Answer: Be co-author of an autophagy guideline
this is another episode of guidelines paper. More participants listed here – Affiliations listed stopped at 2299 – this means that there are 2299 authors in the manuscript. Unbelievable – how did they manage to get a consensus on what is written. May the first author explain, how the authorship on this guidelines is decided?
Mittelman on the “The World-Class University and Repurposing Higher Education” 2018:
… the central academic purposes of the university are imperiled. While not universally adopted, they began to take root in the nineteenth century, developed gradually in the nineteenth and twentieth, and encounter novel tensions in the twenty-first. In this century, the triad of core educational missions in nonauthoritarian societies—cultivating democratic citizenship, fostering critical thinking, and protecting academic freedom — is losing footing. A new form of utilitarianism is gaining ground. It prioritizes useful knowledge and problem-solving skills at the expense of basic inquiry…
A few pages later Mittelman notices that universities
… have become preoccupied with strategic planning, benchmarking, branding, visibility, rankings, productivity indices, quality assurance systems, students as customers, and measurable outcomes. Before the 1980s, members of the higher education community rarely expressed themselves in these terms.
And it is true – we have been struggling even after 1980 with the mysteries of nature, by designing experiments and studies, trying to make new discoveries and teaching them to our students.
Fast rewind to the “idea of a university” and the “cultivated intellect” by John Henry Newman (p15) and the usefulness of useless knowledge of Abraham Flexner. In the last century clearly a need for unanticipated outcome was felt while today basically every research program starts with a lengthy introduction that this is the most important research because disease D is so frequent or technology T is so important for the environment. Mittelman quotes Daniel Zajfman, 10th president of Israel’s Weizmann Institute, when talking about university rankings
When we look at the values of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, we realise 100 years later what we can do with this. If you look at the history of science, you will find that most of the discoveries were never made by trying to solve a problem, rather by trying to understand how nature works, so our focus is on understanding.
Hoekstra and Vazire on “Aspiring to greater intellectual humility in science”
Although intellectual humility is presented as a widely accepted scientific norm, we argue that current research practice does not incentivize intellectual humility. We provide a set of recommendations on how to increase intellectual humility in research articles
Indeed – many recommendations are counterproductive for a science career…
and well, a divergent view at PubPeer.
As an avid PubPeer reader, I found a new entry by Elisabeth Bik recently about Andreas Pahl of Heidelberg Pharma who has already one retracted and several more papers under scrutiny.
Unfortunately there are now also many asthma trash papers from paper mills. Another example was identified by @gcabanac, distributed by @deevybee and published at Pubpeer.
What makes it even more complicated that there is no border anymore to predatory journals if also respected scientists drop their names at predatory journals. Only recently I received an email addressed to one of my former technical assistants as “professor” inviting her to send a paper…
It has been mentioned many times before and has been even officially published by COPE
Science is either replicable or not. If not, it should be corrected. If faulty or fabricated, it should be retracted.
Continue reading Papers that should have been retracted, not corrected
The amyloid analysis published in Nature has been commented at PubPeer and also earned a commentary of Charles Piller in Science. His “Blots on a field” news story is leading now even to an expression of concern by Nature.
The editors of Nature have been alerted to concerns regarding some of the figures in this paper. Nature is investigating these concerns, and a further editorial response will follow as soon as possible.
IMHO there are many artifacts including horizontal lines in Fig 2 when converting it to false color display. I can not attribute the lines to any splice mark and sorry – this is a 16 year old gel image, (Basically an eternity has passed in terms of my own Nikon history with 5 generations from D2x to Z9) So don’t expect any final conclusion here as long as we cannot get the original images here.
courtesy of Dr Lutz Boehm on Jun 26, 2022
A phantastic idea by Lisa deBruine – a Rosling type plots which look very much like a negative association.
We have learned in the past that the Lancet published editorials that clearly separated the journal from the publisher Elsevier
Reed Elsevier’s response is that the sale of military equipment is legal, government supported, and tightly regulated. However, The Lancet‘s collaborations in child survival and health-systems strengthening, for example, risk being tainted by Reed Elsevier’s promotion of the “selling process” of arms.
Of course you can’t sell weapons and distance yourself from selling weapons at the same time…
https://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0638 explains an experiment leading to an increase of 774 citations in 129 papers basically as they
created a fake researcher (Marco Alberto Pantani-Contador — a reference to two infamous cyclists, Marco Pantani and Alberto Contador, each of whom was accused of blood doping). Copying and pasting text from a website, adding a few figures and graphs and lots and lots of self-citations … created six fake documents, translated them into English using Google Translate, and uploaded them to a new webpage under their university’s domain. It was a process, the authors explain, that took less than half a day’s work.
Take care – category joke here.
This article won’t change your mind
I remember looking at her and thinking, ‘She’s totally lying.’ At the same time, I remember something in my mind saying, ‘And that doesn’t matter.’
Don’t miss Werner Herzog…
There is an interesting study “When Good People Break Bad: Moral Impression Violations in Everyday Life” by the Canadian PhD student Kate Guan and her advisor Steven Heine. It is a phenomenon that is annoying many people if we look at the reactions to Twitter posts und PubPeer entries accusing scientists of wrong doing. The paper provides some explanations Continue reading Good scientists doing wrong
Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969)
Das Halbverstandene und Halberfahrene ist nicht etwa die Vorstufe der Bildung, sondern ihr Todfeind.
nicht aus den Minima Moralia sondern den Soziologische Schriften, Suhrkamp, 1972, S. 93ff
