What happens when scientists dwell about the final result of their work ? Often , they never get trip up . But now , a new strain of scientific whistleblowers are try out to keep their colleagues honest , sometimes mould for long time to show that information has been fudged . Here are their stories .
Over at Nature , there ’s a bang-up objet d’art that profiles three well - know whistleblowersin the scientific biotic community , who place from mild - mannered data psychoanalyst to anon. reformist .
Here ’s the room the first profile begin :
Uri Simonsohn date himself as more of a data - whisperer than a whistle - blower . His day job as a social scientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia involves scouring archival datum — from house prices to auction records to college admissions — as part of his research into judgement and determination - devising . He surmise that this background has predispose him to trip up spurious patterns in other psychologists ’ results . “ With an experiment , you do a t - trial and move on , ” he says . “ But people who make for with archival data point are used to looking at data very cautiously . ”
It was this intuition that stir when he first number across report by Dirk Smeesters at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands and Lawrence Sanna at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the summer of 2011 . In both eccentric , the data seemed too good to be unfeigned , containing an overmuch of large outcome and statistically significant results . In one of Sanna ’s newspaper , Simonsohn notice that one experimentation — in which volunteers were purportedly split into unlike group — produced results with uncannily similar standard deviations . In the result of Smeesters ’ study , he saw a suspiciously low relative frequency of round numbers and an strange similarity between many of the norm . “ If there ’s too little noise , and the information are too dependable again and again , they can not be veridical , ” he says . “ Real data are supposed to have wrongdoing . ”
Head over to Nature to read the rest , and to receive out about the other whisteblowers who are changing the direction scientific discipline gets done .
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