Thursday, January 18, 2007

Science Ethics

An interesting article on patenting, falsification and plagiarism in science and science ethics in general published on chemistry.org.

I'm not sure if this link only works if you're an ACS member. Let me know if you have any problems accessing the site. C!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think blog ethics may require us to link to each other. ;)

Mitch

Daniel Sejer said...

A very interesting article indeed. The article is mainly concerned with the big cases of falsification where all the stuff is more or less made up. However, falsification on a small scale is very common at least in the area of synthetic organic chemistry. Over the years people have told me of their almost systematic falsification of analytical data. One person told me he had made up all the melting points in his thesis because he couldn't be asked to do them. I have seen many chemists removing unwanted solvent peaks and minor impurities from their NMR spectra. Also I have noticed a great deal of creativity when it came to making those elemental analysis "correct". Strangely all these individuals where talking openly about it as if it was perfectly alright to do so. Speaking of plagiarimse I recently refereed a paper that was clearly a case of milking the paper-cow. Fortunately the journal in question was kind enough to attach a copy of the groups previous paper for comparison. Basically, they had just taken the previous paper and starting adding stuff to the manuscript. In the experimental section they had actually forgotten to change the numbering of the molecules and they had even included compounds not mentioned in the paper and omitted others...idiots! Anyway, thanks for the link Chris. D!

Anonymous said...

Yeah, it was an interesting article, I like the bit about Corey not wanting to patent his synthetic route. It's kinda worrying when people make up stuff in their research..you'd hope they wouldn't, but then again...

Celso said...

Hello Daniel, can you refresh the link or add more reference information for the article? The link did not work anymore.
Thanks in advance

Daniel Sejer said...

@ieu, unforunately i cannot recall the details. I've tried tracking it down at the ACS website with no luck. This was a post by someone else no longer associated with the blog so I'm afraid I can't help you. D!