JJ Tyson 720467726

1. This article revolves around increasingly problematic methods which are used to publish scientific research, namely psychology studies. One major point of the article is that academic fraud is on the rise. According to a report in the journal Nature, retraction of study results has risen by over 1200% in the past decade; the overall number of published scientific studies has risen by only 44%. The other major point of the article is the need for change in how scientists publish their findings. Because popular journals tend to favor new and exciting findings, there is enormous pressure for researchers to come up with positive results. If the scientific community does not make some kind of change to the research-publication process, problems with academic misconduct are likely to increase. 2. When evaluating the moral equivalence between selective publishing (ie. Cherry Picking) and outright falsification of data, it is important to put oneself in the position of the researcher. Lets say that you are a university scientist looking for a link between eye color and hours spent watching TV. When the study is complete, you find that there is no correlation between the two variables for blue or brown-eyed people. However, you find that people with green eyes seem to watch significantly more television than those with other eye colors. While it would obviously be preferable to present the entirety of your findings, this could jeopardize the publication of your work, so you choose to cherry pick and only publish the green-eyed statistics. This could be seen as unethical, however, these scientists are working in a broken system which rewards positive findings and ignores negative ones. How can we expect scientists not to selectively report data when their livelihood depends on being published by heavily biased publications? While I believe that researchers caught falsifying data should be fired, I think the methods of scientific publication need to be changed. Until the system is revised to be inclusive of negative findings, I do not believe we should fault researchers for selective reporting, and I certainly do not think it should be equivocated to outright falsification of data.

3. One idea to quell the recent surge in scientific misconduct is to require researchers to post their data online. Dr. Simonsohn from the article says instating this initiative would allow for better peer review and in turn, reduce instances of academic fraud. Another course of action would be to require scientific journals to publish a certain number of negative findings and repeated studies in each published edition. In order for this idea to work properly, the approximate percentage of non-positive articles would need to be agreed upon and adopted by most or all major scientific journals. This could be accomplished via a UN-esque symposium which would allow for open and honest discussion and debate. Hopefully, such discourse would allow for journals and scientists to reach a compromise that is beneficial to scientists, journals, and the public at large. However, if we continue to ignore the problem, the tangled web of poor research practices and exclusivistic publication will continue to plague the scientific community.