Category: Methodology
Back before I was sucked into the vortex of paper-grading, an eagle-eyed Mattababy pointed me to a very interesting post by astronomer Mike Brown. Brown details his efforts to collaborate with another team of scientists who were working on the...
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 2:35 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Astronomy/astrophysics
Over at Starts with a Bang, Ethan Siegel expressed exasperation that Nature and New Scientist are paying attention to (and lending too much credibility to) an astronomical theory Ethan views as a non-starter, Modified Netwonian Dynamics (or MOND): [W]hy is...
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 3:46 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Ethical research
In a recent post, Candid Engineer raised some interesting questions about data and ethics:...
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 7:40 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Ethics 101
How a paper which purports to be about medical ethics itself falls short of a central tenet of medical ethics.
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 1:26 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Misconduct
There's an interesting article in the Telegraph by Eugenie Samuel Reich looking back at the curious case of Jan Hendrik Schön. In the late '90s and early '00s, the Bell Labs physicist was producing a string of impressive discoveries --...
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 1:17 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Communication
Stealth advocacy or just poorly executed ethical analysis?
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 3:12 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Communication
If you're speaking to the public as a scientist (including speaking to the public through a journalist), you have some responsibilities.
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 1:30 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Medicine
By email, following on the heels of my post about the Merck-commissioned, Elsevier-published fake journal Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, a reader asked whether the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPandS) also counts as a fake journal....
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 1:53 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Ethical research
One arena in which members of the public seem to understand their interest in good and unbiased scientific research is drug testing. Yet a significant portion of the research on new drugs and their use in treating patients is funded...
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 2:50 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Communication
Some commenters on my last post seem to be of the view that it is perfectly fine for scientists to pull numbers out of thin air to bolster their claims, at least under some circumstances. I think it's a fair...
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 1:51 PM • 47 Comments • 0 TrackBacks