Data, Collaboration, and Scientific Integrity

How to ensure data integrity is a key part of science. Psychology has recent been shaken by its replication crisis and now a similar problem has emerged in behavioural ecology. A number of have been thinking for a while about how to promote and discuss better research practices and hopefully we will be able to further develop such activities. But it is useful to keep up to date about these scandals to learn from them. Below are some links. Here is an article in Science: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/spider-biologist-denies-suspicions-widespread-data-fraud-his-animal-personality "23 journals are investigating Pruitt’s papers. And the community is feeling its way through the trouble. “Nothing like this has ever happened in our discipline,” says Simmons, who is editor-in-chief of Behavioral Ecology." Blog post by one of his collaborators who discovered that her paper was based on invalid data. "WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU DON’T TRUST YOUR DATA ANYMORE" https://laskowskilab.faculty.ucdavis.edu/2020/01/29/retractions/ Blog post by journal editor about the retraction process http://ecoevoevoeco.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-pruitt-retraction-storm-part-1.html Blog post by PhD students https://theethogram.com/2020/02/03/publish-and-perish-a-graduate-student-perspective/ Some blog posts on how ecologists are thinking of improving their data handling practices: "many discussions are happening right now about ways to improve data integrity in published papers, while also maintaining trust in collaborators, supervisors, and students." http://ecoevoevoeco.blogspot.com/2020/02/maintaining-trust-and-data-integrity.html ---- For another recent scientific scandal related to food research "A top Cornell food researcher has had 15 studies retracted. That’s a lot." "Brian Wansink is a cautionary tale in bad incentives in science" https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/9/19/17879102/brian-wansink-cornell-food-brand-lab-retractions-jama And Swedish microplastic's fraud case https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/groundbreaking-study-dangers-microplastics-may-be-unraveling https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/researcher-swedish-fraud-case-speaks-out-i-m-very-disappointed-my-colleague