For reasons I don’t entirely understand, this post is trending high on Google searches for ‘chemistry fraud’. I’d actually like to do a follow up on some of these cases, so if you’re interested in seeing that, have other cases you’d like listed, or know any of the participants, please contact me in the comments or at: chemistrystatistics AT gmail DOT com

– verpa , 10/20/2010

After reading about the IUCr scandal with some 70 structures invalidated followed by another one this month for another set, it got me thinking about the chemistry scandals that have come to light in the past few years. It seems as though the number of massive frauds is increasing … or are they just getting becoming more public? A quick review of some of the biggies ( only chemistry, mind you ):

With the most recent batch of frauds coming out of China, it’s easy to blame China’s research-or-starve model ( literal publish or perish ) as the cause. But, as Nature continues with another piece, that’s too simple of a view.

We need to submit journal articles to the same kind of plagiarism scrutiny that we force students to undergo. Reviewers can’t be expected to keep a significant fraction of an exploding field of knowledge in their heads. We need to let the computers score new manuscripts/data for duplication across all the journals, then include those scores when the manuscripts are sent to the reviewers. I’m not saying we should pull the human from the loop, but the computer should be in there too. Without this sort of check, the databases are rotting from the inside.

We should also have open commenting on all journal articles once published … not the anemic ghetto of a journal club that JACS is doing to ‘test the waters’. As far as I can tell, no one takes that ‘club’ seriously, as it’s obvious JACS isn’t committed to it. I wouldn’t mind having to defend my papers against the occasional troll if I could see easily that three people other people had failed to get a synthesis working, saving myself a day or two of work.

How often have you heard a fellow chemist say … “I don’t trust anything that’s not in [ JACS, Angewandte, Organometallics ]” or “I won’t even read Tett. Letters because it’s full of ISHTAR: Irreproducible Shit That Aggravates Readers“?

Is the network of trust between chemists breaking down?

Where do you see this heading?