Predatory journals face intense scrutiny

In a great example of collaborative journalism, The Indian Express partners with several other big names in the news business to shine a bright and harsh spotlight on predatory journals. Its global partners include broadcasters NDR and WDR (Germany), and newspapers Suddeutsche Zeitung (Germany) and Le Monde (France), and the magazine The New Yorker (USA); IE says International Consortium of Investigative Journalists provided the platform for the over 60 journalists to share their findings.

There is just way too much that has been brought to light, so I will just provide a link to the stories [Update: Links to the entire series of news stories in The Indian Express are collected at this page]:

• From The Indian Express, a whole bunch of stories, an explainer and aan interview, all by Shyamlal Yadav:
  • Inside India’s fake research paper shops: pay, publish, profit. "Despite UGC blacklist, hundreds of ‘predatory journals’ thrive, cast shadow on quality of faculty and research nationwide."
  • V-Cs, AIIMS, IIT professors on list: ‘Students sent it, we don’t know’. "Most of them figure in publications brought out by Hyderabad-based OMICS and Turkey-based WASET, which claim to organise research conferences across the world."
  • How the pay-and-publish business works. "The pressure to publish, and to present papers at conferences in order to collect the marks needed for recruitments/promotions often incentivises pay-to-publish practices."
  • Fake Science: 1 journal to 1,500 in 10 years, Hyderabad is hub of pay & publish. "Fake Science part-II: Most of these journals exist online and are operated by companies based across the city, including the posh Banjara Hills, but flaunt addresses from abroad on their websites, mostly in the US and UK."
  • Fake Science, Part III: Energy cure, God university get prime space for money. "The Indian Express accessed over 90 articles published by Trivedi and found similar claims in all. He also claims to have developed 'Trivedi Water', which is listed on Amazon but is 'currently unavailable'."
  • An iterview with Jeffrey Beall, the man who first came up with the description "predatory" to describe these journals and publishers: Jeffrey Beall: ‘Predatory publishers threaten scientific integrity, are embarrassment to India’. "Beall said that universities need to re-examine how they evaluate faculty and should not give credit for publications in fake journals."
• Scilla Alecci in ICIJ Blog: New international investigation tackles ‘fake science’ and its poisonous effects. Has links to some of the other articles from other countries, notably Germany and France.
• NDR: More than 5,000 German scientists have published papers in pseudo-scientific journals. It has a lot of info about articles and news stories from the other partners, but without providing links!

Links

1. FY Fluid Dynamics on Dead salmon swimming.
2. Editorial in Nature: China sets a strong example on how to address scientific fraud. "New measures introduce what could be the world’s strongest disincentive for misconduct so far."
3. David D. Perlmutter in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Academic Job Hunts From Hell: Keep on Script. "The job interview is not a spontaneous exchange, it’s a minefield."
4. Debraj Ray and Arthur Robson in Vox EU: Certified random co-authors. "This column -- whose authors both have surnames starting with R, one of whom was once recommended a “wonderful paper” on which he was a co-author -- proposes a new mechanism for co-authorship. It involves a coin toss to order co-authors, and an institutionally ratified symbol to signal random order. Such a mechanism would be fairer and more efficient, and it would displace alphabetical order through voluntary participation alone."
5. Leonie Mueck in Nature Nanotechnology: Report the awful truth!. "Negative and null results are routinely produced across all scientific disciplines, but rarely get reported. The key to combat the biases arising from this mismatch lies in disseminating all details about a work." rather than just positive results."

Avijit Pathak: "Debating Plagiarism: Indian Academia Is Producing Imitative Conformists"

Riffing off on recent cases of plagiarism by Indian academics, he poses a deeper question: "Is ... our thinking itself ... plagiarised?"

To illustrate his point, he presents an episode from his own days "as a student of sociology at a leading university in Delhi":

... Let me recall what I experienced as a student of sociology at a leading university in Delhi. My professor asked me to write a paper on caste. I met my professor and conveyed my wish. ‘Sir, I have read what you have asked us to read. However, in my paper I wish to write something more: the way I saw, experienced and analysed the institutionalisation and practice of caste, and through this account, I would learn and unlearn the texts you have suggested.’

