Janet Stemwedel is blogging, as is her wont, about questions of ethical behavior in science. She had a post Monday giving advice on how to counter unethical behavior, which all seems pretty good to me.
Unfortunately, the people who read and comment on blogs about academic culture tend to start at “corrosively cynical,” and get more misanthropic from there, so Janet has been deluged with negative commentary about how nothing she suggests will work. Feeling beleagured, she has issued a call for comments from senior scientists, asking for stories of how they deal with ethical issues:
I keep hearing — and I really believe — that most scientists are serious about doing good science and behaving ethically. Let’s hear from some of those good scientists at the top of the food chain that the game isn’t run by the scoundrels
The response thus far has been underwhelming.
Unfortunately, I really can’t do all that much to help her out.
I’m in kind of a weird intermediate position, here. I’m technically “senior faculty,” but the ink is still wet on my tenure documents, so it’s not like I can bring decades of experience to bear on this question.
And, on top of that, my experience with the scientific community has generally been positive. The AMO physics community is not terribly cut-throat as such things go, and as a table-top experimental science, it’s not really susceptible to the data or sample theft issues that Janet mentions in the life sciences. The research groups I’ve worked directly with are headed by good people, and I’m not directly aware of anything the least bit fishy taking place in any of those groups. We never even really stretched a legitimate claim, to the best of my knowledge.
I’ve heard dark mutterings about a couple of research groups in the field, but when I’ve questioned the mutterers, the issue has come down to “So-and-so’s group went and did an experiment that they knew the Such-and-such group was working on, and published it first.” I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for that, especially as even the people doing the grumbling admitted that So-and-so had gone out of their way to give Such-and-such a chance to complete the experiment.
It sucks to get scooped, and it’s happened to me more than once. But such is life, and the proper response is just to complete the experiment, and do it better than the people who scooped you.
There are really only two situations I know of directly that border on ethical issues, and those are really minor. One involves the mass media, and a researcher who rushed out a press release claiming an achievement that he really couldn’t back up with evidence. He probably had done what he claimed to have done, but he didn’t have rock-solid proof when he called the media to get mentioned in the same articles as another group that had much better evidence.
In that case, his reputation took a bit of a hit for a few years. People in the field all sort of rolled their eyes at him, and nobody gave the claim all that much weight. He stopped pushing it after a couple of years, and it’s largely forgotten now. Anybody who’s followed the last twenty-ish years of AMO physics probably knows the story, though.
The other case I have direct knowledge of involves a researcher who wrote a paper about work that was very similar to something my lab had recently published, without citing us at all. In that case, my boss sent a somewhat sharply worded email to the PI of the group in question, and received an apologetic response. In subsequent talks and posters on the same subject, we were always cited, and we considered the matter closed.
These are both incredibly trivial cases, and barely register on the same scale of the offenses Janet is talking about. As I said, though, I was trained in an extremely collegial community, and I had the good fortune to be working for one of the very top groups in the field. The view may well be very different from the perspective of somebody lower on the food chain, but I really can’t say.
(There’s one other case of a group that I think has slightly shortchanged me of credit for something I did, but I’m probably being petty. They did cite my work in their first paper on the subject in question– my gripe is that all subsequent papers just cite their first paper, not the earlier stuff that I worked on.)
Anyway, that’s all I have to offer in response to Janet’s call, which isn’t much. If you have other anecdotes to offer, particularly if you happen to be a senior scientist, please speak up.
(I suspect that her call for good news from senior scientists has not been answered because the people she’s trying to reach just don’t read blogs. The corrosive cynicism of many commenters probably doesn’t help, either– I know I’m not enthusiatic about commenting on these subjects, just because I can expect a flood of comments calling me hopelessly naive for thinking that scientists are basically decent people, and that the profession mostly works fine.)
(For best results, read the title in the voice of Jon Polito in the opening scene of Miller’s Crossing.)
I left the following comment on Janet’s blog (it may still be awaiting moderation there):
——
I am a mid-career scientist who can give you some good news. Not that there is no misconduct in my field, but rather that when misconduct is discovered people will do something about it.
I have referred previously to my own case. Brief summary: a group of authors submitted a manuscript to the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar Terrestrial Physics in which several paragraphs were copied verbatim from one of my papers. As a referee on the manuscript, I drew the editor’s attention to this fact, and the editor rejected the paper. Two weeks later, the authors submitted a slightly revised (but still infringing) manuscript to Annales Geophysicae, which published the paper. Upon discovering the published version I complained to the editors. The result was the following editorial (which has now emerged from behind the paywall):
http://www.ann-geophys.net/25/1/2007/angeo-25-1-2007.pdf
I think that this is one of those issues that depends strongly on the field you are in. The larger the pool of competition and the higher the stakes, the greater the appeal of doing something unethical.
In the fields of astronomy I work in, there are only a few people publishing papers, we all know each other. There are some strong disagreements and the occasional nasty referee report, but it would be pretty hard to get away with anything, in part because the data are mostly public.
The bigger reason, though, is that I do not work in a really high stakes field. No one will get a Nobel prize for our stuff, nor is anyone going to form a company that will make billions marketing a wonder drug. When big money becomes involved, the number of people goes up and the urge to cheat.
I think that this is one of those issues that depends strongly on the field you are in. The larger the pool of competition and the higher the stakes, the greater the appeal of doing something unethical.
I don’t disagree, but in the case of academic researchers, can the stakes ever be said to be small? If your tenure case is riding on publications, it seems like there should always be a powerful incentive to at least push the envelope, if not cheat outright.
Experience with fields in which there were no strong precautions taken to detect unethical behavior, and then had standards imposed, suggests that there’s usually lots of corruption in places people aren’t bothering to look.
Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.
This doesn’t contradict your statements – most people are basically decent, and your subfield of science probably does work well enough – but those statements do not indicate that there isn’t a problem.