This is another entry at my Facebook Author Page on error, bias, numerical analysis, and all the topics in Painting By Numbers: How to Sharpen Your BS Detector and Smoke Out the Experts.
I’ve spent many hours in my career listening to technical papers, reviewing them for engineering associations and conferences, and editing them or extracting from them for publications and client reports. Over close to four decades, I’ve witnessed a deterioration in quality of these papers and presentations. Many of them today are thinly veiled marketing pieces for the authors’ companies.
So my eyeballs perked up when I read this headline at Retraction Watch: “Could bogus Scientific research be considered false advertising?” The opening sentence is, “Could a scientific paper ever be considered an advertisement?” Retraction Watch is a newly discovered website I’m now following through regular notices.
The questions were stimulated by a court case in Japan where a researcher for a top global pharmaceutical company was being tried, not for manipulating data and scientific fraud (that had already been acknowledged), but for criminal violation of Japan’s advertising laws. The article goes further to probe whether a similar court case in the US might find the researcher and/or his/her company guilty of false advertising when research shown to include falsified data is circulated with promotional material about the drug.
There’s a difference between a technical paper so weak it comes across as company marketing collateral and corrupted research data used to support pharmaceutical advertising. But my larger point here is that the general deterioration in technical information disseminated by “experts” to professionals and consumers creates a huge credibility gap.
It’s high time we call out data-driven BS for what it is in many cases – advertising, false or legitimate, for a product, company, specialist, researcher, author, or government policy maker disguised as legitimate information.
Retraction Watch is a fascinating site to follow (even if somewhat depressing). Someone has to do the dirty work of accentuating the negative. I’m glad I’m not alone!
http://retractionwatch.com/…/bogus-results-considered-fals…/
Could a scientific paper ever be considered an advertisement? That was the question posed to a…
RETRACTIONWATCH.COM
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