The professor said, ‘No, you can’t write what you think, experience and feel. You are required to write the way the likes of M.N. Srinivas and Louis Dumont have thought about it’.

I followed his instruction and wrote a highly-mechanised but ‘academically impressive’ paper with predictable quotes and references from the big names. Needless to add, I got a good grade. In other words, I got the message: My style, my perception, my words do not count; what matters is a defined academic format, a style created by others. I have to be clever in the art of copying.

A student's FB post on scientific misconduct in her lab

There are several updates, which appear at the end of the post.

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Read this post (on FB) by Jayita Barua from a week ago. After reading her post, keep a copy for your own record -- just in case her FB post is taken down.

The magnitude of the misconduct in Barua's post is mind-boggling, and the frank way in which she talks about the mental trauma caused by the toxic environment in her lab is truly moving.

It is very brave of Barua to have come out and said all this in an open forum. I hope she will get all the support she needs. From my distance, the least I can do is to spread the word.

I know nothing about Barua's background -- not even the college and the research group she was in, and I stay away from FB. Which means that I am not aware of any follow-up action at her college / university. If you know of any, please leave a comment.

[Thanks to a friend who forwarded it.]

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Update 1 (1 May 2018): G. Mudur of The Telegraph has a story on this case, triggered by Barua's post: CU teacher under data fraud scanner. This story appears in the Metro section, implying that the editors decided that this is of interest primarily to the residents of their home ground, Kolkata.

We learn two things: (a) Calcutta University has formed a two-member inquiry committee to probe this case, and (b) Dr. Anindita Ukil, Barua's PhD adviser, denies having committed any fraud or misconduct. A key quote:

Ukil said Barua was not a regular National Eligibility Test-qualified scholar who earned her own fellowship as most others in her laboratory, but was dependent on a project-based salary.

"She was in our lab for four years and participated enthusiastically in all our activities. She has raised this issue now - after being told earlier this month that she could not be provided any new project fellowship," Ukil said. "Why she has done this is beyond my understanding."

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Update 1a (A little later on 1 May 2018): Barua has an FB post in which she rubbishes Ukil's (implied) suggestion that the impending loss the scholarship might have been the reason behind Barua's allegations.

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Update 2 (2 May 2018): I am a little late to post this, but Nature India too has covered this case (in fact, this story was done even earlier than the one in The Telegraph). In their story, Biplab Das and Subhra Priyadarshini report that:

Barua's PhD guide Anindita Ukil, an assistant professor in the department, denied having forged data or being involved in any kind of scientific misconduct. “All these allegations are entirely false,” Ukil told Nature India over phone. “I have already informed the authorities of the Calcutta University and the matter is under scrutiny,” she said.Barua said she had also informed Prasanta Kumar Bag, head of biochemistry department of the University, and funding authorities – the Department of Science and Technology and Department of Biotechnology – about years of wrongdoing at the lab. Contacted, Bag also refrained from commenting saying that the issue was "under scrutiny by higher authorities".

Whistleblowing is Hard (and Dangerous): Theranos Edition

Just drop everything and read this absolutely gripping WSJ story on Tyler Shultz, the Theranos whistleblower (who also happens to be the grandson of former Secretary of State George Shultz, who was -- and continues to be -- associated with Theranos).

This snippet is from the section where the lawyers appear:

A few weeks later, Mr. [Tyler] Shultz was confronted by his father after arriving for dinner with his parents at their home in Los Gatos, Calif. His grandfather had called to say Theranos suspected he had talked to the Journal reporter. Theranos’s lawyers wanted to meet with him the next day.

He says he called his grandfather and asked if they could meet without lawyers. The elder Mr. Shultz agreed and invited his grandson to his house. The mood was tense but cordial, Tyler Shultz recalls, and he denied talking to any reporters. He says his step-grandmother was present during the conversation.

