Ivan Oransky
speaker
46 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Ivan Oransky’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The most likely career path for anyone who has committed misconduct is a long and fruitful career.
There may be something that sounds a lot less nefarious than what I just described, but that is actually what's happening.
You know, you wear red, you must be angry, or if it says that this is definitely a cure for cancer.
I essentially spend all of my nights and weekends thinking about scientific fraud, scientific misconduct, scientific integrity for that matter.
We hear from whistleblowers all the time, people we call sleuths, who are actually out there finding these problems. And often that's pre-retraction or they'll explain to us why retraction happened. We also do things like file public records requests.
I went to Adam and I said, what if we created a blog about this? It seems like there are all these stories that are hiding in plain sight that essentially we and other journalists are leaving on the table. And when we looked at the actual retraction notices, the information was somewhere between misleading and opaque. What do you mean by that?
So when a paper is retracted, and it's probably worth defining that, a retraction is a signal to the scientific community or really to any readers of a particular paper. peer-reviewed journal article, that you should not rely on that anymore, that there's something about it that means you should, you know, you can not pretend it doesn't exist, but you shouldn't base any other work on it.
Right. So when you retract a paper, you're supposed to put a retraction notice on it, the same way when you correct an article in the newspaper, you're supposed to put a correction notice on it. But when you actually read these retraction notices, and to be fair, this has changed a fair amount in the 13 years that we've been doing this, sometimes they include no information at all.
Sometimes they include information that is woefully incomplete. Sometimes it's some version of you know, getting Al Capone on tax evasion. You know, they fake the data, but we're going to say they forgot to fill out this form, which, you know, is still a reason to retract, but isn't the whole story.
So we think that... Probably 2% of papers should be retracted for something that would be considered either out-and-out fraud or maybe just severe bad mistake. According to our data, which we have the most retraction data of any database, about 0.1% of the world's literature is retracted. So one in a thousand papers. We think it should be about 20 times that, about 2%.
There's a bunch of reasons, but they come down to one. There was a survey back in 2009, which has been repeated and done differently and come up with roughly the same number, actually even higher numbers recently, that says 2% of researchers, if you ask them anonymously, they will say, yes, I've committed something that would be considered misconduct.
Of course, when you ask them how many people they know who have committed misconduct, it goes much, much higher than that. And so that's one line of evidence, which is, you know, admittedly indirect.
The other is that when you talk to the sleuths, the people doing the real work of figuring out what's wrong with literature and letting people know about it, they keep lists of papers they've flagged for publishers and for authors and journals. And routinely, most of them are not retracted. Again, we came to 2%. Is it exactly 2%? And is that even the right number?
No, we're pretty sure that's the lower bound. Others say it should be even higher.
Bolt, an anesthesiology researcher, was studying something called head of starch, which was essentially a blood substitute. Not exactly blood, but something that when you were on like a heart-lung pump, a machine, during certain surgeries or you're in the ICU or something like that, it would basically cut down on the amount of blood transfusions people would need. And that's got obvious benefits.
Now, he did a lot of the important work in that area, and his work was cited in all the guidelines. It turned out that he was faking data.
He at one point was under criminal indictment or at least criminal investigation. That didn't go anywhere. The hospital, the clinic also, which to be fair, had actually identified a lot of problems. They came under pretty severe scrutiny. But in terms of actual sanctions, pretty minimal.
So universities, they protect fraudsters in a couple different ways. One is that they are very slow to act, they're very slow to investigate, and they keep all of those investigations hidden.
The other is that because lawyers run universities, like they frankly run everything else, they tell people who are involved in investigations, if someone calls for a reference letter, let's say someone leaves college, And they haven't been quite found guilty, but as a plea bargain sort of thing, they will leave and then they'll stop the investigation.
Then when someone calls for a reference, and we actually have the receipts on this because we filed public records requests for emails between different parties, we learned that they would be routinely told not to say anything about the misconduct.
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