Is too much pounding the table the problem with science today?
“Science requires open debate. It does not advance by consensus or political pressure”.
What is science
“The scientific method requires scientists to test all theories. Science progresses not by claiming a theory is true but by proving a theory is false”.
I will start this essay by clarifying what science is not. It is a widely promulgated myth that all scientific activity is beneficial, morally sound and ideologically and politically neutral. Unfortunately, this idealistic view does not reflect reality.
Public policymakers heavily rely on the best available science to develop policies. Ideally, their work should be based on dispassionate evidence.
However, in our increasingly conformist society, special interest groups often exert influence through active negotiations with the government to suit their agendas.
This has led to the politicisation of science, where scientists who dissent are censored, and data is manipultated, distorted, and suppressed to justify political ends.
The scientific method determines reliable scientific knowledge, where theoretical predictions are validated by observations or rejected when they fail to do so.
Agreement with observations is the measure of scientific truth, and scientific progress proceeds by the interplay of theory and observation. This has been the scientific method for more than 400 years.
At the core of science is questioning. Questions are essential to determining what is true and what it is not based on the data available. Through this process, established lines of thought are challenged, leading to innovations in knowledge and technology.
However, recent research disciplines have turned that noble pursuit upside down. The highest-profile research is now heavily influenced by cultural forces and career incentives that are not necessarily aligned with the dispassionate pursuit of truth.
It has become taboo to question “the science” – questioning is now anti-science. Those who champion the new anti-science movement never admit when they are wrong. When challenged, they become hostile and attack the questioner personally instead of debating “the science”.
Research misconduct
Alarmingly, 1-in-50 scientists fake research by fabricating and falsifying data. A whistle-blower revealed that researchers often use government grant money to produce made-up findings, and many are never caught or exposed. According to Ivan Oransky in Gaming the metrics:
“The most common outcome for those who commit fraud is a long career”.
There have been many documented cases recently in the USA where academics have been caught manipulating or tampering with their data. In 2018, a researcher at Cornell University was found to have manipulated data in many of his studies.
Similarly, research data produced in a lab at Stanford University was tampered with, leading to the resignation of the university’s president.
In Australia, climate geoscientist and associate professor at the University of Western Australia (UWA), Michael O’Leary, brought shame on himself and the scientific community. A Federal Court judge criticised him for his lack of credibility, independence and for lying:
“I would not accept his evidence as sufficient to establish any scientific proposition at all … My conclusions about Dr O’Leary’s lack of regard for the truth, lack of independence and lack of scientific rigour are sufficient to discount or dismiss all of his reports for all purposes”.
The case against Santos’ Barossa gas project, brought on by the Environmental Defenders Office, demonstrated how properly interrogating expert evidence can have a dramatic effect. The court decision now allows Santos to take legal action against UWA.
O’Leary has previous form in scientific circles. In 2022, his colleagues at UWA raised concerns about his scientific methods, publishing a paper highly critical of the findings he and his team made in their research into indigenous artefacts on Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsular.
O’Leary dismissed the critique but was forced to publish a correction to his original paper a year later, including addressing errors in three statistical analyses.
He had a paper retracted by his co-authors in 2022, leading to a bitter campus dispute about the integrity of project design, data collection flaws and presenting data in a biased way. Former professor at the James Cook University and marine physicist, Peter Ridd, believes the court judgement was evidence of a big problem within the country’s scientific institutions.
“There has never been a better example of how science had been corrupted”.
Another story from Western Australia
During a very dry summer, Murdoch University academics conducted an aerial and ground survey over 92,000 hectares of the northern jarrah forest in 2011. They claimed to have observed a “sudden and unprecedented forest collapse” in 1.5 per cent of the study area, where 74 per cent of all measured stems had died or were dying.
However, the study failed to highlight that this small area (only 0.15 per cent of the forest) was on marginal ground for tree growth with very shallow soils exposed to bedrock.
They returned later and recorded that 60 per cent of the trees had recovered, but still maintained the forest was in danger of collapse.
This episode is not uncommon for this forest on such substrate during dry summers. The rest of the forest did not suffer in the same way and remained healthy.
