The many ways a scientist can lie

In a paper published in the European Journal of Oncology, Professor John Bailar discusses how he thinks that although it is not often scientists directly lie, it is a common trait to mislead. They can do this without resorting to fraud or other direct lies.

False graphs and charts are not the only way scientists can lie to us

The choice of the topic of the study is a big area. Bailar uses the example of the tobacco industry- their preferred method of lying is through the use of secret research. If the secret research  shows a secondary one will not be harmful to the industry, only then are the results published.

Scientists are clever humans and know how to frame a question that will allow them to reach a pre-determined outcome. A study can also be put into the hands of a person adept at interpreting results in certain ways. Most scientists have peers that are engaged in such methods of interpretation and can invite them to interpret their specific study.

Rice is soooo biased

With a 708 papers out of the 874 showing some sor tof bias, the map-based sequence of the rice genome paper showed 81% total bias. Naughty! 245 papers, 28% of the total, showed bias A. This was author bias coming from the 323 authors from the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project (IRGSP).

This rice plant is leaning to the left- biased like the paper on its genome?

Bias B came up at 298 papers, 34% of them. This was institute bias and due to the fact that the number of institutes that collaborated in the IRGP was 32. These were government bodies, universities as well agriculture regulatory bodies such as the Society for Techno-innovation of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Japan.

Rice’s citations say…

The increase in the W of K citations since analysis of results highlights further the importance of the paper

PubMed and Web of Knowledge (W of K) were used to find the citation results of the map-based sequence of the rice genome. The paper was cited in W of K 874 times and only 286 times in PubMed, a total of 1160 times across the two. All of the citations in PubMed were repeated in W of K so the total number of citations was taken as 874 times. The type of citation was unsurprising- 726 were articles, 98 were reviews, 27 editorials and only four were letters. The high number of citations reflects the importance of rice in the world. As a major foodtsuff, many people will have a vested interest in the genome of it- especially producers of the crop, and governments of countries which produce it. As these countriers tend to be the less economically developed, such as Bangladesh, finding more efficient production methods from information gleaned from the genome is of utmost importance. In the picture, it can be seen that the number of citations has increased since the data was analysed- I did not include any citations after December 2010, since then the paper has been cited a further 72 times, highlighting the importance of the paper.

The map-based sequence of the rice genome

This is the paper I generated from Nature, investigating rice- one of the world’s most important foods, feeding over half of the world’s population. The paper presents a map-based sequence covering 95% of the genome. The map is useful as it identifies the genetic traits which would be useful in the production of the cereal. It is predicted that rice production will have to increase by 30% over the next 20 years to meet the demands of a growing population. The results of the paper should therefore accelerate improvements in rice production.

Rice, one of the world's most important foods

Citation impact and self-selection bias: A problem of causation for open access

There have been a number of studies that show pretty conclusively the citation advantage Open Access research articles benefit from. The argument goes that through increased visibility and access to OA papers, more people will view the work which in turn will lead to a higher number of citations.

Alma Swan in The Open Access citation Advantage lists a number of contributory factors that possibly comprise this advantage:

Media coverage and citation bias?

Throughout this project, we’ve been analysing the potential bias within our papers, their citations and authors, and examining the flaws, benefits and necessities of peer review. One thing we haven’t yet looked at is the media coverage our papers received.

Originally we wanted to look at the media coverage for each of our citations, but with over 3500 citations in Web Of Knowledge alone (i.e. not including all the cross-checking required with the PubMed citations) this was unfeasible, especially as it was a side project, rather than the crux of our research.

So instead I sat down this morning with the task of looking at the media coverage of each of our original papers in Nature. I was actually fairly surprised – this is a high impact journal for which most of the big newspaper journalists get pre-embargo press releases sent to them. What I saw, however, was that 60% of the papers received no press coverage at all.