Starting fires as a form of political expression...

This article in Nature seems to have started a number of rants.

I'll get around to writing something meaningful about this, and related phenomena, a bit later (I've got a number of books due back to the library that can't be renewed, and I need to finish them- a task that has and will require many more hours of reading, and coffee, to accomplish). In the meantime, I'd love to hear people's thoughts.

What interests me about articles and research like this is not the Nature article itself, but the comments to the article. Nothing says ruffled feathers, angry bloggers, and general nastiness like pulling Internet users into a sexism debate.

Problems with the private sector...

A topic that seems to be increasingly relevant in the last few days of posting (here, and here) is the invasiveness of corporate practice on other areas of life. So with that in mind, I thought I'd throw some news from Nature out there, in the form of this article.

So this article gives us a quite disturbing set of events whereby

"a company conducting a clinical trial, having its employees design the trial, analyse the data, write the paper, and then towards the very end recruit academic authors to put their name on the paper to give it that seal of supposed authenticity "

Two words for this: not cool. Peer-review for a number of years has come under attack for encouraging, among other things, nepotism and sexism. The literature is vast, and a study (albeit, a potentially rewarding and important study) in itself, which I don't feel confident trying to portray to you in a single blog post. What is important to note, is that in the Journal of the American medical Association (JAMA), where the study mentioned in Nature is soon to appear, this phenomena of 'ghost authorship' has been mentioned for at least 10 years.

What is the problem here? Well, apart from the fact that, as Nature mentions, this particular cache of studies are actually so doctored as to be plain ol' fraudulent in their content, it's also a subversion of the current system of scholarship practiced over the world. If the peer-review system wasn't on shaky footing before, it's certainly been shown to be in even more strife. The tobacco industry has been employing researchers for decades to attempt to show that smoking isn't as bad as everyone thinks (nice, guys), but this is a new level of subversion, the actual hiring of external researchers as front-men for internal research.

Priority is one of the big prizes in scholarly research. It always has been, as we aren't generally the type to earn the big bucks. But lo and behold, the private sector has found a way to tap into this prize, by effectively giving away research to motivate their own ends. It seems like a win-win situation: the company gets their research, and a researcher gets to be a first name. This is not so much an issue in philosophy, but in the natural and life sciences there is a huge emphasis on being a first name. I mean, computational science/high-end physics papers can have tens, occasionally hundreds of names on a paper. No one wants to be obscured behind the impenetrable wall of `et. al.' And hence the problem - the prize of research, priority, has been subverted.

How does one counter this? It's not easy, and will most likely require a restructuring of peer-review (a shout out to my friends who are big on `designing in ethics'). The first, if somewhat cumbersome method I can think of to alleviate this problem is to require a defense of a paper funded by industry, but I don't think we have enough peer-reviewers for this. The second would be a change in emphasis on the importance of priority in research in the current academic climate, but that's even harder to accomplish.

the method of discovery mentioned in Nature may show some promise, but requires a diversification of talents in the academic community. I'm talking about encouraging and promoting the meta-study: a study of studies. Hell, this might even allow us to get our highly critical social theorist brethren into the fray. To examine a wide range of studies on a topic allows us to see trends in data that may not appear otherwise.

I'll quote a personal example to illustrate: my honours thesis in nuclear physics revolved around the debunking of a number of popular ideas in a particular field of plasma physics. The problem was that people had initially misunderstood a set of phenomena, and had published based on this misunderstanding, which was never picked up. It, over the span of 30-odd years, became canon within this field, until one day my then-supervisor was alerted by a PhD student that the description of the system was false. As in, the data that people continued to collect, to describe other phenomena, was all based on an interpretation of a system which was false. The data had been replicated time and time again as a side product of other projects, and still no one noticed. It followed that an analysis of the literature pointed to how and where the misunderstanding occurred.

That was a benign example, certainly far removed in intention from the current situation, but I hope I get my point across- by looking at what has come before, we can see patterns that each individual study can't display. In my example, it was a misunderstanding of theory, in Ross' example written up in nature, it was the subversion of a practice within the scholarly methods of reporting. Both of these are important, but it takes a particular type of research to see where things are going wrong. Academic maintenance, so to speak.

I can't see that corporations are going to stop trying this. It's up to the academy to make it that much harder for private sector interests to subvert our practices in an effort to push products.