Retired forester Frank Batini understands Western Australian forest ecology better than most. He has observed and studied the forests for 60 years as a forester, environmental scientist and consultant. Frank has monitored several sites near Jarrahdale for drought stress since 2002.
On one of his sites on shallow soil above rock, the stand of regrowth jarrah saplings were affected by the 2002 drought.
Over time, he observed most recovered, either with epicormic shoots or by sprouting new stems from the root collar. The trees were again scorched in 2007 and recovered. In 2011, most saplings died only to repsrout again from the root collar.
During an inspection in April this year, after another severe and dry summer, he found the same response: thinner crowns on the better sites with deeper soils and severe crown scorch and some deaths on shallow soils above clay.
On some sites, the understory appeared stressed, with occasional dead banksias. The scorch of plants is the most significant since the 2010-11 drought, but not as severe.
At a conference on the rapid collapse of ecosystems in Canberra in May 2018, several sites were presented, including the northern jarrah forest, studied by the Murdoch academics, which suffered “rapid die-off in forest canopies and tree mortality”.
A subsequent workshop was held to refine the list of ecosystems showing evidence of rapid collapse. The authors of the published paper cited the above study as an example of Mediterranean-type forests in peril.
An opinion piece in The Conversation by academics reinforced this message with unscientific language:
“An extreme heatwave in 2010-2011 has ravaged land ecosystems and devastated forests and woodlands in Western Australia”.
However, they failed to mention that most of the dead trees in 2011, had recovered, just like Frank has observed after every drought period since 2002.
A few dead trees in a small area do not constitute imminent forest collapse, no matter how hard academics misrepresent the facts. Jarrah can grow and prosper in many different places. Based on this example, one wonders whether the ecosystem collapses reported in the other 18 vegetation communities are true.
Instead of believing the “experts”, local foresters, invite anyone to drive through the jarrah forests to see for themselves there is no imminent threat of a collapse.
However, the issue did not end there. Due to this conflated issue, the northern jarrah forests have gained infamy worldwide as they are now listed as a “key risk of transition or collapse” by the IPCC. Activists used this alarmist rhetoric to convince the government to close the native forest timber industry.
There are no fewer than 38 co-authors for the post-conference paper. Is it easier to attract limited funds, pick up many citations, and boost their h-index by exaggerating the results of their study into an impending catastrophe?
The Great Barrier Reef controversy
This strategy of exaggeration already works with Great Barrier Reef research, where billions are spent studying a contrived catastrophe. Remember the outbreak of the Crown of Thorns starfish some 50 years ago? It attracted the attention of biologists and other researchers. Today, after a half-century and hundreds of millions of dollars in research, there is still no evidence to indicate such population blooms are not natural events, as they are with other starfish species worldwide.
During the 1970s-80s, reef threats were just an added boost to basic research focused on discovering a new understanding of these oldest and most diverse natural communities. However, by the 1990s, eco-threats began to eclipse basic research in funding and research interest.
Today, we have a whole generation of researchers whose entire experience of the reef is limited to finding, investigating and promoting environmental “threats”. They perceive every fluctuation in nature as evidence.
A recent report released by the Australian Academy of Science (AAS) argues the Great Barrier Reef is doomed and “irreversibly” damaged without providing any scientific data to support their claim.
The report chose to ignore evidence that shows coral growing 30 per cent faster for every degree increase in water temperatures; or that there is 100 per cent more coral on the reef today than in 2012;
or that just one per cent of the reef has the potential to be affected by farming practices; or that UNESCO had just declared the reef is not endangered.
Instead, they propose crazy interventions such as shading the reef via “solar radiation management” or a preventative measure called “rubble stabilisation” advocating gluing together the 3,000 reefs a 100 metres high, a few kilometres wide, and spread over a lazy 2,000 kilometres.
Their unscientific report is based on roundtable meetings of “experts” romanticising and justifying how best to spend the millions of dollars taxpayers are forced to give to “protect” the reef.
Instead of providing data and statistics about the reef to justify their conclusions and crazy solutions, AAS gave prominence in their report to statistics on the gender identification and indigenous percentage of all those who participated in the roundtables.
Clearly, according to AAS, the ability of scientists to measure changes in the reef’s complex ecosystem depends on the researcher’s gender and indigenous status.
