Source: Great Wall Network
●Special Commentator Zhang Tiankan (Beijing)
Recently, the president of a 985 university and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering was exposed to have faked papers, and the experimental pictures of the papers had traces of PS. On PubPeer, an online platform for foreign academic exchanges where the papers were initially exposed to have faked papers, more than 40 papers with the author's signature included in the academician can be retrieved on PubPeer, an abnormal image of the above-mentioned image, and the author's signature includes the academician.
In this regard, members of the academician's scientific research team have begun to answer questions about the corresponding papers on PubPeer. Replies were given to 4 of more than 40 papers. Dr. Elisabeth Bik, who has worked in the Stanford University School of Medicine, believes that some of the questions can be resolved, but some of them have answers that although she does not know much about it, they seem serious. She hopes that the academician team can answer the questions of the remaining papers, "Of course, this takes time."
No matter what the final facts are, this incident may deepen people's understanding of the more and more papers in modern scientific research. Apart from the fact that has not yet been identified, a large number of previous papers have been falsified and withdrawn. But why is this phenomenon happening, and why is it becoming more and more serious?
Winner take all mechanism helps explain it all. Whether intentional or unintentional fraud, as long as the paper is published and the more papers are published, the more likely it is to obtain a large amount of resources, including scientific research funds. This situation has spread to graduate scholarship applications. "As long as you publish a lot of papers, National Scholarship is yours!"
This is like neurofeedback, but if it continues to develop, it may evolve from positive feedback to negative feedback . The role of positive feedback is that publishing scientific research papers is an important indicator for measuring scientific research, so there are various rewards, funds and resources to encourage researchers to engage in research and publish papers. However, the prerequisite for publishing a paper is to do a good job and do enough homework, conduct in-depth research, and obtain objective, verifiable, repeatable data and facts. However, this requires a lot of labor and long time.
Moreover, some situations in scientific research, including academic and social, make the publication of papers driven and difficult by various motivations. For example, positive papers are easier to publish than negative papers, and papers with negative results are often not published, namely the so-called "file drawer effect", and the "sleeping beauty phenomenon" after the publication (a paper does not attract attention and reaction after it is published, and no one quotes it, and it will only be noticed after decades of silence), etc., so that researchers will try their best to process and PS their papers. Just as Dr. Bik now questioned that many pictures of the academician's papers are either PS or reused when arguing different results. The purpose is to make the results look better and easier to publish. The premise for the publication of
papers is that the result is positive, positive results, and there must be a sensational effect. These three requirements are more difficult than the other, but if they can be met, it will be easier to publish. The more papers are published, the winner will be the winner-takes-all, and a large amount of funds and resources will also belong to those who have published more and most papers. According to reports, the academicians who are questioned have published more than 300 papers, of which the current doubts account for 10%-15% of the total number of published articles.
On the other hand, whether it is the allocation and investment of government research funds formed by taxpayers, or the R&D funds invested by enterprises and other institutions, it depends on the amount of papers, and a mechanism may be formed to encourage the publication of papers that are not conducive to the encouragement of serious and true results. Even research papers without positive results need to be published, thus forming a negative feedback.
Under the sole and main criteria for judging the number of papers, some researchers will consider how to package their research results better and tell the story more perfectly, creating something out of nothing, creating something out of nothing, and then making it very exciting and perfect.
Some researchers admitted that their original trials were done many times, but only once came up with the results they wanted, and they wrote this only positive result into the paper because it would be a "perfect story." Behind the "perfect story" is of course funding and reputation. Moreover, the more perfect stories such as this, the more papers even with PS data and results, the easier it is to obtain funding. Negative feedback such as
has caused the gradual increase in falsified and non-repeatable papers. Some studies have shown that at least half of the papers published in world-class academic journals today are non-repeatable and verified. In addition, in a research report on more than 20,000 papers in 40 journals in the past 20 years, 3.8% of the papers have problems with a total of 782 images.
Of course, the phenomenon of fraud in papers is very complicated, and it is not just the responsibility of scientific researchers. The scientific research and evaluation mechanism and R&D funding methods will all affect the authenticity of the papers. But the most fundamental thing is whether more scientific researchers can adhere to the bench-bench ethics like Einstein , Podolsky, and Rosen.
