Not Dana-Farber!

Allegations of plagiarism have been coming fast and furious of late. The recently deposed president of Harvard. The wife of the man behind the outing of the president of Harvard for plagiarism. Et al.

I haven't read the stories all that carefully, but a lot of the plagiarism seems to involve not adequately citing references and omitting quote marks. A lot of the accusations, from my cursory read, seem to be around using non-material technical definitions of the "a horse is an animal with four legs" variety without noting where those definitions were lifted from - which is apparently a generally accepted practice in some fields. (One of the charges leveled against the wife of the blowhard-whistleblower who went after the recently-deposed president of Harvard, a man whose motivations seemed as political as anything else, was that she used content from Wikipedia without referencing it - probably because referencing Wikipedia in an academic piece would be viewed as pretty ludicrous) 

Much of what I've read has not been about stealing someone's ideas, theories, and interpretations and palming them off as your own. Much of what I've read has been embarrassing - sloppy, shoddy, half-assed "scholarship," which is shameful but not - to me, anyway - a sign of deep corruption. For what it's worth, I'm not an academic but I'm pretty damned careful about the citations in a blog that's mostly for my entertainment, and that of my small cadre of readers. Someone who is an academic should be at least as careful as a minor-league blogger.

All that said, most of the recent stories reveal sloppiness and a bit of shadiness that's harmful to the sloppy and shady, but isn't really life or death.

But there's another entire category of academic malfeasance, and that's falsifying research. 

There's a still broiling embroilment of a Harvard Business School professor (and highly-regarded and mega-well-paid business consultant) whose field of study was honesty of all things. She's been accused of falsifying her researech jiggering it to get the results she wanted. 

Falsifying data in studies on honesty? Well, honestly, that's almost LOL funny.

But falsifying data in scientific research that could be life and death? Yikes! 

And now Dana-Farber, the prestigious Boston cancer center, is caught up in allegations that some of the published papers authored by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists contain non-trivial errors. So far, six papers have been retracted, and a couple of dozen other papers are in the process of being corrected. 

The allegations — against top scientists at the prestigious Boston-based institute, which is a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School — put the institute at the center of a roiling debate about research misconduct, how to police scientific integrity and whether the organizational structure of academic science incentivizes shortcuts or cheating.

...A biologist and blogger, Sholto David centered attention on Dana-Farber after he highlighted problems in a slew of studies from top researchers.

In early January, David detailed duplications and potentially misleading image edits across dozens of papers produced primarily by Dana-Farber researchers, writing in a blog post that research from top scientists at the institute “appears to be hopelessly corrupt with errors that are obvious from just a cursory reading.” (Source: NBC News)

Dana-Farber is pushing back a bit, stating that just because the images appear to be manipulated doesn't prove that there was any "intent to deceive." And the Insitute notes that "the allegations all concerned pure, or basic, science, as opposed to studies that led to cancer drug approvals."

So there's that.

And Dana-Farber is getting some props for responding quickly once the allegations surfaced.

Still, there are all those retractions and corrections, and the process and culture that enables regular sloppiness and/or deceit to occur. (Part of that process and culture is likely leaving the scut image work to more junior colleagues who, eager to please the top dogs, may "manipulate results and chase favor.")

AI software will increasingly be used to spot problematic work pre-publication and, of course, to examine published works to determine where the science is sketch. Alas, "AI programs can [also] generate realistic looking figures of common experiments." Swell. 

I'm very sorry to see Dana-Farber implicated here. 

I know a few folks who have been treated - and treated well, if not always successfully - there. And one of the most well known local charities, the Jimmy Fund - which has been promoted by the Red Sox for as long as I've been watching them - raises money for Dana-Farber research. Jimmy Fund - Dana-Farber isn't one of my main charities, but I have made small donations over the years. 

Damn!

AI is going to out all the paper chasers who make mistakes, both those involved in petty carelessness and those doing major, conscious cheating. Which is a good thing, but you hate to see it. How about being more careful and less dishonest to begin with.