Instead of making suggestions to save the reef from imaginary dangers, real scientists should question and call out reports that provide evidence-free solutions and approaches for research.
Suppression of dissenting voices
Research scientist Peter Ridd, has been a prominent figure in challenging the prevailing narrative on the Great Barrier Reef. Despite his long-standing academic career and numerous contributions to marine physics, he faced significant backlash for questioning the integrity of research conducted by some of his colleagues.
Ridd highlighted issues such as data manipulation and the lack of replication in studies about the reef’s health, arguing that the scientific community must maintain rigorous standards of evidence and open debate.
However, instead of addressing these concerns through scientific discourse, Ridd’s employer, the James Cook University, terminated his employment, claiming he violated the university’s code of conduct.
This move sparked a broader debate about academic freedom and the consequences of challenging established scientific narratives.
Ridd’s case underscores the importance of maintaining a culture where scientists can question and critique each other’s work without fear of retribution.
The scientific method thrives on skepticism and the testing of hypotheses, and stifling dissent can lead to a stagnation of ideas and perpetuation of potentially flawed research.
The failure of self regulation at Universities
Australia’s research institutions have a pernicious problem. When scientific fraud is reported, investigations are left to the alleged fraudster’s university – their employer.
Universities investigate allegations of research misconduct in-house and behind closed doors. Self-regulation is rife with conflicts of interest, and in recent years, its failures have led to calls to establish an independent watchdog. Unlike other countries, Australia has no independent research integrity organisation.
This is despite establishing the Australian Research Integrity Commission (ARIC) in 2011 to review how government-funded research institutions investigate potential breaches of the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research. However, ARIC has limited scope and powers.
While it claims any person can request a review, it will only undertake a review under its narrow framework in response to a complaint made to a research institution.
Universities can make much money from poor science and lose money if fraudsters are caught. The current system gives little incentive for universities to uncover fraudulent practices because of the negative publicity, potential lawsuits and defamation.
The University of New South Wales, for instance, is embroiled in a long-running “preliminary” investigation into an alleged case of research misconduct involving the University’s Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHBA).
In September 2021, several “image sleuths” studied more than a dozen papers co-authored by researchers from CHEBA and other institutions. They found experimental images with signs of duplication, including photos that appeared to be stretched or flipped and used to represent different experimental results.
They are serious allegations, and it is perplexing why the university is still investigating the complaints, particularly when section R11 of the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research states institutions must:
“Ensure that the process for managing and investigating concerns or complaints about potential breaches of the Code is timely, effective and in accord with procedural fairness.”
Despite the retraction of two papers in the scandal, the preliminary investigation is in its third year. Part of the problem is that universities rarely have specialists qualified to adequately carry out investigations into misconduct claims, or the terms of the investigation are controlled and deliberately limited in scope.
University of Melbourne scientist Kristen Scicluna, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australia Institute, has studied the problem here and here. She argues that research institutions are vested in maintaining the ineffective self-regulation model.
She claims the way institutions investigate misconduct falls well short of global standards. Bruce Lander, the former South Australian Independent Commissioner Against Corruption, recently completed a misconduct investigation at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research, and his report noted that there was a real disincentive for institutions to investigate their research.
Universities argue they have every incentive to comply with the Code because breaches result in a pause or withdrawal of federal funding until an investigation is complete.
However, the government doesn’t pause funding during a preliminary assessment, hence the long periods universities take to carry out those assessments.
The Annual Report of ARIC shows an alarming increase in investigations. A lot of misconduct would probably not have been detected without public scrutiny through websites such as USA-based PubPeer.
It is abundantly clear that the growing number of research misconduct controversies proves that the self-regulation of Australia’s research sector has failed.
The “Pay, publish and prosper” culture
Australia’s chief scientist, Dr Cathy Foley, believes that the way researchers are assessed needs to be overhauled. Currently, it is done through the Hirsh Index (h-index), a metric used in academic circles to measure a researcher’s productivity and impact through citations of their publications.
However, when something becomes a metric, its usefulness ceases because there is a tendency to game the system. Foley believes the h-index is like the 3-Star Michelin system that ranks restaurants and drives behaviour in “unhappy directions”.
