Tag Archives: science

So many asthma papers under fire

3.09.2022 admin

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.

In total there are 386 asthma entries at PubPeer. What is really happening in this field? When I started the field there was just one misconduct case – Ranjit Kumar Chandra. That’s an increase from 1 to 386…

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…

Joke, Philosophy

Papers that should have been retracted, not corrected

2.09.2022 admin

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Continue reading Papers that should have been retracted, not corrected →

Software

The amyloid Western blot: Schrag vs Lesné

1.09.2022 admin

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 the image 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 camera history with 5 generations from the Nikon D2x to the Z9.

So don’t expect any final conclusion here as long as we cannot get the original images.

false color display of Fig 2 a “the presence of 8 M urea did not alter the electrophoretic pattern of Aß oligomers in extracellular-enriched extracts from 12- to 20-month-oldbrains ofTg2576þ/2mice that were probed with 6E10 antibodies.”

Philosophy

Academic crisis

31.08.2022 admin

courtesy of Dr Lutz Boehm on Jun 26, 2022

https://twitter.com/DrLutzBoehm/status/1541012471913365505

Philosophy

Acute reviewer shortage?

28.07.2022 admin

Continue reading Acute reviewer shortage? →

Allergy, Joke

Happiness and Working Hours

22.04.2022 admin

A phantastic idea by Lisa deBruine – a Rosling type plots which look very much like a negative association.

Allergy, Genetics

The Lancet and scientific integrity

21.04.2022 admin

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…

Philosophy

How to Game Google Scholar H Index

9.04.2022 admin

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.

Joke

I rearrange facts so they resemble truth more than in reality

22.03.2022 admin

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…

Philosophy

Good scientists doing wrong

2.03.2022 admin

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 →

Allergy

Brandolini’s principle

14.02.2022 admin

https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1493139995380510723

Philosophy

Und immer wieder Adorno

2.02.2022 admin

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

Genetics, Philosophy

What is needed is a confrontational approach

1.02.2022 admin

Google showed me today a long forgotten abstract. Although I am not an expert in schizophrenia we collaborated two decades ago on this particular chromosomal region.

What is even more remarkable is the challenging keynote of the Xth World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics in The Palais des Congre ́s Brussels, Belgium October 9 –13, 2002 by Irving Gottesman [+2016], the father of epigenetics in psychiatry. He wrote there

We cannot escape the history of our field and are constantly guided today by the accumulation of facts with either positive or negative valences from our past. But when did the clock start—with the domestication of animals, with Galton’s musings and amoral passion for data collection about individual differences in behavior, or with the initially objective scientizing of Mendelism applied to schizophrenia but ending with a Nazi-tainted albatross around the neck of psychiatric genetics. In regard to the long quest for the distal and genetic (partial) causes of mental diseases, the conclusion that both genetic and environmental factors, none yet known in detail, provide the distal causes of mental disorders—that statement is too general to be of use to making further progress. What is needed is a confrontational approach based on evidence collected from competing ‘schools of thought’, and then reconciliation before some kind of omniscient and impartial Science Court.

I couldn’t agree more. What is needed is a confrontational approach based on evidence collected from competing ‘schools of thought’, and then reconciliation before some kind of omniscient and impartial Science Court.

Joke, Philosophy

It’s all too much

13.01.2022 admin

Charles Day in Physics Today (which is already my view in biomedicine 5 years ago)

Their main conclusion is sobering: As the number of papers in a field increases, researchers find it harder to recognize innovative work. Progress seems to be slowing.

Joke

How to buy papers

10.01.2022 admin

It is incredible – but probably some kind of advanced fee scam only.

https://twitter.com/ronepz/status/1480035059046313991 Screenshot 10.1.2022 while I can’ t verify the original Facebook post

500€ would be clear bargain compared to the 9500€ that you have to pay here

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03324-y Screenshot 10.1.2022

although there is a surplus of 6000€ for the science writer at fiverr and another 50,000€ lab funding to one of the numerous “science charities” and “patient alliances”.