His grandfather asked if he would sign a one-page confidentiality agreement to give Theranos peace of mind. According to Tyler Shultz, when he said yes, his grandfather revealed that two lawyers were waiting upstairs with the agreement.

Ranjit Chandra

Via Shannon Palus in Retraction Watch (After court verdict, BMJ retracts 26-year-old paper), we get links to two devastating BMJ articles:

1. Editorial: A major failure of scientific governance.

2. A feature by Caroline White: Ranjit Chandra: how reputation bamboozled the scientific community

See also: the Ranjit Chandra archive in the blog of the late Seth Roberts.

Links

1. Ben Goldacre in Buzzfeed News: Scientists Are Hoarding Data And It’s Ruining Medical Research. "Major flaws in two massive trials of deworming pills show the importance of sharing data — which most scientists don’t do."

2. Hari Pulakkat in Economic Times Blogs: Why India is lagging in disruptive innovation.

3. John P.A. Ioannidis in Al Jazeera: Could Greece become prosperous again?

   Populism and a critical lack of know-how is the common denominator among the neo-Stalinist syndicalists, outspoken nationalists and eccentric university professors (most of whom are entirely disconnected from serious global scholarship) who now happen to run the country. Mass media, justifiably anxious to create anti-austerity heroes, manufactured an artificial reality about these people. For example, the original finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, was heralded as a famous professor of economics, while he has never authored a single scientific article in any of the 30 top economics journals (as ranked based on citation impact factor by Thomson Reuters). In education and science, the two fields where Greeks particularly excel, emerging state policies are strikingly counterproductive. In his inaugural parliament speech, the minister of education (a professor emeritus) proudly declared himself a Marxist who considers excellence a stigma; fittingly, his deputy minister, a university professor of genetics, has not published any PubMed-indexed peer-reviewed scientific paper since 1996. This is Greek mediocrity at its finest.

Bad Incentives are behind Big Science Frauds

Updated with links.

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Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, the folks behind Retraction Watch have penned an op-ed in NYTimes: What’s Behind Big Science Frauds? They flag a circle of behaviours to support their thesis that "the incentives to publish today are corrupting the scientific literature"

• Science fetishizes the published paper as the ultimate marker of individual productivity. And it doubles down on that bias with a concept called “impact factor” — how likely the studies in a given journal are to be referenced by subsequent articles.

• Journals with higher impact factors retract papers more often than those with lower impact factors.

• Scientists view high-profile journals as the pinnacle of success — and they’ll cut corners, or worse, for a shot at glory.

• [The reviewers at top journals] seem to keep missing critical flaws that readers pick up days or even hours after publication.

• [P]erhaps journals rush peer reviewers so that authors will want to publish their supposedly groundbreaking work with them.

The news that appears to have triggered this op-ed is a recent retraction of a high profile paper. Since the original paper was on a topic of wide interest, it got picked up by many news outlets. Now that many problems with the data presented in the paper have been uncovered, the senior author (Prof. Donald Green, at Columbia) has sought a retraction, the journal (Science) has responded with an expression of concern, and the junior author (Michael LaCour, a grad student at UCLA) says he stands by his study and promises a comphrehensive response by the 29th of May.

Read the whole thing at Retraction Watch: Author retracts study of changing minds on same-sex marriage after colleague admits data were faked.

Here's a round-up of how various news outlets which covered the original paper have responded to the retraction.

* * *

Update (26 May 2015): An Interview With Donald Green, the Co-Author of the Faked Gay-Marriage Study by Jesse Singal in New York Magazine.

How the Gay Rights Canvassing Study Fell Apart by Naomi Shavin in The New Republic.

Links

1. Anjali Vaidya at India BioScience: Unaddressed demands remain after research fellowship hike. Uses several quotes from IISc students and faculty!

2. Prashant Nanda in Mint: Govt climbs down, to drop IIM council plan. "The HRD ministry’s change of heart came after the business schools raised concerns, say two government officials".

3. Adam Connor-Simons in MIT News: How three MIT students fooled the world of scientific journals. SCIGen is 10 years old, and this is a timely (and short) profile of the MIT grad students who created it.