Just like restaurants devote time to cleaning bathroom taps and placing silverware instead of the quality of meals and service, researchers spend valuable time producing iterative papers, applying for grants and chasing citations.
A study published in Nature showed that some researchers publish a new paper every five days, but data trackers suspect that not all the researchers produced their papers honestly.
The increase in the number of very productive authors has raised concerns about the methods used to publish extra studies. The study’s co-author, Stanford epidemiologist Dr John Ioannidis, believes that:
“Questionable research practices and fraud may underlie some of the most extreme behaviours”.
For instance, my alma mater, the Australian National University, has more than 100 academics with h-indexes at a high level, beyond 60. For the universities themselves, the more published research from their researchers, the better its ranking and reputation.
There is no guarantee that high h-index researchers produce anything of value for the country. Foley points out that excellent scientists who have produced critical scientific work in the last decade have low h-values.
In 2005, Ioannidis wrote an essay titled “Why most published research findings are false”. He argued that the greater the financial and other interests in a scientific field, the less likely the findings will be valid.
“Many otherwise seemingly independent, university-based studies may be conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure”.
Part of the problem is that fewer tenured professorships, which provides job security and more pay, are now available. Selection committees consider the h-index during the recruitment process. Researchers are pressured to publish as often as possible to get promoted or recognised, which takes priority over quality.
The number of published papers has grown from about a quarter of a million a year in 1960 to around 8 million a year today. It has been suggested that they are almost all useless. If the need to publish were removed, the best and brightest would shine with relevant research.
One of Australia’s most prolific scientists is a professor from the Australian National University. His profile lists 964 scientific articles.
He has also published 48 books. That is equivalent to one book every ten months and one article every two and a half weeks during his 40-year working career, assuming he didn’t take holidays. And if you read this person’s papers, they have a preponderance to cite their own papers, thus boosting their h-index quite easily.
With the increase in papers published, there has been an increase in articles retracted. Over 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 as publishers struggled to clean up many sham papers and peer review fraud. An analysis in Nature shows that the retraction rate has trebled in the past decade.
Australian geologist and professor emeritus at the University of Melbourne, Ian Plimer doesn’t hold back when he writes about scientist’s achievements these days:
“Large teams of scientists rarely achieve what an isolated left-field outcast scientist can achieve. Many published scientific papers are only read by a few people and many scientists are funded for trivial research that can only be described as hobby science.
We taxpayers fork out our hard-earned cash for our own hobbies yet many scientists want both their hobby and salary funded by the taxpayer”.
A study published in Quantitative Science Studies found that scientists or the universities or research institutes they are affiliated with pay fees to journals to ensure their papers are published. The fee is widely known as “article processing charges”.
It has come about from a transformation in how journals present papers. In the past, readers paid via various forms of subscriptions. However, authors now pay to publish their research. The money for this comes from public funds. The five largest publishers received $1.06 billion in four years, only to publish open access studies.
The winners are, of course, the publishers as well as the researchers. Scholars get an assurance of getting published rather than running the gauntlet of competing with other research papers, where editors determine publication if they pass peer review.
“Publish or perish” has become “Pay, publish and prosper”. The losers are the public who assume that scientific research is selected and published on its merits and accuracy.
Take, for example, this abstract from the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney published in Environmental Politics in 2021:
“Theories of climate justice retain a persistent tension between transcorporeal entanglement and coherent individuality. The ontology of bodily separation required for accountability for polluters and reparation for the vulnerable enacts a worldview potentially inconsistent with the more-than-human relationality of climate change.
Yet theories of material agency and posthuman becoming are criticised for offering limited guidance for political practice. Engaging with the bushfire smoke that blanketed eastern Australia throughout 2019/2020, I seek to revitalise climate justice by engaging with theories of more-than-human transcorporeality.”
This paper relates to bushfire smoke from the 2019-20 bushfires. I tried to read it and got as far as the first two paragraphs in the introduction. It was as painful as reading Wuthering Heights, Richard Flanagan, or a Peter Carey novel.
I find it highly unlikely the editor of the journal or the peer reviewers understood what the paper was about. I don’t even think the author knows. It is not scientific and certainly doesn’t add to any understanding of bushfire smoke.
