Editorial
1-2012
Lab Times
page 3
“Science is self-correcting”...
... – a claim that is repeated in an almost mantra-like fashion
when it comes to cases of “bad science”. If conclusions are erroneous, if results are flawed or even if data sets are manipulated –
in the end, the errors will definitely be recognised and corrected
because the way science works automatically makes it a self-correcting enterprise. If someone claims something is incorrect, science itself will show it to be false by further research and scientific testing. This way, false claims will undoubtedly fall by the wayside during science’s inexorable march forward.
Sounds good. But how is that in practice? Well, you might assume that, first of all, it is the journals’ particular role to officially
correct errors and thereby clear the
scientific record from false claims.
A couple of reports during the last
months, however, have raised serious
doubts about whether most notably
the so-called top tier journals show
sufficient responsibility in this point.
Last September, for example, in
a comment at the blog Retraction
Watch, University of Rochester’s Paul
Brookes shared his experience when
informing Nature Cell Biology about
several fundamental problems with a
certain paper, including the mislabelling of figures and use of the wrong
tissue material. His first letter was
bluntly rejected. Brookes recalls, “They simply would not accept
any criticism that shed a bad light on their peer review system.”
Thereupon, Brookes recruited a group of colleagues (“a veritable who’s who in mitochondria, with a combined ~200 years of
research experience on this topic”) and repeated some of the experiments in the paper. The results proved all his points. Nevertheless, it took three rounds of review and more than a year, just
to get a two page correspondence published 18 months after the
original paper.
In his comment, Brookes describes those review rounds in
frustrating detail. His bitter “final conclusion”: “… you can have
all the heavy hitters on your side, but if you challenge something
in a Nature Publishing Group (NPG) journal, you will have a fight
to even get in the door, followed by a pitched battle to get something published, with every possible curve-ball thrown at you
during the review and revision process. NPG does not like it when
you find mistakes that should have been found in peer review.
The phrase ‘it’s in Nature so it must be true’ was never more appropriate.”
Another example, also covered by a comment at Retraction
Watch, definitely tramples the journals’ duty to correct science
under foot. In 2009, the University of Alabama in Birmingham officially announced the findings of an expert committee that the
crystal structure data in ten papers by one of its researchers was
fabricated. Therefore, the committee requested that the corresponding protein structure files be removed from public protein
databases as well as that the papers be retracted by the various
journals. Six papers instantly were, whereas four of them haven’t
officially been retracted to this day – among them one Nature paper and another one from Cell. The concluding Retraction Watch
comment was, “I generally like those titles, but they appear to be
very obstinate in one area where they could do a lot of good.”
Our next example. Last August, after a year-long “battle”, the
Yoram Groner group at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot finally
published a paper in EMBO Molecular Medicine (vol. 3(10): 593604), which clearly refuted the claims of a highly-cited 2002 Cell
paper on a certain tumour suppressor. Lab Times asked Groner,
“Did you also try to publish your findings in Cell where it would
have been appropriate because the
refuted paper had appeared there?”
Groner’s responded, “The answer to
your question is yes. The paper was
first written for Cell ‘Matters Arising’
but was instantly refused without
even pre-reviewing. I did argue that
since Cell published the original refuted paper it holds a moral obligation to right the wrong. Evidently,
I failed. My impression is that Cell
didn’t want the headache. I was sad
and disappointed by the lack of responsibility to scientific integrity.”
One last example. Recently, a
Belgian group led by Vincent Detours from the Université Libre de Bruxelles published a study
showing that random gene sets can predict cancer survival even
better than the majority of prognostic “genetic signatures”. A real
case of multiple “de-discovery”, as it were. Wouldn’t you expect
to read this important “self-correcting” result in a top tier journal
or, at least, in an oncology journal? Wrong! Here’s what Detours
told The Scientist about his quest, “It took us four years and six rejections to get this work finally published in a computational biology journal [PLoS Comp. Biol. 7(10), e1002240] – not the most
efficient venue to reach the oncology community.” And he finally added, “This has to be said; one can no longer stay silent about
the rather limited self-correction capability of the top tier publishing system (Cell, Nature Genetics, PNAS, etc.), which promoted these studies in the first place.”
These examples show that science indeed has a very high
power for self-correction. But it’s almost for the birds if the journals don’t join in.