Tag Archives: science

Rescuing Science

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Last week, the same editorial was published on the two top scientific journals, Nature and Science1,2, describing the intent of the scientific community to address reproducibility and transparency of scientific results.

Last June, a group of editors of scientific journals, members of funding agencies, and scientific leaders have met to discuss guidelines and principles for future publication policy to guarantee reliable scientific methods. The meeting resulted in the publication of a list of guidelines that the journal should follow to report preclinical studies (http://www.nih.gov/about/reporting-preclinical-research.htm). According to the guidelines, the journals should carefully check accuracy of statistical analysis use a checklist to assure a complete report of the methodology (standards, replicates, statistics, sample size, blinding, inclusion and exclusion criteria); the journal should encourage sharing datasets and software in public domains, be responsible of refutations, and guarantee the accurate description of all sources as well as check for image manipulation.

Sometimes it is difficult to incorporate all the information on the methodology in a paper, especially because of the word count limit. To guarantee a careful and accurate description of all the methodologies, some journal should revise the word count limit that induces the author to cut or to move a huge part of the methods section to the supplementary section. To encourage accuracy, some journals are already requesting a minimum word count for the methods section. To assure a good quality of the research published on both high and low impact journals, the new guidelines should be followed by all the journals and not only by a set of top scientific journals, otherwise affecting the whole research reliability.

These guidelines should not only be adopted by the journals but also by all researchers. Honestly, I thought that the principles outlined in the guidelines—statistics, blindness, sample size, etc.—were obvious steps when outlining an experiment. Obviously, they are not, since the scientific community had to meet and had to delineate them in an official document. The increasing number of retractions—the last most clamorous case of the Obokata’s papers published on Nature and then retracted previously this year—highlights the necessity to draft such a guide. To avoid future problems on science reliability, a training should be provided not only to the new generation of scientists but also to the old generation, who is mostly responsible of the recent scientific scandals. Unfortunately, scientists are not the only responsible for what is happening in science: everyone in the scientific community is guilty from the journals to the funding agencies.

I am still shocked that the people in the scientific community had to meet and draft these guidelines. Now it is time to slow down and to promote transparency and reliability instead than sensationalism.

1Journals unite for reproducibility. Nature. 2014 Nov 6;515(7525):7. doi: 10.1038/515007a.

 2 Journals unite for reproducibility. McNutt M. Science. 2014 Nov 7;346(6210):679.

On the road of science: reproducibility, fraud, and authorship for sale

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Argentina 015 
Happy 2014!

This is my first post of the year and I would like to start this New Year reflecting on some concerning habits in science. I will just focus on only three recent articles that undermine the trustfulness of science, but there are many others out there in the jungle of scientific journals.

In a Comment published in Nature last November, Mina Bissell justifies the non-reproducibility of some in vitro experiments1`. Nowadays, “the techniques and reagents are sophisticated, time-consuming and difficult to master”, challenging the ability to reproduce complicated experiments in different laboratories. The solution, for Dr Bissell, “is to consult the original authors thoughtfully […] ask either to go to the original lab to reproduce the data together, or invite someone from their lab to come to yours.” However, this can be true for in vitro assays that are already an artifact, but I hope that it isn’t for in vivo studies used for preclinical studies. This article has opened an intense discussion on scientific reproducibility, as you can read in the comments published this month by Nature2. You can either agree or disagree with her statements, but we are spending words and time on a topic, experimental reproducibility, that shouldn’t be an issue.

Last December, Nature has reported the news regarding duplicated images used on different journals from the same group3.  Professor Fusco at the University of Naples (Italy) and an associate professor from the Academia of Lincei (Italy) are now under investigation by the police and the university. The misconduct has been revealed by Enrico Bucci, a molecular biologist founder of a small startup (BioDigitalValley) aimed at creating a database of all images from Italian papers published since 2000. Running all images on his gel-checking software, he found that out of 300 papers published from Fusco, 53 contained duplicated or cut and paste images, even one from 1985.  Some of the papers have already been retracted; one of them was published on Journal of Clinical Investigation in 2007.  It is highly possible that Fusco is only the first target of this operation that is going to reveal other misconducts. This is quite concerning not only because it is not a right practice, but also because it comes from a country, Italy, where scientific research is well behind and the funding situation is not good; this circumstance is not going to help Italian science. However, fortunately, this fraud has been unmasked.