More importantly, what accountability does the university in question apply to allow this work to be published using grants from taxpayer funds?
Recent work by management scientist Russell Funk and others showed that new and novel foundational scientific work, called disruptive science, has dramatically declined since 1950. It has all but stopped in all fields of science, and just like the study on bushfire smoke above, most are of little real value.
Is it because most scientific discoveries have been made, or is what is being studied dictated by some higher authority to follow certain narratives and give them credibility? The term “follow the science” comes to mind as our rulers pick and choose “the science” they like and want us to believe.
Diminishing the practice of science
Sensationalising scientific findings through press releases before peer evaluation or timing them to coincide with political events undermines the integrity of science.
The Fenner School at the Australian National University has become adept at this, especially when producing research advocating for greater forest preservation.
A notable example is this brief literature review about tropical rainforests. Through the media here, here, here, and here, the paper evolved into a platform claiming that industrial logging in Australia’s wet forests made them more fire prone.
The press statements were strategically released to coincide with the 2009 Victorian Bushfire Royal Commission and the Tasmanian state election, amplifying their impact.
Another paper on the same topic was published in September 2011, followed by a flurry of press releases again with alarmist headlines here, here, here and here.
Fellow forester Mark Poynter, who has extensively reported on this practice, summarised how this sort of behaviour diminishes the practice of science:
“Unfortunately, this episode demonstrates how such engagement should not be done. The manner in which the findings of a scientific paper have been promoted in the media and hence to the public, does not reflect the rigour which its authors would normally apply to their own work or expect of others.
In particular, the promotion of the finding of an international literature review as demonstrating that “forest logging creates fire traps” in the Australian context, is both misleading and irresponsible.
While we have come to expect such behaviour in campaigns run by mainstream environment groups, pushing unsubstantiated sensationalism is unbecoming for credible scientists.
It simply dumbs-down complex issues to create headlines that will be every bit as divisive, and ultimately, unhelpful in informing sensible environmental policy.
Of considerable concern is that it also diminishes the respect which the community currently affords to scientists and their academic institutions”.
By prioritising sensationalism over scientific rigour, the credibility of scientists and academic institutions is undermined, leading to public distrust and misinformed policy decisions.
The problems in research funding
“It is very difficult to get someone to disagree with something when agreeing means you keep your job”.
Anyone aspiring to a career in science needs to secure research grants. If their research does not align with the prevailing political narrative, they risk not receiving funding. This environment stifles free thinking and discourages scientific breakthroughs, casting as shadow over the once noble pursuit of knowledge.
Karl Popper, perhaps the greatest philosopher of science foresaw this issue. He famously challenged the practice of science by demanding rigorous testing and warned that scientific progress would halt if free speech was restricted and governments controlled research. Although vilified and demonised for his views, Popper has been proven right.
Today, in Australia and elsewhere, the research funding process is highly politicised, overly bureaucratic and demoralises innocent researchers who are not part of powerful cabals.
Funding is predominantly provided through three primary vehicles, all tax-payer funded: the Australian Research Council (ARC) ($815 million a year), the National Health and Medical Research Council ($853 million) and the Medical Research Future Fund ($627 million).
Researchers must spend months writing extensive applications adhering to strict formatting rules such as 12-point Times New Roman, 10-point footnotes, and specific requirements for graphs and margins.
Instead of allowing researchers to focus on describing their project, the process prioritises the readability for bureaucratic assessors and managing their workload. One application was rejected because the figure captions were in 11-point font, instead of 12.
The ARC, in particular, faces heavy criticism. In December 2022, the responsible minister wrote to the ARC CEO, seeking operational changes, including encouraging researchers to partner with businesses, thus giving industry more influence over research projects and enabling scientists to commercialise their ideas.
The minister also called for a new advisory council from the industry. Despite these requests, the CEO resigned a week later and no significant changes have been implemented.
Taxpayer funding for research should be contingent on its contribution to the public good. The current system, which recognises excellence and impact based solely on publications rather than content is counterproductive.
It offers cushy jobs without incentivising valuable contributions. Funding should not be allocated to esoteric research that does not meet the national interests and is poor value for money.
