Within months of starting his undergraduate at Stanford University, 18-year-old Theo Baker was already on the trail of a story that would lead him to become the youngest George Polk award winner in American journalism history.
This is a major problem in probably all high profile labs. The PI is super busy because he is such a top dog in his field, he has dozens of postdocs and phd students who are all lucky if they get to see him 10 minutes every few weeks. No supervision or control but all the academic pressure to produce something. And not just anything, but something great and interesting. Of course this can result in people doctoring (heh) results.
I think what’s surprising about it, is that this isn’t a laundry list of shitty journals. High quality journals have a fairly rigorous review process meant to surface and deal with exactly this kind of thing. The bigger journals are quite good at spotting simple techniques like omitting data or p-hacking, but it appears that at least historically they were less resistant to image manipulation. Although I’ve never been a prolific researcher going through the submitter process with a place with the amount of prestige that Science and Nature brings and it’s very possible that they lax the process for high profile people or those who submit regularly. Either way, I’m sure many journals are watching this unfold quite closely as there will be much to learn to make processes more resilient to issues like this.
This is a major problem in probably all high profile labs. The PI is super busy because he is such a top dog in his field, he has dozens of postdocs and phd students who are all lucky if they get to see him 10 minutes every few weeks. No supervision or control but all the academic pressure to produce something. And not just anything, but something great and interesting. Of course this can result in people doctoring (heh) results.
I think what’s surprising about it, is that this isn’t a laundry list of shitty journals. High quality journals have a fairly rigorous review process meant to surface and deal with exactly this kind of thing. The bigger journals are quite good at spotting simple techniques like omitting data or p-hacking, but it appears that at least historically they were less resistant to image manipulation. Although I’ve never been a prolific researcher going through the submitter process with a place with the amount of prestige that Science and Nature brings and it’s very possible that they lax the process for high profile people or those who submit regularly. Either way, I’m sure many journals are watching this unfold quite closely as there will be much to learn to make processes more resilient to issues like this.