?
Most articles are *never* cited or cited only a handful of times, and in those cases they are usually a self-citation by the author. Some of that's the proliferation of predatory journals, and some of that is what I personally call "literature
pollution" - people who publish anemic work that such as making simple derivative of a known compound, or publishing what should be one paper as a series of five, ten or even twenty papers. I had one colleague who was famous for this - he was proud that he
had several hundred papers; I looked at one and 14 of the 17 references were to his own work which, quite honestly was of little value or interest. As a peer reviewer, that kind of self-citation alone would cause me to reject a manuscript. Discussion here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02479-7
But to give you an idea just how hard it is to retract a paper let's look at a few examples.
First, aluminum causes Alzheimer's. For the most part, it does not (too many caveats to list here). That wasted multi-decade debacle was thrust into the mainstream by a single paper published in Science (or was it Nature, I can't remember)
that found aluminum in brain samples. Aluminum should not be able to cross the blood-brain barrier so there was a lot of hype about whether the condition made that barrier porous or whether aluminum caused that to happen etc. etc. Hundreds of millions of dollars
of follow-on research, people throwing out their aluminum cookware, avoiding aluminum cans; you still see it on fringe sites to this day. It turns out that when the researchers were forced to go back and re-examine their data the aluminum in the brain samples
had come from the aluminosilicate dust in the walls of their drying oven.
Now, you would think that after causing all that wasted effort, the authors and the journal would immediately retract the article. No, I almost choked when the journal published (sometime around 1992, I recall) a small correction which
described the issue and they authors stated something to the effect "our findings should be reconsidered in light of this issue." Bad science, bad data, bad technique, unsupported conclusions and you should just "consider" this when reading their conclusions.
Scientific malpractice. Retraction was certainly warranted. And, that means the paper was still out there for people to cite. And in those days searching the literature generally meant hoofing to the library to pull each 5-year Chem Abstracts index, so nobody
would see the "correction".
Second, vaccines cause autism. Of course, they don't. Look at the damage that one falsified personal-agenda idiot did to both science and society (and the implications for vaccine resistance in the current environment). It took Lancet
**12 years** to officially retract that **fraudulent** piece of work.
Third, water has memory. Nature actually published this recycled homeopathic claptrap in 1988 even though they took an unprecedented step of trying to confirm the claims; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Benveniste The
author refused to retract the article. Homeopathic anything is junk psuedoscience.
Two more words: cold fusion.
Finally, I think every bench chemist has certainly suffered from trying to make an intermediate using a literature prep and not being able to get it to work. But after wasting a week or three, you don't usually bother to contact the author
unless you really, really, really have no options and, even then, it was on something they did years ago and have moved on from. Not something anyone would bother to retract or try to force.
Overall, while retractions are becoming sightly more common, the simple fact is that it would require Herculean efforts to force a retraction on a paper where the author is unwilling to admit to or accept the need. And what researcher has
time to go mount a campaign against a piece of bad science that he or she has discovered when time is already such a precious commodity and it means picking a fight with another research group as well as any of their clique, one that might end up reviewing
your latest research grant? Another discussion of retractions https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5395722/
I have second-hand knowledge of two near-retractions. The first was an error that one of the coauthors spotted in paper that had been submitted - I don't remember the circumstances but the advisor had to pull it in prepress and redo part
of the work to correct it. Because that's what a conscientious scientist who cares about his/her reputation does. The second was another prepress retraction caused by the graduate student who felt such pressure to reproduce his results that he grabbed the
pen on the NMR plotter and made a peak where it needed to be. That one had already had a patent filed on it. The student was forced out of the graduate program shortly thereafter.
The sources I mentioned below looked specifically at high-impact papers. And that irreproducibility rate is downright scary. Good science requires good work; just being published does not guarantee quality. Trust but verify, especially
when it involves subsequent human trials.
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See the link below about the "Correcting the Scientific Record: Retraction Practices in Chemistry and Materials Science" published in 2019. Around 331
articles were retracted in the fields of chemistry, materials science, and chemical engineering, out of 1,114,476 papers published in those fields. Even though the number is too
small, possibly something is really incorrect with these articles.
Good science is reproducible. However, it's an open secret that a significant amount of biomedical (and other) research is not. Here are a couple slides from a lecture called
Paradigms and Pseudoscience I do in my Nobel Prize course. Keep in mind this is discussing high-impact papers that passed peer review in some of the highest impact
journals out there
Slide 1 - Good Science is Reproducible
¥ 2012, Nature - Amgen scientists look at 53 landmark cancer studies. Confirmed only 6 (11%).
¥ 2011 - Bayer Scientists found only 25% of published preclinical studies could be validated.
¥ These papers spawned hundreds of other secondary studies that did not seek to confirm or falsify the original work.
¥ Secondary research included clinical studies. Wow.
¥ Reproducible studies- "authors had paid close attention to controls, reagents, investigator bias and describing the complete data set."
¥ Others - plagued by lack of double blind control studies, presentation of a single result or data point, supplying data that supports their hypothesis but discarding data
that does not!
Slide 2 - This is Widespread
¥ NIH official comments 75% of published biomedical findings would be hard to reproduce.
¥ Smaller studies more prone to false conclusions.
¥ Nobody gets a publication/credit for reproducing work.
¥ "Publish or perish" makes people push out work prematurely.
¥ Reviewers seldom look at supplemental material and (in chemistry) do not reproduce the experiments.
"Unreliable Research: Trouble At The Lab", The Economist, 2013, Oct 19th 2013
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble
Slide 3 - The Math (using figures from the aboveÉsee graphic titled "Unlikely results")
¥ Assume 1,000 hypotheses, of which 100 are true.
¥ Assume false negatives will result in 80% (80) of them being found.
¥ Of 900 false hypotheses, 5% (45) will be false positives for various reasons.
¥ This makes 125 positive results, so (45/125) = 36% of the results are bogus!
¥ Negative results are 97% trustworthy.
¥ But no journals are interested in negative results!
Key poins - you don't get tenure, you don't get grants, and your company doesn't make money for replicating someone else's research. And this leads to a dangerous cascade
of research and effort based on unconfirmed results.
Ask me about peer review nextÉ.
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It will be interesting to see if this approach of peer review after publication becomes a trend in the scientific publishing world as in person meetings become less common
and preprints rise in prominence in all fields...
- Ralph
Subject: [CHMINF-L] Debunking Bad COVID-19 Research
Date: June 29, 2020 at 4:15:33 PM GMT-4
From today's Inside Higher Ed
"MIT Press and the Berkeley School of Public Health are launching a new COVID-19 journal, one that will peer review preprint articles getting a lot of attention -- elevating the good research
and debunking the bad.
The Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 journal
will be led by Bertozzi, who will serve as the first editor in chief. Unlike a traditional journal, authors will not submit their work for review. Instead, the Rapid
Reviews team will select and review already-published preprint articles -- a publishing model known as an overlay journal."
In addition to it being an overlay journal, "Bertozzi hopes that by encouraging reviewers to attach their names to publicly published reviews, transparency and accountability will promote thoughtfulness
and care. Bertozzi hopes that each preprint article selected for review will be reviewed by at least two experts in the field. The reviews will themselves be reviewed to ensure they meet certain quality benchmarks, Bertozzi said."
American Chemical Society Committee on Chemical Safety
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