Researching scientific articles is addictive. Elisabeth Bik started by chance in 2013, when she discovered that someone had plagiarized her work on the human and dolphin microbiome. Pulling the thread a little, he says via videoconference, he found out that the theft of phrases was more widespread than he could have imagined. A few months later he found that in a thesis there were not only copied texts. His clinical eye detected something strange in an image. “A couple of pages later the same photo appeared, but it was flipped. “It was the same thing, but it represented a different experiment.” He continued searching and found “many other examples that had been reused.” He didn’t know it yet, but he had begun a path that would have no turning back. Despite the great personal cost in the form of threats, insults and harassment that it entails.
There came a time when this Stanford University microbiologist spent the day waiting for her workday to end before going home to track down scientific frauds. Until he did some math, he weighed his new hobby against his old job, and decided that he found it more fulfilling – and could afford – to investigate plagiarism, duplication, and all kinds of traps that plague the endless world of publishing. scientific articles. Today he is one of the few people in the world who makes a living from this activity.
Bik is one of the fraud detectives (scientific sleuthsas they are known in English) best known in the sector, but it is not the only one. Scientists (or not) from all over the world such as Michael Dougherty, Kevin Patrick, Nick Wise or Smut Clyde (this is a pseudonym) and several dozen others dedicate a good part of their free time to altruistically monitoring an uncontrolled sector, which in recent years ( decades?) has encouraged productivity over innovation as a way to progress in the scientific-research-academic career. That quantity takes precedence over quality. A recent magazine review Nature has concluded that in recent years scientific innovation, the great advances, have stagnated. More articles are published than ever, but the paradigm is changed – that is, there is disruption – less and less.
An altruistic job
What moves someone to investigate other people’s work in exchange for, in the most common scenario, nothing, and in the bad scenario a lot of hate or threats? “Most people who work on research integrity only get involved after discovering problems with their own research,” Dougherty, M.D., says by email. Professor of Philosophy at Ohio Dominican University and one rare bird in a world dominated by natural or biomedical science researchers. It was also his case when he discovered a consciously plagiarized article in a respected magazine by a successful professor from a major university, which he ended up successfully denouncing (it was retracted).
Bick walked in by chance. Nick Wise, fluid dynamics researcher at the University of Cambridge, because he was bored writing his thesis and started looking at articles. Smut Clyde began doing it on a private basis, almost as a hobby, until someone invited him to write an article on a website. Kevin Patrick has another profile. Financial consultant, his case is even a little more particular because he is a professional outside the scientific world. It started out of personal curiosity, he explains, when he went from being a regular reader of Retraction Watch, perhaps the quintessential website on scientific fraudan incisive commentator and one day hooked up with researcher Richard Fleming as a result of a study on diets that ended up being retracted. He ended up contacting others detectives and systematizing their work.
“I do this for several reasons,” he says. “To potentially improve the scientific record (by eliminating errors or fraudulent research), to potentially help deter future misconduct (by increasing fraudsters’ concern about being caught), and to possibly encourage responsible parties (journals, publishers) , institutions, funding agencies) to take measures to improve the research publication system.”
Because, all the researchers consulted agree, the system encourages erroneous practices. “All incentives basically aim to encourage people to publish more articles. Sometimes explicitly: you need as many papers to graduate. There are countries where you need a number of articles each year to keep your job as a teacher and get promoted,” explains Wise, a part-time fraudster. They collaborate with each other from a distance. Articles are submitted, reviews and advice are requested. They interact through from the PubPeer websitewhere scientists from around the world comment on published scientific articles. From time to time they manage to balance their agendas and find a place in the world that suits everyone relatively well to see each other live and exchange impressions.
These practices are combined with a sector, the publishing industry, that does not provide the means to control its product with the zeal that the detectives they would like it. And they have to fill that space. “I don’t think [las grandes editoriales, como Elsevier] “They don’t overlook the problems, but they actively try to hide them because they are more concerned about not losing public funding and protecting the reputation of their researchers,” Patrick says. “I don’t blame them, since they have no incentive to clean up their scientific record. It seems like that’s no one’s job, and only when publishers see a threat to their reputation and business models (as happens with printing factories) papers) begin to proactively address the problems in their already published articles. “I don’t know of any publisher or institution that proactively reviews their old articles for errors or fraud,” he maintains.
