When is it fraud?
| 19 July, 2011 | Richard P. Grant |
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Via a tweet from F1000 Member David Stephens I came across the latest edition of despatches from the frontline, aka the Journal of Cell Science‘s ‘Sticky Wicket‘ column.
‘Sticky Wicket,’ for those of you not in the know, is an irregular series of pseudonymous writings from practising scientists. Originally authored by ‘Mole,’ apparently an ageing professor in the biosciences, he now shares this important task with a young researcher with a freshly minted PhD, ‘Molette’, and a more senior post-doc, ‘X-Gal’. And I must confess I’d forgotten it existed. So thank you David, for reminding me.
In the current installment, ‘Smoke and Mirrors,’ X-Gal ponders an ethical conundrum. One of her colleagues has a pet hypothesis that is borne out by two independent lines of evidence. However, a third approach is yielding results that are equivocal. They don’t appear to disprove the hypothesis, but neither are they as positive as one might wish. Should X-Gal’s colleague ignore these data, or publish the work with a ‘representative’ (i.e. best) image, or show positive and negative data and hope the reviewers understand?
I think I know what I’d do, but X-Gal would like to canvas the opinion of the community, too. You can write to her at xgal@biologists.com.
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My view: Quantify it and include it. While at the moment this is about the current hypothesis, these EM data could work toward someone else’s work in the future. Furthermore, these data might even have some greater significance for the underlying biology. It might avoid someone else coming to the same conclusion and not publishing their EM data on the same experiment. Repetition is vital in science but how to know that you are indeed repeating an experiment if it was never published in the first place?
The flip-side is of course that a manuscript needs to retain a narrative and if it is to find its way to the highest echelons of publishing (which could make a postdoctoral career) then I would imagine that clarity and “punch” are the key factors. This must inevitably leads to folk leaving data out. More reason for looking at citations of a paper rather than the IF of the journal. [Journal of Molecular Cell Biology as a prime example of misleading IFs! http://jmcb.oxfordjournals.org/ ].
While I normally loathe the stuff, one could make an argument for this being the most appropriate use of supplemental data. This would avoid distracting from the flow of the paper but would ensure that these experiments are published alongside the original work.
A sound scientific argument would be to find another validation of the hypothesis using an additional technique. This gets quickly into the realms of hand-waving without knowing more about the question at hand.
Regarding the blog title – fraud is perhaps too strong – poor science is certainly how I would describe it.
Thanks David. I tend to agree with you.
Yes, the title is a little strong, but such questions definitely have to be asked, and have ethical implications.