I Saw That. ~ Karma
I was reading some case summaries on the research misconduct page of office of research integrity (ORI). First of all, I was surprised by the number of cases of research misconduct every year. The year 2015 had the most cases reported and though there were fewer cases in the following years (same number of cases in 2016 and 2017), there is not really a big improvement per se. These cases are just those reported to public health service (PHS) in the field of biomedical and behavioral research. There would be many more cases overall in the research field probably in hundreds if not thousands. I read the summary of the only case in 2018 so far. The person involved, a post-doctoral fellow at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), National Institute of Health (NIH), falsified/fabricated data in two papers: one paper published in Cell, a very high impact journal and another paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was not a small innocuous change in some data to make the graph look prettier but falsification in almost every data and graph of the two papers. Now, I know even some professors get involved in the malpractice and the person was only a postdoctoral fellow, however, lying in the paper all over the place, is something you would not do in your right mind. Leave alone the probability of getting caught, if you are publishing something which is utter nonsense, definitely, the fundamentals of a scientific community are not clear to the person. It becomes all the more important in fields such as biomedical research as the results might have a direct negative effect on human health. This brings us to the point that if the person was thinking with all the senses functioning, then there must be too much pressure to publish. Moreover, if there were any supervisors, which details were not provided, are also a part of the misconduct. I think the peer pressure of publishing has completely changed the basic idea of the need to publish any scientific findings. Papers should be published in order to inform the community of the new findings in the science which will either help the society or the science in developing further. Nowadays, papers are just a checkmark on the resume of the person. I read a lot of papers as part of my research and find that so many of them are just useless. Some papers just repeat the things with slightly different words and slightly different concept and publish in a different journal. We, as a community, need to change the way we put requirements on the professors and students. A healthy community is one which is free to think, experiment and develop. If you put it in a cage and ask it to perform, it can only think and do what a caged person can do. Furthermore, in order to come out of the cage, a person tries to do everything and hence, sometimes doesn’t hesitate in trying the wrong path. They are not able to see the big picture and at the time only think about themselves. However, we need to learn whatever goes around comes around. Karma is a sweet thing if you can just do the right thing.
More details about the case can be found here.