4. For the Ilayaraja fans: Rare Photos Of Music Composer Ilaiyaraaja. Look at those bell-bottoms!

Links: Higher Ed Edition

1. The most depressing thing you will read this month. Kendall Powell in Nature (April 2015): The future of the postdoc. "There is a growing number of postdocs and few places in academia for them to go. But change could be on the way."

2. As usual, Google has figured it all out!

3. Ivan Oransky in The Conversation: Unlike a Rolling Stone: is science really better than journalism at self-correction?

4. Richard Van Noorden, Brendan Maher & Regina Nuzzo in Nature (October 2014): The top 100 papers. "Nature explores the most-cited research of all time."

Links: Misconduct in Science Edition

1. Jill Neimark in Aeon: The Retraction War. "Scientists seek demigod status, journals want blockbuster results, and retractions are on the rise: is science broken?"

2. John Rasko and Carl Power in The Guardian: What pushes scientists to lie? The disturbing but familiar story of Haruko Obokata. "The spectacular fall of the Japanese scientist who claimed to have triggered stem cell abilities in regular body cells is not uncommon in the scientific community. The culprit: carelessness and hubris in the drive to make a historic discovery."

3. James MacDonald at JSTOR Daily: Research Fraud: When Science Goes Bad.

4. Neuroskeptic: Editorial Misbehaviour in Autism Journals?. See also: The games we play: A troubling dark side in academic publishing by Pete Etchells and Chris Chambers in The Guardian.

5. To end all this bleakness, here's a link to something positive. Dan Hopkins in Washington Post: How to Make Scientific Research More Trustworthy. An interview with Brendan Nyhan, who advocates registering research designs before scholars begin the work.

Links

1. Veenu Sandhu in The Business Standard: Sexual harassment at work: Tell and suffer. "A woman's ordeal only worsens after she protests against sexual harassment at the office."'

2. Cat Ferguson in Retraction Watch: Rolling Stone retracts UVA gang rape story: A view from Retraction Watch. [The only (and, barely) redeeming thing in this disaster is that Rolling Stone got an external review done by Columbia Journalism School, and made the review report public.]

   Ferguson quotes from the NYTimes article on the report's findings:

   It is hardly unusual for journalists to rely on members of advocacy groups for help finding characters, but it is a practice that requires extra vigilance. “You’re in a zone there where you have to be careful,” said Nicholas Lemann, a professor at Columbia and the journalism school’s former dean.

   Mr. Lemann distributes a document called “The Journalistic Method” in one of his classes. It is a play on the term “the scientific method,” but in some respects, investigating a story is not so different from investigating a scientific phenomenon. “It’s all about very rigorous hypothesis testing: What is my hypothesis and how would I disprove it?” he said. “That’s what the journalist didn’t do in this case.”

Crusaders against bad science

Links to interviews of people at the forefront of the fight against bad science:

1. Over at Vox.com, Julia Belluz has an interview of a leader in the fight against bad science: John Ioannidis has dedicated his life to quantifying how science is broken [see also Ioannidis's recent paper: How to Make More Published Research True]. An excerpt from the interview:

   Julia Belluz: How do you guard against bad science?

   John Ioannidis: We need scientists to very specifically be able to filter [bad] studies. We need better peer review at multiple levels. Currently we have peer review done by a couple of people who get the paper and maybe they spend a couple of hours on it. Usually they cannot analyze the data because the data are not available – well, even if they were, they would not have time to do that. We need to find ways to improve the peer review process and think about new ways of peer review.

   Recently there’s increasing emphasis on trying to have post-publication review [see below for an interview with the founders of PubPeer]. Once a paper is published, you can comment on it, raise questions or concerns. But most of these efforts don’t have an incentive structure in place that would help them take off. There’s also no incentive for scientists or other stakeholders to make a very thorough and critical review of a study, to try to reproduce it, or to probe systematically and spend real effort on re-analysis. We need to find ways people would be rewarded for this type of reproducibility or bias checks.

