Подделка результатов

korendovych · 12.02.2006 20:46:31

Еще один скандал

www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts … professor/

korendovych · 05.01.2007 02:46:57

А вот пример скорее не скандала, а того, к чему иногда приводит сильное давление/конкуренция на ученых.

Science 22 December 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5807, pp. 1856 - 1857
DOI: 10.1126/science.314.5807.1856

News of the Week
SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING:
A Scientist's Nightmare: Software Problem Leads to Five Retractions

Greg Miller

Until recently, Geoffrey Chang's career was on a trajectory most young scientists only dream about. In 1999, at the age of 28, the protein crystallographer landed a faculty position at the prestigious Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California. The next year, in a ceremony at the White House, Chang received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the country's highest honor for young researchers. His lab generated a stream of high-profile papers detailing the molecular structures of important proteins embedded in cell membranes.

Then the dream turned into a nightmare. In September, Swiss researchers published a paper in Nature [R. J. P. DAWSON AND K. P. LOCHER, NATURE 443, 180 (2006)] that cast serious doubt on a protein structure Chang's group had described in a 2001 Science paper. When he investigated, Chang was horrified to discover that a homemade data-analysis program had flipped two columns of data, inverting the electron-density map from which his team had derived the final protein structure. Unfortunately, his group had used the program to analyze data for other proteins. As a result, on page 1875, Chang and his colleagues retract three Science papers and report that two papers in other journals also contain erroneous structures.

"I've been devastated," Chang says. "I hope people will understand that it was a mistake, and I'm very sorry for it." Other researchers don't doubt that the error was unintentional, and although some say it has cost them time and effort, many praise Chang for setting the record straight promptly and forthrightly. "I'm very pleased he's done this because there has been some confusion" about the original structures, says Christopher Higgins, a biochemist at Imperial College London. "Now the field can really move forward."

The most influential of Chang's retracted publications, other researchers say, was the 2001 Science paper, which described the structure of a protein called MsbA, isolated from the bacterium Escherichia coli. MsbA belongs to a huge and ancient family of molecules that use energy from adenosine triphosphate to transport molecules across cell membranes. These so-called ABC transporters perform many essential biological duties and are of great clinical interest because of their roles in drug resistance. Some pump antibiotics out of bacterial cells, for example; others clear chemotherapy drugs from cancer cells. Chang's MsbA structure was the first molecular portrait of an entire ABC transporter, and many researchers saw it as a major contribution toward figuring out how these crucial proteins do their jobs. That paper alone has been cited by 364 publications, according to Google Scholar.

Two subsequent papers, both now being retracted, describe the structure of MsbA from other bacteria, Vibrio cholera (published in Molecular Biology in 2003) and Salmonella typhimurium (published in Science in 2005). The other retractions, a 2004 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and a 2005 Science paper, described EmrE, a different type of transporter protein.
Crystallizing and obtaining structures of five membrane proteins in just over 5 years was an incredible feat, says Chang's former postdoc adviser Douglas Rees of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Such proteins are a challenge for crystallographers because they are large, unwieldy, and notoriously difficult to coax into the crystals needed for x-ray crystallography. Rees says determination was at the root of Chang's success: "He has an incredible drive and work ethic. He really pushed the field in the sense of getting things to crystallize that no one else had been able to do." Chang's data are good, Rees says, but the faulty software threw everything off.

Ironically, another former postdoc in Rees's lab, Kaspar Locher, exposed the mistake. In the 14 September issue of Nature, Locher, now at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, described the structure of an ABC transporter called Sav1866 from Staphylococcus aureus. The structure was dramatically--and unexpectedly--different from that of MsbA. After pulling up Sav1866 and Chang's MsbA from S. typhimurium on a computer screen, Locher says he realized in minutes that the MsbA structure was inverted. Interpreting the "hand" of a molecule is always a challenge for crystallographers, Locher notes, and many mistakes can lead to an incorrect mirror-image structure. Getting the wrong hand is "in the category of monumental blunders," Locher says.

