Matthew's Journal

On Tuesday, I finished the first draft of an article I've been working on for the past few weeks. I won't say much about the article since it's going to be somewhat controversial and anyone can read what I write here. The article is going to overturn some high profile research of someone who works in my department and my adviser and I don't want to deal with the flack we're going to get for ruining the department's good press until our article has been submitted for publication.

It's weird. It's like there is more desire to get researchers in the news than for them to do careful, well-mannered research. There is such a push to publish, some scientists aren't left with the time to double check their results or to make sure their theories are applicable beyond anecdotal cases and examples. The reason I'm writing a paper to overturn another is because the authors didn't check to see if their theory was reproducible for other times and areas other than the one time and place they looked. I'm sure that they were just in a rush to publish and forgot to tie up all the loose ends, but I worry that some scientists do this kind of thing out of laziness or negligence – implying that they're not fit for important research – or, worse, they know their theories are unsound and they're just looking to get good press and hope they don't get caught.

It's that last point that really worries me. There is already some precedence for scientists doing this sort of thing. Several scientists have been exposed for lying about their research into stem cells, cloning, and fusion just to name a few fields. Obviously, these scientists were caught and their research was invalidated, but what if they weren't caught or not caught until years later? Their false work would be used by others and research would continue, but everything would be built on false principles until the whole thing falls apart like a house of cards. Imagine being a scientist and having your career ended because the work that you built your own research on wasn't true.

As a scientist, you have a responsibility to “do your homework”. Before you publish, you should double check that you're right. Just because something happens a certain way at place A and at time X, doesn't mean that it will happen at place B or Time Y. At the same time, I live in fear of committing the same sin myself. You can spend years working on a project and building and double checking your theories, but all it takes if for one person to come up with one example where you're theory doesn't work – an example that you might have never thought of – to invalidate the whole thing.

Now, from a scientific perspective, having your theories invalidated like that isn't that bad of a thing. After all, you, and by extension the scientific community, will have learned something and the collective body of knowledge still gets bigger. However, there is still the issue of having what was supposed to be the crowning achievement of your career ruined because of something that you didn't think of. And, let's face it, no one has won a noble prize for explaining how something doesn't work.

Anyway, back to my original point, my draft is completed and my adviser will now rip it to shreds and, with our combined efforts, we will see if we can't turn my scribblings into something that isn't an affront to science and the written word.