical approval. 2011 and 2014, Macchiarini implanted artificial windpipes in at least eight patients in Sweden, the United States, and Russia. All but one died following severe complications with the implants. (The patient who survived had the implant removed.) The most outrageous part of his fraud is his colleagues who attempted to be whistleblowers when they noticed adverse outcomes from Macciarini were silenced and retaliated against by the Karolinska Institute. https://retractionwatch.com/2017/03/24/three-tough-years-macchiarini-w…

Check out https://retractionwatch.com/ , a continuous stream of exposés on authors publishing flawed or fraudulent works.

These are good points and hard to know. But the Retraction Watch is tracking stories of both mistakes and fraud in published research, across universities: https://retractionwatch.com/

>Were the subjects actually exposed in a meaningful way to another source of asbestos One of the subjects previously filed a workers comp claim for asbestos exposure at a textile plant where she worked, despite being considered to have had no asbestos exposure other than from cosmetic talc for the purposes of the quoted study. https://retractionwatch.com/2023/01/24/jj-subsidiary-alleges-fraud-in-…

Yes, and we even have a system for that. Retraction. https://retractionwatch.com/ I'm not saying the system is perfect but it works over time.

ahem https://retractionwatch.com/?s=turbine A lot of these appear to be cases of flat-out fraud or dubious research practices. These all get muddled together under the heading of "replication crisis" but I do think they're a bit of a different beast.

It has to do with the crisis of quality, and indeed outright fraud, that seems to be affecting science these days. https://retractionwatch.com/

Retraction Watch (source: https://retractionwatch.com) and independent consultants like Elisabeth Bik (article about her in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01363-z) are good for this, though they aren't really traditional media. ProPublica and large newspapers (e.g. The New York Times occasionally) do publish investigative work on science topics sometimes too.