On reading the Nature paper, Chang quickly traced the mix-up back to the analysis program, which he says he inherited from another lab. Locher suspects that Chang would have caught the mistake if he'd taken more time to obtain a higher resolution structure. "I think he was under immense pressure to get the first structure, and that's what made him push the limits of his data," he says. Others suggest that Chang might have caught the problem if he'd paid closer attention to biochemical findings that didn't jibe well with the MsbA structure. "When the first structure came out, we and others said, 'We really don't quite believe this is right,'" says Higgins. "It was inconsistent with a lot of things."

The ramifications of the software snafu extend beyond Chang's lab. Marwan Al-Shawi, a biochemist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, says he's now holding on to several manuscripts he was about to submit. Al-Shawi has been using Chang's MsbA structure to build computer models of an ABC transporter involved in human cancer drug resistance. David Clarke of the University of Toronto in Canada says his team had a hard time persuading journals to accept their biochemical studies that contradicted Chang's MsbA structure. Clarke also served on grant panels on which he says Chang's work was influential. "Those applications providing preliminary results that were not in agreement with the retracted papers were given a rough time," he says.

At Scripps, colleagues are standing behind the young researcher. "He's doing some really beautiful work, and this is just an absolute disaster that befell him," says Chang's department chair, Peter Wright. "I'm quite convinced he'll come out of it, and he'll go on to do great things." Chang meanwhile has been reanalyzing his original data and expects to submit papers on the corrected structures soon. The new structures "make a ton of sense" biologically, he says. "A lot of things we couldn't figure out before are very clear."

hsda · 05.01.2007 17:26:02

Ну так современная наука все больше становится похожей на шоу-бизнес, где можно лажать по-черному безголосым юнцам и даже маститым "проффесорам" - лишь бы "пипл хавал" и продюсер был не против. Особенно паршиво выглядит ситуация в компьютерной химии, где распространение программок "a la black box" (Hyperchem, Gaussian, etc.) приводит к появлению огромного количества низкосортных статей - достаточно взглянуть, например, на практически каждую вторую статью в журнале J. Mol. Struct. (THEOCHEM).

zaitsev · 25.02.2007 13:47:57

Хорошо, что хотябы "у них" такое может стать скандалом. А вот у нас, в стране, которая на 124 месте по коррупции, боюсь переписывание чужих работ стовится уже нормой.

Кроме "хорошо зарекомендовавшего себя" переписывания чужих статей, вышедших давно (скажем до 1990 года) в малодоступных (для ученых из других стран) журналах (таковыми вполне могут быть журналы СССР), известна практика передачи "авансом" научных исследований, сделанных одними людьми - другим (например студентам), для того, чтобы они смогли принять участие в конкурсе студенческих работ и выиграть его (ведь работа сделана группой авторов высокой квалификации). Всем хорошо. И кафедре + и студентам +.

Говорят существует и другой проверенный способ. Берется чужая опубликованная статья и добавляется в список собственных публикация. Нужно просто вписать свою фамилию где-то посередине списка авторов. Проверить есть ли этот "умелец" действительно в списке соавторов сложно, ведь журналов то в библиотеках практически нет, да и кто этим будет заниматься.

Самое грусное в этом то, что в наших условиях, даже при раскрытии аферы, никакого скандала не будет (ведь у нас все все понимают) sad

IB · 25.02.2007 22:58:04

Меня среди описаний некоторых "махинаций" в предыдущем посте, привлекла внимание следующая:

Zaicev написав раніше:

известна практика передачи "авансом" научных исследований, сделанных одними людьми - другим (например студентам), для того, чтобы они смогли принять участие в конкурсе студенческих работ и выиграть его (ведь работа сделана группой авторов высокой квалификации)