   Julia Belluz: Doesn’t this require basically restructuring the whole system of science?

   John Ioannidis: These are open questions, I don’t have the answers. Currently we have a couple of time points where studies get reviewed. Some studies get reviewed at a funding level, and the review may not be very scientific. Many focus on the promises of significance here, and scientists have to overpromise. There’s review at the stage of the manuscript, which seems to be pretty suboptimal. So if you think about where should we intervene, maybe it should be in designing and choosing study questions and designs, and the ways that these research questions should be addressed, maybe even guiding research — promoting team science, large collaborative studies rather than single investigators with independent studies — all the way to the post-publication peer review.

   Julia Belluz: If you were made science czar, what would you fix first?

   John Ioannidis: [...] Maybe what we need is to change is the incentive and reward system in a way that would reward the best methods and practices. Currently we reward the wrong things: people who submit grant proposals and publish papers that make extravagant claims. That’s not what science is about. If we align our incentive and rewards in a way that gives credibility to good methods and science, maybe this is the way to make progress.

2. Another must read is Julia Belluzs interview of PubPeer founders:

   Why you can't always believe what you read in scientific journals. PubPeer is a website / platform to promote post-publication review, discussion, and scrutiny. Here's a sample from the interview, where the founders comment on the craze for publishing in "high impact" journals, and take a swipe at the editors at these journals:

   JB: There's been a lot of talk in recent years about how broken science is, particularly the peer-review process. What are the bigger systemic changes that need to happen in order to fix it?

   PP: The biggest problem is the pressure to chase after "metrics" — indirect measures of scientific success. The most important metric is publication in top journals, which determines jobs, grants, everything. This distorts the scientific process toward mostly illusory "breakthroughs" and "high-impact research" at the expense of careful work. Scientists now find themselves ruled by often-incompetent kingmakers — the editors of the top journals — who effectively decide their futures and make scientific fashion.

   PubPeer is helping scientists retake control of their lives, work, and careers by providing a collective judgment that is independent of and ultimately more important than acceptance by the top journals. That judgment is the expert opinion of your peers. We are also big fans of open-access publishing and the use of pre-print servers such as ArXiv or the newer bioRxiv; we believe these will also loosen the stranglehold of the top journals on research.

Links

1. Deevy Bishop: Editors behaving badly?. It starts with this (and goes down from there!):

   ... I found that for 32 papers co-authored by Matson in this journal between 2010 and 2014 for which the information was available, the median lag from a paper being received and it being accepted was one day.

2. Scott Burns in Dallas Morning News: Tortured data will confess to anything. Mentions Uri Simonsohn and p-hacking. And, of course, torture of data.

Links

1. Pushpa Bhargava in The Hindu: Scientists without a Scientific Temper.

2. Jeffrey Mervis in Science Insider: Data check: Why do Chinese and Indian students come to US universities?. See also Elizabeth Redden at Inside Higher Ed: International Enrollment Up.

3. Rachel Bernstein in Science Insider: Belief that some fields require 'brilliance' may keep women out.

4. The US Office of Research Integrity presents The Research Clinic, an "interactive training video [that] educates clinical and social researchers on the importance of appropriately protecting research subjects and avoiding research misconduct."

Plagiarism Allegations against VCs at Jadavpur, Pondicherry Universities

I completely missed these two other stories about plagiarism allegations against the Vice Chancellors at Jadavpur University and Pondicherry University. Serious stuff!

Mayank Jain in Scroll.in: Plagiarism charges fuel demands for removal of Jadavpur University's vice chancellor.

The Telegraph: Jadavpur VC credentials under court scanner.

Arun Janardhanan in The Indian Express: Pondicherry V-C has a problem: CV has a suspect book, two that can’t be traced, and his follow-up: ‘Plagiarism’: Teachers at Pondicherry varsity seek V-C’s removal.

