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Comment by GuestFAUniverse | Hacker News Reader

I am a co-author on a paper I never asked for, but my supervisor insisted, because the petty idea upgrading his desperate try to the point of "considerable at all" came from me. It was a chair which normally prouded itself of only publishing in the most highly regarded journals of its field (internally graded A, B, C). They had a few years without viable paper. Desperate to publish. From my POV this was a D. The paper is worthless crap, hastily put together within two weeks. It should have been obvious to the reviewers.

I feel ashamed that my name is on it. I wish I could retract it.

So, yes please: make it hard to impossible for paper mills and kill the whole publish or perish approach.

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I have a similar experience. We had a truly terrible paper written as a collaboration with a team from the US on a software project, integrating their "novel" and "innovative" component. The component took 1 hour to compile, the architecture made no sense, and the US professor constantly talked about nothing but high-flying marketing concepts. I managed to hack together a demo using their component, fixing build bugs and design flaws (the ones I could do something about).

The proof of concept worked, but it wasn't doing anything new. We were just doing what we used to do, but now this terrible component was involved in it, making everything slower and more complicated.

Somehow that became a paper, and somehow this paper passed review without a single comment (my feeling is it's because of the professor's name recognition). I'm ashamed to have my name on that paper.

I can't make sense of your first sentence. Can you rephrase it please?

OP's supervisor wrote a paper without any merit. OP then provided a "petty idea" that made the paper "considerable at all". That's how he ended up as co-author.

Thanks, exactly as I wanted it to be understood.

If it’s any consolation I split up with an ex partner after she wanted to put me as a co-author on a pseudoscience bullshit paper that she was working on to try and hit her quota. Her entire field, in the social sciences, is inventing a wild idea and using meta analysis to give it credibility. Then flying to conferences and submitting expenses.

I contributed nothing other than a statistical framework which was discarded when it broke their predefined conclusion.

When research is just means to an end...

I think as children if we are taught what earning a living means, people who only want to make ends meet would try to do it using other less damaging methods. For e.g., sales and marketing are not bad places for such people. When it comes to research people should know that perhaps money will not be great.

It is because we aren't aware of the full picture as children, we follow our passions (or we follow cool passions) and then realise that money is also important and then resort to unethical means to get that money. Let's be transparent about hard fields with children so that when they enter such fields they know what they are getting into.

I suspect there's a lot of people that end up pursuing research because they enjoy college and learning with the idea of seeking out a job sounding rather less enjoyable, and more education will just equal more $$$ in said job anyhow, right?

In the past this wasn't an issue because university was seen as optional, now in most places it's ostensibly required to obtain a sufficiently well paying job, and so much more of society ends up on a treadmill that they may not really want to hop off of.

Yeah that's about right.

I think in some fields you walk into them with some kind of noble ideology, possibly driven by marketing but then you find out it's all bullshit and you're n-years into your educational investment then. Your options are to shrug and join in or write everything off and walk away.

I don't blame people for taking advantage of it but in some areas, particularly health related, there are consequences to society past financial concerns.

> so that when they enter such fields they know what they are getting into

I don't think this would help. IMO, it's a money vs. effort thing. Yes, real research is hard, but if someone learns early on that the system can be easily gamed, then the required effort is relatively low.

Plus, there's the friction factor. Moving from undergrad to grad to post-grad to professor keeps you within an institution you know.

The game is this: get hired at a research university and pump out phony papers which look legit enough to not raise any suspicions until you get tenure. Wrap the phoniness of each paper in a shroud of plausible deniability. If anything comes out after you're tenured, then just deny and/or deflect any wrongdoing.

I treat all social science degrees as "likely bullshit" these days. Could as well be astrology.

A few computer science friends of mine worked at a social science department during university. Their tasks included maintaining the computers, but also support the researchers with experiment design (if computers were involved) and statistical analysis. They got into trouble because they didn't want to use unsound or incorrect methods.