Это распространненный вопрос "о справедливости", который, думаю, волнует многих студентов. Дело в том, что это отнюдь не подделка - ведь студент скорее всего был вовлечен во все стадии экспериментального труда. Очевидно, что студент не может выполнить самостоятельно серьезную научную работу полностью - он ее выполняет в связке с другими людьми. Чем больше научный уровень последних - тем больше преимущество студента по отношению к коллегам как на конференциях, так и с точки зрения карьеры вообще. Тот же самый эффект имеет место и "у них" - и даже в более выраженной степени. Увы, уравнять шансы студентов при сравнительном оценивании их работ практически невозможно. Отчасти, можно лишь пытаться уменьшить неравенство - при оценке конференций важно высоко оценивать сам доклад и, что еще более важно, ответы на вопросы.

zaitsev · 27.02.2007 01:46:51

IB написав раніше:

... Очевидно, что студент не может выполнить самостоятельно серьезную научную работу полностью - он ее выполняет в связке с другими людьми.

Нет, я не такой вариант имел ввиду. Это понятно, что работа, приведенная в статье или докладе не делается вся одним человеком. Тут другое.

В непрофильных вузах, где студенты наукой заниматься не могут, их руководству все равно необходимо показывать, что работа (научная) выполняется. А как это показать? Послать студента (вернее "его" работу) на конкурс. Студент этой работой никогда не занимался и заниматься не будет (даже ее частью), а работу берут, скажем, у сотрудника кафедры. Мне кажется самое ужасное в этом - моральное развращение студентов (молодых ученых).

korendovych · 21.02.2008 05:21:56

C&E News

FEBRUARY 18, 2008 VOLUME 86, NUMBER 07 PP. 37-38
A Massive Case Of Fraud
Journal editors are left reeling as publishers move to rid their archives of scientist's falsified research

