wumblr:sixth-light:prospitianescapee:prospitianescapee:wumblr:so that’s what happened to spiders geo
wumblr:sixth-light:prospitianescapee:prospitianescapee:wumblr:so that’s what happened to spiders georgMore than 20 scientists — co-authors, peers and other interested observers in the field — mobilized to pore through the data in almost 150 papers on which Pruitt is a co-author, looking for evidence of manipulated or fabricated numbers. They found similar signs of copy-and-paste duplications. In at least one instance, researchers identified formulae inserted into a published excel file, designed to add or subtract from a pasted value and create new data points.HAHAHAHA(I think it’s this one…? The spider scientists’ collaborative bullshit-tracking sheet also lists two paywalled papers - this one and this one - whose “raw data” was provided via Excel files which generated some of their own contents.)seriously though, this isn’t funny; this was originally discovered by a woman who had reached out to this man to form a collaboration shortly after finishing her PhD, and then discovered years later that his part of the collaboration had involved…just…making up the data so it looked like it proved her hypothesis. this is gut-wrenching for the scientists involved. modern science is a team effort and you have to rely on your collaborators being honest. if they aren’t, you can (and people apparently have) waste years of work. additionally, it casts the shadow of doubt on everybody who worked with him. they’ll have to prove they didn’t know about the fraud and that their other work is sound. people are going to have to spend ages combing through all the data, when they could be doing new work. it’s a complete nightmare. plus, if he was wholesale faking data, then you have to wonder what happened to any students or lab workers who noticed. did he fast-talk them? force them out? make them complicit? falsify their data and let them graduate using it? it’s going to be ugly whichever way. oh absolutely! the worst implication being that (as sabine hossenfelder has been saying for years) the academic “citation mill” implicitly encourages this, so one must wonder who else has been trying to pull this kind of shit -- source link