An article published last November on Science describes a concerning practice in the Chinese scientific community4. Some intermediary agencies sell authorships on papers that have already been accepted for publication, sometimes without the consent or the knowledge of the actual authors. The price for this service varies based on the position in the author’s list. Thus someone can publish a paper not only without doing anything, but also without even knowing the authors. These practices worry the same Chinese scientific community because “hinder China’s growth in original science, damage the reputation of Chinese academics, and dampen the impact of science developed in China”, as asserted by the president of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Wei Yang in the Editorial published on the same number of Science5.

These are just three examples of the present scientific world. Every month there is at least one retraction, at every meeting there is someone who mistrusts other’s experiments.  Unfortunately we are in a system that gives rewards and funding to sexy science and high Impact Factors publications at the expenses of the truth, the real science, made by simple and reproducible experiments and not artifactual and sexy assays.

Where is science going?

1 Bissell M. Reproducibility: The risks of the replication drive. Nature. 2013 Nov 21;503(7476):333-4.

2 NATURE ’S READERS COMMENT ONLINE.Nature. 2014 Jan 2;505:27.

3 Abbott A. Image search triggers Italian police probe. Nature. 2013 Dec 5;504(7478):18.

4 Hvistendahl M. China’s publication bazaar. Science. 2013 Nov 29;342(6162):1035-9.

5 Yang W. Research Integrity in China. Science. 2013 Nov 29;342(6162):

Motherhood discrimination in science

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Novembre“The view of my colleagues is that for a man, an engineer is able to do what he is supposed to do, but for a woman, she always has to demonstrate she is able”1.

Nowadays, in the XXI century, women have obtained rights that rank them at the same level as men, but they still experience discrimination in many sectors of the society. While women participation has increased in almost all the professions in the last 20 years, they are still underrepresented in science, engineering, and technology (SET) sectors.

Although the number of women graduating and with high level of education in SET is not decreasing, the number of women at senior positions has reached a deadlock. The reasons for this gender disparity are different (i.e. long working hours, necessity to travel) and perpetuate masculine tradition in these settings.

A recent article by Herman C. et al.1 analyzes women discrimination in the scientific world focusing not on gender disparity, but on motherhood discrimination.  They interviewed women SET professionals working in multinational companies (MNCs) in three European Countries-Italy, France, and The Netherlands-where the proportion of women in SET is equivalent, but the norms for working parents and hour flexibility are different.  They divide the women in three different categories: assimilation, cul de sac, breaking the mould, and lying low.  Women who followed the assimilation strategy are those who accepted the existing structures and continued to work long hours and travel to fulfill their career aspiration. Another group of women who accepted the existing structure are those in the cul de sac category, who had stalled their career and had no more interest in advancing. A third group (breaking the mould), characterized by very ambitious and motivated women, didn’t conform to the existing structure and tried to change the norms to follow their career aspirations.  At last the lying low women retained their ambition, but were pushed away from their career progression by the corporation. They found women in all categories in the three countries with some peculiarity. For instance, In Italy, the assimilation system prevails because there are no norms for hour flexibility, therefore women have to conform to the system or quit the corporation. On the other hand, the lying low strategy has been institutionalized in France and is common in The Netherlands, where the norms for hour flexibility and part-time made this possible.

Despite the environment, many women returned to work part time and this, together with their new status as “mothers”, undermined their career opportunities. The same companies expressed their concern about their female employees coming back after maternity leave and failing to achieve higher levels of management. Although some women were still able to progress and achieve their career goals, these situations were considered exceptional.

In this study, the authors present for the first time an analysis of motherhood discrimination over women discrimination. As pointed out by the study, the situation can be different based on the Country, company norms and managers. To have a broader spectrum of the actual situation, the analysis has to be extended to different Countries and companies.

Women SET professionals have to face first gender discrimination, and then later in their career also motherhood discrimination, thus making their progression and life very hard. Studies, discussions, blogs on this topic underscore the “exceptionality” of successful mothers in SET sectors, and, I believe, in many others. How many studies do we need before this situation is going to change?

As a new mom, I would like to quote an interviewed woman in the study described here.

“I take care of my children first, because they won’t wait for me to grow up…”

Source

1Herman C, Lewis S, and Humbert AL. Women Scientists and Engineers in European Compnies: Putting Motherhood under the Microscope. Gender, Work and Organization, Vol.20 No.5 Sept 2013