William G. Schulz

A CHEMIST IN INDIA has been found guilty of plagiarizing and/or falsifying more than 70 research papers published in a wide variety of Western scientific journals between 2004 and 2007, according to documents from his university, copies of which were obtained by C&EN. Some journal editors left reeling by the incident say it is one of the most spectacular and outrageous cases of scientific fraud they have ever seen.
The culprit, sources say, is chemistry professor Pattium Chiranjeevi of Sri Venkateswara University in Tirupati, India. SVU conducted an investigation into Chiranjeevi's work after a journal editor presented evidence to university officials that the professor had plagiarized and possibly falsified several manuscript submissions. Chiranjeevi, who communicates through a wide variety of e-mail addresses, has not responded to multiple requests for comment by C&EN.
Chiranjeevi retains his teaching position at SVU, according to a university source who has requested anonymity. "He is a permanent employee of the university, and the administration cannot fire him easily," the source says. Instead, Chiranjeevi has been barred from research and research supervision and from holding any administrative post at the university.
"Chiranjeevi claimed to be using advanced instrumentation not available at the university," the source says. "The chemistry in most of his papers is illogical—the chemistry itself is wrong. How did this get past reviewers?"
"I hated seeing papers from this guy," says Gary D. Christian, who is editor-in-chief of the Elsevier analytical chemistry journal Talanta, one of the journals that published Chiranjeevi's research. Christian, who is professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Washington, Seattle, says Chiranjeevi's tactic was to flood journals with manuscript submissions in the hopes of wearing down editors who would eventually publish some of his work. "He published 70-plus papers in 25 journals in three years," Christian says. "The case is unprecedented."
Chiranjeevi's papers have appeared in Talanta and four other Elsevier journals: Food Chemistry, Journal of Hazardous Materials, Analytica Chimica Acta, and Chemosphere.
In the wake of the SVU investigation, Elsevier has retracted all of Chiranjeevi's articles published in its journals. "In total, we have retracted 13 articles authored by Chiranjeevi from our online database, ScienceDirect," says a company spokeswoman. "As a publisher, being made aware of these cases of plagiarism has made us more determined to continue to introduce practices that will help deter such activities.
"We are currently experimenting with tools that can help spot incidences of plagiarism," the spokeswoman continues. "We use software that mines our articles and identifies similarities between papers. It gives guidance by giving a score in terms of how similar two pieces of text are to each other."
"This guy really scoured the world for journals to publish in," says Christian, who has carefully documented much of the Chiranjeevi case. He says, at worst, he thought Chiranjeevi might be self-plagiarizing his submissions to boost his publication record. He says only careful analysis and comparison with other papers will reveal plagiarism, a task journal editors simply don't have the time or resources to pursue.
CHIRANJEEVI'S PLAGIARISM of other scientists' work was discovered by Purnendu K. (Sandy) Dasgupta, a chemistry professor at the University of Texas, Arlington, and U.S. editor of Analytica Chimica Acta. He says a reviewer, a former student of his, pointed out that a Chiranjeevi submission on measurement of arsenic(III) was similar to a published paper from a Japanese group on chromium(III). In fact, Dasgupta says, but for the change in the name of the chemical being measured, the papers were identical.
"At that point, I was really mad," Dasgupta says. He says it upset him that Chiranjeevi is also Indian and that his university is located in a holy city in India. "I wrote a scathing letter to Chiranjeevi, and said I was going to notify his university that they should look into his Ph.D."
Eventually, Dasgupta did make contact with Duvvuru Gunasekar, who was chair of the SVU chemistry department at the time. And he probed further into Chiranjeevi's publication record. He found several instances of duplicate submission—for example, a series of four papers on how to measure selenium submitted to as many journals—and he began to question data reported in these and other Chiranjeevi articles.
Dasgupta queried Gunasekar on instrumentation in his department only to find that Chiranjeevi apparently made false claims. The instruments cited in his papers did not exist in the department, according to Gunasekar. He asked Dasgupta to make an official complaint in writing, which, along with a letter from Elsevier's legal department, triggered the SVU investigation.
According to Dasgupta, Chiranjeevi has proclaimed his innocence through all of this and threatened to sue him in international court. He says Chiranjeevi blamed persons unknown for submitting falsified papers under his name through e-mail addresses that Chiranjeevi did not recognize or use.
But the university's investigation, according to the SVU source, found that Chiranjeevi had used those same e-mail addresses in papers that he stood behind as authentic. "He was trying to throw blame on his students," the source says.
Worse, "he was charging students a fee to award them degrees," the source says. "He listed as many as 56 coauthors on his papers. There were complaints prior to the investigation, but nobody looked into it very seriously." He says the university does not seem to have taken disciplinary action against any students who worked under Chiranjeevi's supervision, even though some of them were aware of and participated in the fraud he perpetrated.
"I cannot find fault with the peer reviewers," says the SVU source, because not all of the journals he published in dealt exclusively with chemistry. "The chemistry described for the preparation of the reagents involves organic reactions, and maybe some of the reviewers were not aware of the chemistry involved. Plagiarism is very difficult to prove for many reasons,
"We rely on peer reviewers, and for some reason no one ever picked up on the fact that he was submitting the same stuff over and over again," Christian says. He says he did reject a number of Chiranjeevi's papers without review because of similarities with earlier papers, but it takes a lot of an editor's time to track down and compare the papers and justify scientifically to the author why a paper is not accepted for review.
"Reviewers are overwhelmed," he continues, pointing out that they do not have the time necessary to prescreen manuscript submissions for such problems. "The Elsevier in-house experiment with software to identify similarities between papers should help," Christian says.
"The scale of it was unprecedented and outrageous," says Dasgupta of Chiranjeevi's scientific misconduct. Like any case of scientific fraud, he says, it raises the question "what is inciting people to do this even though it is deeply wrong?"
"Partly we have to blame our own selves," says Dasgupta, citing the enormous pressure on scientists everywhere to publish and win grants. But he wonders, too, whether something more essential has been lost. "I really like what I am doing—creating something at the bench. Where is that pleasure and wonder?"
Dasgupta also says editors and reviewers are overwhelmed and reliant on the honor system at the heart of scientific publishing. "Plagiarism can be guarded against," he says, "but out-and-out fraud is hard to guard against."
ONE TOOL that Dasgupta has used to find reviewers—and that might be useful in discovering plagiarism—is a Web-based tool called eTBlast. Developed by computational biologists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, the free service does a similarity search of text that someone inputs with papers in Medline or other online databases. Dasgupta and others say it could be a powerful tool for weeding out plagiarism in journal manuscript submissions.
The developers of eTBlast have now developed a duplicate submission database called Deja vu. Both are available for free, eTBlast at invention.swmed.edu/ and Deja vu at spore.swmed.edu/dejavu.
Of Chiranjeevi, "this is by far the most egregious case of scientific fraud in 30 years," says G. Bruce Wiersma, a professor in the department of forest ecosystem science at the University of Maine and the editor of Environmental Monitoring & Assessment, a Springer Netherlands journal. He says the journal published three Chiranjeevi papers, all of which have been retracted.
"The problem with peer review is that it is an honor system," Wiersma says. "There is no fail-safe. If people want to break the honor system, there is nothing you can do."
Like other journal editors affected by Chiranjeevi's fraud, Wiersma says he was at some point concerned about the number of submissions from the Indian scientist and the similarity of his article submissions. "But there was no indication that he copied from someone else."
At worst Wiersma thought Chirnajeevi might be veering toward self-plagiarism—essentially submitting the same or nearly the same paper over and over again to Wiersma and other journal editors. "I sent him a letter and said, 'Don't do this.' I was trying to be fair and point out that this isn't professional."
All authors who submit articles to any journal fill out a statement saying that they have not submitted to another journal. "That's the only protection we have—and it's not much protection," Wiersma says.

