On scientific fraud

Did you ever notice how small time bank or convenience store thieves only get caught after about the tenth heist using the exact same disguise and MO?

Read ORI findings and retraction notices with this in mind.

[H/t: a couple of peeps who made me think of this recently. You know who you are. ]

Repost: Study Section, Act I

I think it has been some time since I last reposted this. This originally appeared Jun 11, 2008.

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Time: February, June or October
Setting: The Washington Triangle National Hotel, Washington DC

Dramatis Personæ:
• Assistant Professor Yun Gun (ad hoc)
• Associate Professor Rap I.D. Squirrel (standing member)
• Professor H. Ed Badger (standing member, second term)
• Dr. Cat Herder (Scientific Review Officer)
• The Chorus (assorted members of the Panel)
• Lurkers (various Program Officers, off in the shadows)

If you are going to talk about "tiers", then you'd better own that

Occasionally during the review of careers or grant applications you will see dismissive comments on the journals in which someone has published their work. This is not news to you. Terms like “low-impact journals” are wonderfully imprecise and yet deliciously mean. Yes, it reflects the fact that the reviewer himself couldn’t be bothered to actually review the science IN those paper, nor to acquaint himself with the notorious skew of real world impact that exists within and across journals.

More hilarious to me is the use of the word “tier”. As in “The work from the prior interval of support was mostly published in second tier journals…“.

It is almost always second tier that is used.

But this is never correct in my experience.

If we’re talking Impact Factor (and these people are, believe it) then there is a “first” tier of journals populated by Cell, Nature and Science.

In the Neurosciences, the next tier is a place (IF in the teens) in which Nature Neuroscience and Neuron dominate. No question. THIS is the “second tier”.

A jump down to the IF 12 or so of PNAS most definitely represents a different “tier” if you are going to talk about meaningful differences/similarities in IF.

Then we step down to the circa IF 7-8 range populated by J Neuroscience, Neuropsychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry. Demonstrably fourth tier.

So for the most part when people are talking about “second tier journals” they are probably down at the FIFTH tier- 4-6 IF in my estimation.

I also argue that the run of the mill society level journals extend below this fifth tier to a “the rest of the pack” zone in which there is a meaningful perception difference from the fifth tier. So…. Six tiers.

Then we have the paper-bagger dump journals. Demonstrably a seventh tier. (And seven is such a nice number isn’t it?)

So there you have it. If you* are going to use “tier” to sneer at the journals in which someone publishes, for goodness sake do it right, will ya?

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*Of course it is people** who publish frequently in the third and fourth tier and only rarely in second tier, that use “second tier journal” to refer to what is in the fifth or sixth tier of IFs. Always.

**For those rare few that publish extensively in the first tier, hey, you feel free to describe all the rest as “second tier”. Go nuts.

…."what a drag".

For my lovely persecution complex commenters….

NIH Sekrits

It is a little known #truefact of the NIH that every 500 logins or refreshes on your eRA Commons account improves your eagerly anticipated grant score by 1 percentile point.