Reproducibility!

I guess it is old news but it only caught my eye today at the BBC website. Apparently Nature did a survey last summer (2016) were scientist were asked if they had "failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments"? What really surprised me was that only 70% on average said yes to that question. Obviously, scientists from all disciplines participated in the survey and chemistry did better in reproducibility than biology and medicine (when judged by themselves) but it looks pretty bleak overall. In synthetic organic chemistry, I would estimate that >95% of chemists have been unable to reproduce a published synthesis (as in get any of the desired molecule and not necessarily just the same high yield). Personally, I have had methods across the impact factor landscape fail in my hands, from Synlett to Nature Methods. On more than one occasion everything has just decomposed and gone black. Unless it is published in Organic Syntheses it's a bit of a lottery. Anyway, both articles are quite interesting and worth reading (although they are somewhat depressing). D! 

Faking it - Elemental Analysis!

Earlier this year I was refereeing a rather good paper and had I not taken the time to inspect the experimental section I would have accepted it with minor corrections. However, whoever wrote the experimental had clearly never run an elemental analysis before and was hopeless at making them up. The numbers were simply to good and although everything else looked great I had to reject the paper due to serious misconduct/fraud. This made me think that there must be thousands of papers out there with made up elemental and HRMS analyses  as these are really simple to make up. Have a look at this web page for inspiration for realistic elemental data: http://internal.eps.hw.ac.uk/services/analytical/chn-league.htm

After this incident I always read the experimental section first and check the spectra and I really wish that my refereeing colleagues would do the same. The crap you find in the experimental section of all journals including the most prestigious ones is simply unbelievable. Even when the experimental stuff looks great it is remarkable how many procedures we are completely unable to reproduce in our lab.

Anyway, not all hustlers are equally talented as a good friend of mine pointed out yesterday when he sent me this interesting paper by Reto Dorta and co-workers: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/om4000067

My friend simply wrote check out supplementary information page 12. And so I did and this is what I found (click on image to enlarge):

Many thanks to Reto Dorta and co-workers for this excellent example of what I guess must be classified as attempted fraud since the fake elemental analysis was never added. D!  

Anti-GMO activist sees the light!

I picked this up at one of my favourite blogs (in the pipeline) and simply have to share it. A former fanatical anti-GMO campaigner read some scientific papers and realised his wrong doings. What a fantastic start to the New Year. It makes me think that there still may be hope for humanity when someone like Mark Lynas can come around and realise his mistakes and openly admit it. As a minimum you should watch the first 6 minutes of his presentation at the Oxford Farming Conference. D!

+PLoS+

Some time ago when I was ranting about papers, authors and so on I promised a post on open access journals, more specifically PLoS: Public Library of Science. I'll leave the Open Access issue for another day, suffice to say it's something I like very much. Anyway, the PLoS journals have several neat features:

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(1) Upon submission of a paper to a PLoS journal each author receives an email from the journal where (in detail) they have to justify why their names are on the paper. Until this process has been completed the paper will not be considered for publication.

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(2) If the paper gets published it will contain an account of what each author has contributed to the paper.

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This is all about transparency and not getting on the paper for doing routine work or just as a favour to a buddy. Obviously, the system still isn't perfect but it applies some pressure on the authors. It makes them think about the whole process and I bet that it gets rid of most of the crap you get in ordinary journals.

And there's more:

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(3) PLoS journals have good to high impact factors. In other words people contribute good work to these journals.

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(4) Readers can post comments and questions on the paper and the authors can respond. Just like a blog.

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(5) If the authors make an important discovery relating to the paper they can add more data to the original publication. How cool is that? I wish I could do that with some of my publications. The extra data still has to go through peer review which makes it even better.

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So why am I not publishing all my papers in open access journals. Well chemistry still hasn't caught up with things in this area. There are things happening but compared to what's going on in biology we have a long way to go. However, this is the way of the future and the journals know it so they will have to adapt. Recently, a bill that required all NIH funded research to be published in open access journals was vetoed at a late stage by President Bush so things are certainly bubbling away in this area.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year people. No more posting this year. See you in 2008 and thanks for all the interesting and very encouraging emails. D!

Authors - alphabetical vs. by contribution

After my first post on Authors and who goes on papers I have received quite a few emails from people and had some interesting discussions with some of my colleagues. It seems that everyone has a good story on this topic. Something that I've noticed can give rise to some heated discussions is whether authors should be listed alphabetically or according to how much they have contributed, i.e. the first author did most. From what I've gathered so far the alphabetical system seems to be a chemistry thing. When I mention this concept to people in biology/biochemistry they are outraged. In their area you really need to be the first or second author for the paper to carry any serious weight on your publication list. After thinking a bit about all this I have reached two conclusions that may or may not be right:

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(1) The alphabetical system only benefits the supervisor. The supervisor no longer has to have any troublesome discussions about who did what.

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(2) The contribution system also benefits the people that actually did the work. In many academic institutions and companies they look for first authorship's on papers. This is the only way they can determine if people did any meaningful science. From third author and down they could have ended up on the paper for close to nothing.

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And then there are the supervisors that mix things up:

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(1) Many supervisors will always put themselves last and everyone else by alphabet?

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(2) Others will always put themselves first and everyone else alphabetical (or by contribution). I suspect they do this so that the paper will be referred to as "supervisors name" et al. rather than "students name" et al.

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I have been through two alphabetical places and four by contribution places and I have reached the conclusion that if you want your name at pole position (at the alphabetical places) you just have to do all the work yourself. And finally just in case anyone thinks that I'm moaning and I'm unhappy about how things have panned out for me - I'm not - I just thought the topic was interesting. D!

Authors - who goes on the paper and why?

Yes I know! It's pretty quiet around here. My Internet connection at home is dead. I'm on the phone with my Internet provider every day to resolve this issue but it is a slow process.....So I guess a bit of blogging from work is required (Sorry boss. I'll run that column in 15 minutes). I'm writing papers at the moment and this always brings up the issue of authors. Who's on and who's off? Over the years I've experienced some pretty disturbing things in this category:

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(1) You send the paper off to your boss for proof reading etc. and it comes back with another name on the paper! Why? The boss feels bad about not giving that person credit for something completely unrelated and is trying to make up for it.

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(2) People doing routine analysis go on all papers. This category is a bit of a grey area as some techniques may be routine to the person doing it but does require years and years of experience. An interesting issue in this category is X-ray crystallography. Many older scientists (50+ years) don't realise that this has become a routine operation and religiously put the x-ray dude on all papers. Granted in the world of small molecule X-rays the crystallographer should go on sometimes when things aren't trivial. However, 90% of the time this is definitely not the case.

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(3) Everyone in the lab goes on all papers! This is really far out but nevertheless the policy in some labs. By everyone I also mean the technician making up the solutions.

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(4) And then there are the totally reasonable, serious scientist that will actually ask to have their name removed from the paper as they don't think they have contributed enough. I like this person much more than the evil pseudo-scientist snake that will do anything to sneak their name on a paper.

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There's much more where this is coming from. Another post on the topic coming up shortly. D!

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!