for pennathur, who doesnt believe there is bias in these selection procedures:
quote:
"A question both journals have considered is that of whether their editors and reviewers should have caught the errors in Dr. Hwang's papers before publication. But as in past cases of fraud, the journals' editors and other scientists assert that their system depends basically on trust and that reviewers can check only whether a report's conclusions follow from the data presented.
"Peer review is not set up to test for fraud," Dr. Campbell said. "It is set up to provide expert assessment of the scientific credibility and reliability of what scientists report, taking the report itself in good faith."
"In addition, Dr. Hwang invited well-known American researchers to be co-authors on his articles, which he may have hoped would make his findings more acceptable to leading journals like Science and Nature. He even invited Dr. Gerald Schatten, a stem cell expert at the University of Pittsburgh, to be the lead author on the June 2005 report although Dr. Schatten had done none of the experiments. But Dr. Donald Kennedy, the editor of Science, said the inclusion of American co-authors "certainly did not affect us."
end quoteyeah right, "it did not affect us".
my point is that the peer review process and the selection process is flawed and favors white people, men, and those working in labs in the us and europe. this is pretty much what the new york times article is saying too. so let's not suspend our healthy disbelief just because something appeared in 'Science', the mouthpiece of the AAAS.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/science/25clone.html
5 comments:
What alternative are you suggesting?
Then, a good percentage of people in US labs are Indians. And many journals under review do not give out names of authors. Then how do you suppose these people discrminate?
Do they do that by looking at the english language used?
But then, most Indians score more than the American average in GRE verbal.
Inclusion of American authors, especially from high ranked universities would have helped in gaining more reader respectability.But that is because of the name of the univ. more that being American. That has more to do with general researcher mentality than publisher discrimination.
I cant quite connect your arguements in this case...
Rajeev, since you had asked abt eateries in India sometime ago, here is something to indulge your 'bourgeous' self :-). Enjoy!
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Rajeev,
The co-authors were "well-known
American researchers", so you cant
cant conclude from that statement
that the selection process favors
white people. You can only say
the reviewers were influenced by
the names of *well-known*
american researchers (becoz of
their credibility).
Why do you post articles from
Dr. Kalyan or Dr. Kak ? Because of
their credibility and not because
they are blue, green, yellow,
brown. :-)
It's the same kind of thing.
So this particular argument of
yours wasnt correct.
But I'm not saying you dont have
other reasons for healthy disbelief
in the magazine's review
processes. You probably have good
reasons.
Rajeev,
Your unsubstantiated flame-raising claim that 'white people' are favoured in the academic review process speaks volumes of how well you are acquainted with the process of scientific review, or of the demographics of scientific careers in the US.
First, the study that Hwang's paper mentions is empirical, and based on experimentation. There is no way for reviewers, with about 6 months of review time, to be able to verify all the results of all the experiments mentioned in a paper that is based on work that took years to perform. Usually, reviewers reach back into their analytic understanding of the subject to obtain an estimate of how feasible the procedure is -- and then accept it based on faith.
They assume that all people, white, brown or black are honest to the cause of science and will not falsify results.
Second, look around labs in the US. A large chunk of science reseearchers, and some very successful ones, are from Asia. Part of the reason is that Asians are much more inclined towards careers in math and science.
Making everything an us-versus-them issue does not help. The problem of being able to verify scientific disclosure is genuine. Ascribing race to the matter is inflammatory and pernicious.
I wish to comment on the assertion of "journals' editors and other scientists"
that "...reviewers can check only whether a report's conclusions follow from
the data presented". Indian editors and scientists rarely, if ever, perform
this check. This is especially so with what I call "captive" journals, e.g.,
In-House journals and others that are entirely controlled by exclusive groups.
The vast majority of Indian journals fall in this category. The term Peer
Review has no meaning for these.
Take the following examples from my personal experience. Several decades ago,
I found that the experimental methods described in the Ph.D thesis (and a
paper based on it) of another scientist could not have yielded any meaningful
data. The methodological blunders were so elementary, anyone with highschool-
level chemistry could have detected them. Use of the method, therefore,
indicated abysmal ignorance. The thesis work was on the activity of a certain
enzyme in a bacterium grown under various conditions, but it could be further
deduced from the description of the methodology that there would have been no
growth of the bacteria required for the described work, and no assay of the
enzyme could have been done. The inescapable conclusion is that the data were
"cooked up". Although these facts were brought to the knowledge of the
institution's authorities and to other scientists in the same field, the said
scientist rose very rapidly in his career and reached the very top. At
present, he is Vice-Chancellor of a university.
In another paper (authors held rank equal to Associate Professor at the time
of publication) a statistical "correlation coefficient" of -1.420 between two
properties of a system is claimed, which is absurd, because the value cannot
be outside the range of -1 and +1. In the same paper 'biological half-life"
of radioactive phosphorus in a certain insect is reported as 15.80, 15.76 and
15.00 days, Bilogical half-life can never be more than the physical half-life
which in this case is 14.1 days.
These absurdities have all been passed by the editors and "reviewers". Peer
review DOES NOT WORK in India, The reviewers are lazy or ignorant, or they
deliberately become accessory to fraud and misconduct. Peer Review in its true
sense, with the necessary attributes of scientific objectivity and judicial
integrity, just does not exist.
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