A Profound Embarrassment
Clarke & Esposito
Management consulting firm focused on strategic issues in professional and academic publishing information services
This story is from our May 2023 issue of?The Brief—C&E's monthly newsletter covering professional and scholarly communication.?Read the full issue here.
A Profound Embarrassment
Public trust in scientific research,?which is in decline for various reasons, took another?blow this month due to widespread publicity offered to?a methodologically flawed preprint?offering specious claims that one-third of neuroscience papers and one-quarter of medical papers were fraudulent. University of Washington biologist?Carl Bergstrom offers a fairly succinct explanation?of why the preprint’s claims are both nonsensical and have “racist consequences.” The study relies on two criteria to label a paper as fraudulent (neither of which involve evaluating the paper itself):
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