To express your views on scientific fraud, visit cenresearch.wordpress.com

j_fox · 24.02.2008 05:46:20

Индусы - это еще те пройдохи. Работать многие тоже не любят. А вот говорить они умеют хорошо. (Опять же, не все и не во всем, но в целом честно признаюсь, это облик нации в моих глазах... Причем это еще не самое страшное).

Зайцевский пост поразил - чтоб до ТАКОГО доходило. По-моему, наука и так в таком жутком состоянии, что сделать вид и склепать что-то можно запросто без плагиата. Пусть паршивое и некорректное, но оно пройдет. Смысла вставлять себя посреди братской могилы авторов не вижу вообще - такие статьи для котировки чела не считаются все равно... Разве нет?

AM · 07.07.2009 12:54:20

Поучительная и немного печальная статья ... www.the-scientist.com/2009/07/1/28/1/

zaitsev · 10.08.2009 17:20:11

j_fox написав раніше:

Смысла вставлять себя посреди братской могилы авторов не вижу вообще - такие статьи для котировки чела не считаются все равно... Разве нет?

Хитрость в том, что считаем мы все, даже тезисы изданные на конференцих в которых авторы не участвовали. Все научные результаты. При атестации научных кадров приводится эта цифра первой, потом, мимоходом, количество статей. И все. Где, сколько соавторов - не суть. Первые (в течение года) попытки учитывать какой-то еще показатель, кроме общего количества публикаций, на нашем факультете упирается в забор (в других университетах уже практикуется и активно).

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#1 12.02.2006 20:46:31

Подделка результатов

#2 05.01.2007 02:46:57

Re: Подделка результатов

#3 05.01.2007 17:26:02

Re: Подделка результатов

#4 25.02.2007 13:47:57

Re: Подделка результатов

#5 25.02.2007 22:58:04

Re: Подделка результатов

#6 27.02.2007 01:46:51

Re: Подделка результатов

#7 21.02.2008 05:21:56

Re: Подделка результатов

#8 24.02.2008 05:46:20

Re: Подделка результатов

#9 07.07.2009 12:54:20

Re: Подделка результатов

#10 10.08.2009 17:20:11

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