Deepak Pental's Arrest (and Subsequent Bail)

Wow, this came out of nowhere! Prof. Deepak Pental (a professor of genetic engineering at the Delhi University, and also its Vice Chancellor during 2005-1010) was arrested, sent to Tihar Jail, before he got bail later in the evening. The charges against him were filed by a fellow DU professor (but in a different department), and they include forgery, illegal transport of genetically modified material, and plagiarism. For some strange reason, most news outlets have played up the plagiarism angle; the other charges appear far more grave (one of them, apparently, is so serious that one can be sent to jail for life).

Most news stories I have seen today were short on details, since they were reacting to fast-changing events of yesterday. Only a few have managed to go beyond the bare-bones version put out by PTI. Here are the links to some of the better-reported stories: The Telegraph, India Today, and here.

I'm sure we will get a lot more details in the days to come.

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Update: The NDTV debate doesn't offer details, but the comments by K.L. Chopra (from the Society for Scientific Values) are quite damaging to Pental's case.

Academic Stardom through Falsified Resume

Someone is a academic star?

He is from India? Check.

He used fake credentials? Check.

His victims include several American Universities? Check.

Him? No, but there are many parallels.

Nona Willis Aornowitz and Tony Dokoupil of NBC News have a totally gripping story: Ivory Tower Phony? Sex, Lies and Fraud Alleged in West Virginia.

seemed like the Doogie Howser of India, able to crack the country’s best medical school, and work there as a 21-year-old doctor. Anoop Shankar later claimed to add a Ph.D. in epidemiology and treat patients even as he researched population-wide diseases. He won a “genius” visa to America, shared millions in grants, and boasted of membership in the prestigious Royal College of Physicians.

In 2012 West Virginia University hand-picked this international star to help heal one of the country’s sickest states. At just 37, Shankar was nominated to the first endowed position in a new School of Public Health, backed by a million dollars in public funds.

But there was a problem: Shankar isn’t a Ph.D. He didn’t graduate from the Harvard of India. He didn’t write dozens of the scholarly publications on his resume ...

Some Bad Habits are Learned at School

A letter from S. Ramasesha in Current Science:

... While wilful plagiarism should be punished exemplarily, it may also, in some cases, be due to a lack of understanding on the part of the offender as to what constitutes plagiarism. In the Indian context, often the young researchers, mainly students, commit plagiarism ‘unknowingly’ because it is not clear to them as to what constitutes plagiarism and what does not. This is especially true for students in India, since in their formative years in school, often teachers give full credit only for answers which are reproduced verbatim from their textbooks or class notes. Students who write answers in their own words are often penalized. [...]

And also, this article by Tim Birkhead and Bob Montgomerie in Times Higher Education:

Further discussion with our own undergraduate research students uncovered what they considered to be the main cause of such misconduct: the way science is taught at school. The obsession with box-ticking is a major culprit, where assessment rewards only the right answer rather than the process of research and the integrity of reporting. Students told us of teachers who encouraged them to make up results (the right ones, of course) when a particular experiment had not “worked”. The problem is obvious: teachers have not been given sufficient time by governments and curriculum developers to properly teach the scientific process and to do experiments carefully. If an experiment or demonstration fails, pupils need to understand why. It is ludicrous that pupils should ever be encouraged to fake results when their experiments do not turn out as expected, or be punished with lower marks when they do not get the “right” answer. We expect that for some ambitious young scientists, the mis-training they received at school sets the agenda for the rest of their career.

Links ...

1. Infosys Science Foundation donates Rs. 20 crores to IISc for chaired professorships in mathematics and physics.

2. The Lower Ambitions of Higher Education. Dwight Garner reviews William Deresiewicz's Excellent Sheep.

   William Deresiewicz, of course, is the author of The Disadvantages of an Elite Education, an article that went viral almost immediately after it went online in 2008. It now seems to have been expanded into a book.

3. Plagiarism Allegation on Textbook's Definition of Plagiarism. The title says it all.

   [This reminds me of plagiarism in an book on ... intellectual property!]

4. Graeme Wood in The Atlantic: The Future of College?

5. It's official: paying reviewers does get results! Raj Chetty, Emmanuel Saez and László Sándor describe the lessons from their experiment with referees at an economics journal.