The general train of thought was not "does the data confirm my hypothesis?" but "how can I make my data confirm my hypothesis?" instead. Often experiments were biased to achieve the desired results.

As a result, these scientific misconduct was business as usual and the guys eventually quit.

Glad to know they quit. That's exactly what I observed, except it was probably worse if I think back at it. I'm a mathematician "by trade" so was sort of pulled into this by proxy because they were out of their depth in a tangle of SPSS. Not that I wasn't but at least I have conceptual framework in which to do the analysis. I had no interest or knowledge of the field but when you're with someone in it you have to toe the line a little bit.

Observations: Firstly inventing a conclusion is a big problem. I'm not even talking about a hypothesis that needs to be tested but a conclusion. A vague ambiguous hypothesis which was likely true was invented to support the conclusion and the relationship inverted. Then data was selected and fitted until there was a level of confidence where it was worth publishing it. Secondly they were using very subjective data collection methods by extremely biased people then mangling and interpolating it to make it look like there was more observation data than there was. Thirdly when you do some honest research and not publish because it looks bad saying that the entire field is compromised for the conference coming up which everyone is really looking forward to and has booked flights and hotels already.

If you want to read some of the hellish bullshit, look up critique of the Q methodology.

Sounds like economics.

Research fraud is common pretty much everywhere in academia, especially where there's money, i.e. adjacent to industry.

It does rather depend on the industry. Research in fields relevant to electrical engineering are much less likely to be fraudulent because the industry actually uses the results to make the products and the customers depend on those products working as specified.. If you discover a better and cheaper ceramic insulator you can be confident that transformer manufacturers will take it up but the big companies are well stocked with experts in the field so a fraudulent paper will quickly be spotted.

Graphene in electrical engineering is a staple of every (dis)reputable papermill.

"New battery tech promises 1.5x density, no fire risk, 20 year lifespan"

Let me introduce you to theoretical condensed matter physics, where no one cares if the data confirms the hypothesis, because they are writing papers about topics that very likely can never be tested.

At least in the social sciences there is an expectation of having some data!

That's actually the part about people constantly negging on social sciences [1] that I often find confusing.

There's huge amounts of data available (geography, lots and lots of maps; history, huge amount of historical documentation; economics, vast amounts of public datasets produced every month by most governments; political science, censuses, voting records, driver registrations, political contest results all over the Earth - often for decades if not centuries).

Most is relatively well verified, and often tells you how it was verified [2]. Often it's obtainable in publicly available datasets that numerous other researchers can verify was obtained from a legitimate source. [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]

There's lots of data available. Much is also verifiable in a very personal way simply by walking somewhere and looking. In many ways, social sciences should be one of the most rigorous disciplines in most of academia.

[1] Using Wikipedia's grouping on "social sciences" (anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, management, communication studies, psychology, culturology and political science): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science

[2] Census 2020, Data Quality: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/dec...

[3] Economic Indicators by Country: https://tradingeconomics.com/indicators

[4] Our World in Data (with Demographics, Health, Poverty, Education, Innovation, Community Wellbeing, Democracy): https://ourworldindata.org/

[5] Observatory of Economic Complexity: https://oec.world/en

[6] iNaturalist (at least from a biological history perspective): https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/43577-Pan-troglodytes

[7] Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis, Data Sources: https://www.archsynth.org/resources/data-sources/

[8] Language Goldmine (linguistics datasets): http://languagegoldmine.com/

[9] Pew Research (regular surveys on economics, political science, religion, communication, psychology - usually 10,000 respondents United States, 1000 respondents international): https://www.pewresearch.org/

[10] Marinetraffic (worldwide cargo shipping): https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-12.0/cent...

[11] Flightradar Aviation Data (people movement): https://www.flightradar24.com/data

[12] Windy Worldwide Web Cameras: https://www.windy.com/?42.892,-104.326,5,p:cams

People who hate "social science" are surely targeting too wide, but there's plenty of terrible research hiding under that umbrella that relies exclusively on social media/internet surveys/self-reported data and absolutely deserves criticism.

