[This post is based on a presentation by Annette Brown at the*** Workshop on Reproducibility and Integrity in Scientific Research, held at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, on October 26, 2018. It is cross-published on FHI 360’s R&E Search for Evidence blog***] Two weeks ago, on Halloween, I wrote a post about how to conduct a replication study using an approach that emphasizes which tests might be run in order to avoid the perception of a witch hunt.
[This blog is a repost from the article “Publishers cannot afford to be coy about ethical breaches” published April 19th, 2018 in the Times Higher Education by Adam Cox, Russell Craig, and Dennis Tourish.] There are rising concerns about the reliability of academic research, yet even when papers are retracted, the reasons are often left unexplained.
The problems of publication misconduct – manipulation, fabrication and plagiarism – and other dodgy practices such as salami-style publications are attracting increasing attention. In the newly published paper “Misconduct, Marginality, and Editorial Practices in Management, Business, and Economics” (full text available here), we present findings on these problems in MBE-journals and the diffusion of editorial practices to combat them (Karabag and Berggren, 2016).
In a recent interview on Retraction Watch, Andrew Gelman reveals that what keeps him up at night isn’t scientific fraud, it’s “the sheer number of unreliable studies — uncorrected, unretracted — that have littered the literature.” He then goes on to argue that retractions cannot be the answer. His argument is simple.