A difficult relationship with magazines
All fraud hunters deal with large publishers when they report false or plagiarized articles for removal, with varying levels of success. “The most common answer is probably that there is no answer,” Wise recounts his experience. “There may not even be an email address. I think once in the three and a half years that I have been doing this, an editor answered me asking me to do a video conference so that I could tell him more,” he explains.
The rest of the researchers report similar experiences, although there are those who distinguish the editors, normally expert scientists in the area the journal deals with, from the companies. “There is a great distance between the publisher and the magazine. So sometimes the editor of the magazine listens, but the company doesn’t react quickly, and no matter how much the editor wants to retract it, if the publisher doesn’t it’s not going to happen, because the magazine depends on the publisher,” says Bik. .
One of the most recent cases of the role played by these fraud hunters is that of infectious disease specialist Didier Raoul, who published an article during the pandemic defending hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19 and which has just been retracted thanks to complaints from several researchers.
But there are also success stories. Dreamed. A very recent one is that of infectious disease specialist Didier Raoult, who published an article at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in which he argued that treatments based on hydroxychloroquine or zinc were effective against the disease. Bik was one of the people who initially reported Raoult. It cost her dearly: the infectologist denounced her, in a legal process that lasted three years until it was archived, and which was accompanied by harassment from the scientist’s followers. “They told me that I should be in jail, that I am transsexual, ugly, a big whale, a pig… Things like that,” says Bik, who although he admits that it is a subjective perception, thinks that he receives more hate than his colleagues. men – who also report certain doses – because she is a woman. At least this case has had a happy ending for her (and for science). Raoult’s article just been retracted.
The problem is that four long years have passed, during which the article has been posted and current. Is there any point in withdrawing a text several years later? “Most of the time, the items I have in my hands are ancient; from five years ago or so. I have to believe that getting them to recant is worth it,” says Smut Clyde. “The retractions have had a huge impact,” says Dougherty. “Retraction Watch journalists continue to shape conversations about research and publication integrity and have advanced the cause in important ways. The Retraction Watch database allows researchers to check whether articles they cite have been retracted. Avoiding citations of retracted research is a constant problem. It became clear to me when I investigated how the first plagiarized article I discovered continued to be cited, as did many of the plagiarist’s other articles.” Clyde also believes that it can serve, in some way, as a warning to sailors. “To future academics who are thinking about paying to have their name appear on an article: the article you purchased may be published now, but in five years it could be retracted. How will that affect your career?”
A systemic failure
In any case, and although for these volunteers the work has more satisfaction than inconvenience despite the personal cost and doing it altruistically, the fraudsters believe that their mere existence is proof that the system does not work. “The system – institutions, publishers, editors – is beginning to recognize that it faces an existential threat. But there is a collective action problem. In an ideal world, publishers would fund the detective community to do the work they have failed miserably at. But by the very nature of research activity, the benefits (in terms of identifying fake articles) are not limited to a single publisher, because any article factory we identify, or a corrupt research group, would not simply publish in a single magazine. For this reason, Elsevier (for example) is reluctant to finance any activity that could also benefit Springer-Nature, or vice versa, which is why each large publisher would prefer to create its own Integrity Office and its own computer program for detecting possible conduct. in new shipments,” reflects Clyde.
“The systemic failures are enormous,” says Dougherty, who gives an example. “Specialist journals reject manuscripts of articles that deal with failures in the integrity of research in their own areas of expertise. This rejection means that researchers in the field often remain ignorant about failures that are relevant to them. I recently submitted a manuscript to a journal that documented research fraud in a handful of articles that had been published in that same journal. The editor rejected the manuscript, claiming that the results would not be of interest to readers.”
“We shouldn’t have to do this work,” Bik closes. “Most of us are just looking at articles that we don’t have any information about. We don’t have high-quality original photos, just a PDF with embedded photos, and yet we can encounter problem after problem after problem. All or almost all of these things should have been caught during the peer review. You would expect a publisher to have some quality control.”
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