Since I expressed negative feelings, my thoughts on this:

I wouldn't say I hate social science, that's much too strong. The rampant fraud and poor method in several of the fields just means that I put less value in peoples' academic achievements than they deserve - which I don't like, because many surely sincerely tried to do good science and spent years on getting there, but I can't filter a priori in which camp a person belongs. They should not be defunded or stuff like that, but they need to get their act together. Somehow. I suspect a lot of this is driven by extrinsics (publish or perish; need an advanced degree to get a job, but the advanced degree is actually pointless for the job; probably more things I don't think of now), and those need to change to allow for good science.

Take for example the department I mentioned above, that's essentially commiting fraud. Word is, the professor running it is actually pretty damn good at what they do. They have an accepted grant application framed on the wall: "I need 2000 bucks. Signed Professor Foobar" (like 5000$ in today's money); times surely changed for the worse for them. And I pity that, since we're often (but not always of course) talking peanuts in many of those fields. Especially for Masters level research, or for a single paper.

But I judge people in my life by their competence and character anyway, not by their degree. So politely ignoring their degree has little to no adverse effect on how I interact with them.

I’m not ragging on the whole field. If I narrow it down too much they’ll know who I am and you will know who they are.

I’ll reduce it to a part of psychology.

A lot of psychology research involves data not from these datasets, though.

The complaint is that their data often doesn't strongly support the hypothesis, and dubious statistical techniques are performed to make it appear otherwise. And just poor statistics abilities (not malicious intent).

Physicists get away with it because they often just don't do any statistics. Often the data aligns so well with the hypothesis that you don't need any sophisticated techniques, or their work doesn't involve any data (like my example in my prior comment).

Most US trained physicists have never taken a course in statistics. It's not in the curriculum in most universities. When I was in school and would point it out, the response was always "Why do we need a whole course in statistics? We learn it in quantum mechanics."

No. That's probability you learn. Not statistics.

In social sciences (and medicine) people take a lot more statistics courses because the systems are much more complex than typical physics systems. A lot more confounding variables, etc. They simply need more statistics.

(Yes, yes. I know. There's probably some experimental branch in physics where people actually do use statistics. But most don't).

I'm not a fan of flaming, but I have to get it out: where are the people screaming "THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED!" in any thread involving politically-relevant science? How can they read stuff like this constantly posted on HN then just trust sociology/psychology du jour to tell them what to think (or more likely, to help them justify what was already in their head)? Is Gell-Mann amnesia that potent?

Luckily this made-up social science trash won't be used as evidence when shaping our policies, so it's pretty harmless! /s

To be fair, lobbyists will use phony science from any field to influence policy, not just the social sciences. Think of the tobacco industry.

The science is settled, bro.

Maybe we need an "Alan Smithee" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Smithee) for research papers.

As a co-author are you not able to do so?

In theory $SYSTEM is the most excellent thing that humanity could ever hope and everyone knows they that by acting in accordance with the stated expected behaviors, they will act in the best way they can think of to achieve the best result for everybody.

In practice people see that $SYSTEM is rotten and most likely to doom everyone on the long span, with increasingly absurd actions accepted silently on the road. But they also have the firm conviction that not bending the knee, be brave and say out loud what’s in everyone mind, will only put them on the fast track to play the scapegoat and change nothing else on the overall.

Think about it: over-reporting of grain production was a major factor of the great Chinese Famine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

Thank you for providing the link for this- it's greatly interesting to see how such a failure could occur through human means and the significant impact it had, and how it can directly relate to academia (really, many topics, anywhere there is a '$SYSTEM').

The cover ups in the article were also interesting- a deliberate staging to Mao to prevent uncovering the truth. I'm not sure how this compares directly (is there a centralized authority with power to fix the issue that is being lied to, compared to the decentralized "rotten" system, where the status quo is understood and 'accepted').

Technically being able isn't the same as your career surviving actually going through with it.

Damned if you do and damned if you don't

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