The Second UK Conference of Science Journalists was held on 25 June 2012. The conference programme is available from the UKCSJ web site. The conference is intended for science journalists; I am not a journalist, but attended at the kind invitation of the President of the Association of British Science Writers, Connie St Louis.
I went to two of the sessions. The first was the session was entitled “What can journalists do to uncover scientific misconduct?”. The second was the plenary session at the end. What follows is my perspective on those two sessions.
Misconduct session
Misconduct is what most people call “fraud”. The session on misconduct had three speakers.
The first speaker was the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Anaesthesia, Steve Yentis. Yentis told about the case of Joachim Boldt, an anesthesiologist who has had over 80 papers retracted. He also told about the case of Yoshitaka Fujii, an anesthesiologist who seems to have published 193 bogus papers. A third case was also cited, though I did not get the details. Yentis has been leading the charge to get more integrity in anesthesiology.
The second speaker was a journalist from New Scientist magazine, Peter Aldhous. Aldhous has worked to expose fraud with reports in New Scientist. His presentation seemed sound, but there was no substantial news. (The slides for his presentation are on his web site.) One point he made was that institutions are unlikely to fairly investigate allegations of fraud made against their own researchers. This obvious point seemed to be new to some people.
The third speaker was the Chair of the Committee On Publication Ethics (COPE), Ginny Barbour. Barbour said that COPE was working to get institutions to investigate allegations of fraud made against their own researchers. She also claimed that only a few percent of research publications are fraudulent.
During the question period, someone stated that science journalists should be cheerleading science, and that fraud is very rare, and anyway science is self-correcting. More generally, many people there genuinely believed that almost all scientists are virtually always honest. Those people work with science all day, and yet they seem to have no clue about how science really operates. Overall, I found the session stunningly disheartening: there is an enormous way to go, to get many journalists to appreciate what reality is.
I pointed out that all the examples of fraud given by the speakers were in medical science. I noted that in the UK, during the past half century, there does not seem to have been a single case where a non-medical researcher has been officially found to have committed fraud. That is clearly unreasonable. Consider much smaller groups of respected people: e.g. members of parliament, Catholic priests, police detectives—in each instance, we know that, during half a century, at least a few of them will have committed serious crimes.
I also described how I once reported a fraud at the University of Reading. The university refused to investigate: I was told that the university had no procedures for investigating such allegations, because their professors always acted with integrity.
The conclusion is that there is no accountability. I said that there were some fields of science where half the research publications were bogus. That was in conflict with the claim of Barbour, and did not go over well.
Some journalists seemed to think that verifying research fraud requires specialist scientific expertise. I gave two counterexamples from my own work. One counterexample is in archaeoastronomy of China, where a fraud consisted of claiming that a figure with four dots in it actually had five dots in it: in other words, understanding the fraud only requires being able to count to five. I published a paper on this, which overturned the previous 20 years of research in the field. The other counterexample was the analysis by Phil Jones on Chinese weather stations; I mentioned this only briefly, though, as I did not want to get into the emotive politics of global warming.
Afterwards, I briefly talked with Aldhous. Aldhous explained how a journalist might have to put in as much time to get a story about fraud as to get, say, 75 stories about usual science. From a business perspective, that is obviously a serious problem.
I also briefly talked with Barbour. I repeated the point that Aldhous had made about institutions investigating their own researchers. Barbour replied that she was aware of the problem, but having institutions investigate their own was the best that could currently be done. At the time, I could not think of anything polite to say in response to such nonsense. It is obvious that having institutions investigate their own is worse than doing nothing, because it tends to give the illusion of there being a real investigation. (We have seen such illusory investigations with Climategate, for example.)
Barbour then talked about the COPE Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors. She suggested that it was via the Code that research would gain more integrity. The Code contains statements saying that editors should “strive to constantly improve their journal”, should be “supporting initiatives to educate researchers about publication ethics”, and should “publish guidance to authors on everything that is expected of them”. Those are plainly platitudes. The Code makes no mention of research data having to be disclosed, of computer programs having to be available, etc.—in other words, it lacks most of the specifics that would be needed for it to accomplish anything non-illusory.
Plenary session
The plenary session had four speakers.
The first speaker was the journalist William Cullerne Bown. Bown said that science journalism is failing. His main evidence is the small number of readers. He explained how, after the development of the atomic bomb, the public became fascinated by science and the promise to change civilization. That promise has not been fulfilled, at least not nearly as much as was claimed half a century ago. In consequence, public interest in science has lessened, and shifted more to technology.
Bown noted that the big stories about scientific failures have been missed. He also commented on large institutions involved in science—citing the Royal Society, Elsevier, and the Wellcome Trust: he said that such institutions “have their own interests”, which are not necessarily those of science. He observed that there is lots of corruption among politicians and business people; so how could it be that there is seemingly almost none among scientists? He criticized the many science journalists who seem to treat scientists as being almost like demigods.
The second speaker was the economist and BBC journalist Evan Davis. Davis cautioned journalists about focusing on negative aspects of science, such as fraud, saying that negative publicity might bias scientists against doing anything, and we want to encourage scientists to continue their work.
The third speaker was an Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University, Jay Rosen. Rosen was also the person who delivered the keynote address for the conference. He stated that it was important for journalists to be “confronting … climate change denialism”. He later said that “exposure and investigation [of fraud] are not … very good goals” for science journalism. More generally, he came across as being highly certain of himself, while having little understanding of the issues.
I think that there are many people like Davis and Rosen: people who have effectively taken science to be their religion and scientists to be their priests or even gods. Those people are fearful of having their religious beliefs defenestrated.
The fourth speaker was Connie St Louis; in addition to being President of the Association of British Science Writers, St Louis is also Director of Science Journalism at City University London. St Louis argued that journalists are too close to scientists. She said that fraud is “very very underreported” and that in consequence “we have failed as journalists”. She closed with the exhortation “let’s have some real journalism”.
The statements by St Louis prompted discussion. Bown said that he agreed with the statements. Many people, however, seemed to disagree. Someone in the audience said that fraud is confined to a few isolated individuals.
I repeated my main point from the earlier session: in the UK, during the past half century, there does not seem to have been a single case where a non-medical researcher has been officially found to have committed fraud. This demonstrates that there is no accountability.
Note: a video of the plenary session is available via the UKCSJ web site.
___________________My conclusions
For me, the take-home message from the conference is that a large majority of science journalists are extremely naive
about scientists. The naivety is so extreme that I suspect it must be partially willful.
We have known for millennia that prerequisites for integrity in human affairs include things like transparency and accountability. We need those things in scientific research.
See also
| • | Allegations of research misconduct |
| • | Letter to the Science and Technology Committee (UK Commons) |