Universities are at the forefront of pressuring the government for more research funding, despite the previous coalition federal government increasing funding to universities by $2.2 billion. Universities employ researchers but do not pay for their research; researchers must apply for government grants, sometimes matched by the university.
A case study in science funding
A classic example of questionable funding is evident in forest science, an area I am familiar with.
A professor, now at the University of Melbourne, received a $750,000 grant in 2012 from the ARC to study climate proofing southeastern Australia’s native forests over five years.
Several professional foresters were keen to see the results of this ambitious project.
We were intrigued about how it would be possible to “climate-proof” the forests of Australia. What does the term “climate proofing” actually mean? What were the assumptions about the future climate to which Australian forests had to be made invulnerable?
Even if the research trials could be designed and applied in the forest, with the necessary control areas against which the impacts of “climate change” could be assessed, measured, and analysed, how could this be done in only five years? And how was the climate to be manipulated on the different experimental sites?
In our collective experience, we believe it would take at least three years to get the research sites selected, the treatments done, and the baseline measurements made before you even started to compare the outcomes of one treatment or another against one climate or another.
A colleague wrote to the professor and asked him for a copy of the research proposal that he had submitted to the ARC. Specifically, he asked to see his null hypothesis, his proposed experimental design, how he was selecting his research sites, the proposed treatments, how climate variables would be applied, and his analytical methodology.
After all, it is an interesting topic, and if the study was set up correctly, it could provide invaluable data for professional forest managers in Australia.
The professor refused to answer any of the questions. His grounds for refusal were that we might copy his ideas and do our research using them.
When five years had elapsed, my colleague contacted the ARC and asked about the outcome of the research. They did not reply. Instead, a lawyer from ARC contacted him. She was very stern and threatening. She said the ARC was not obligated to disclose the outcomes of any research they had funded, and this information was strictly confidential.
The researcher and their institution owned the research results, and only they could disclose them. This is despite public money being used to fund the research. My colleague then contacted the university, who also stonewalled him.
The lack of transparency and accountability by a government agency disturbed us. The ARC doles out over $800 million of taxpayer’s money to these researchers, who can keep secret what they do with the money.
I sent a letter to ARC and the minister asking to see the report on the research grant. We presumed that the ARC had some sort of accountability system applying to how researchers spend their grant money and their required feedback via reports of outcomes.
I was referred to a website listing the “related” publications of the $750,000 research on climate-proofing our forests. It is basically the professor’s CV list of research papers he has co-authored, which has little to do with the research topic.
Some were published soon after the professor received the money. Two studies were on forest and savanna in Vietnam, another in Hawaii, and another in Thailand. Another wasn’t a study but a reply to comments on one of their studies, again with dubious connection to the work.
So, after five years and three-quarters of a million dollars of our funds, we are none the wiser as to precisely what research was carried out and how the money was spent.
We cannot find one published paper about the research topic. We cannot help but think it is a costly way to help the professor promote his h-index and standing in the confines of academia. Research Gate lists his citations as 8,499.
Because of the secrecy, the veiled threat and the lack of cooperation of ARC in answering specific questions, we believe something isn’t right.
The obvious question is, what research work did the $750,000 fund to give us an insight into climate-proofing Australia’s south-east forests?
I posed this question to the University of Melbourne to provide them with a chance to prove we are wrong in suspecting any foul wrongdoing, but they did not respond.
I then tried to put in a complaint at the University. However, their website acts as a gatekeeper, only allowing students and staff to submit complaints. I wrote an email to the Vice-Chancellor’s office asking how I could put in a complaint. No response.
I contacted my local federal MP seeking their assistance. After a courteous letter to the minister, the ARC replied that:
“Reporting received in relation to [the study] demonstrated that the research project was conducted according to their guidelines“.
Except, the study did not produce any paper solely about the research topic. Predictably, as before, I was given an esoteric list of studies from the professor’s CV that have nothing to do with the $750,000 research topic.
This is how easy it is for universities, researchers and the funders to escape scrutiny and legitimate questions about how millions of dollars of tax-payers funds are spent to supposedly benefit the community. And how easy it is for bureaucrats to fob off legitimate enquiries of suspected research fraud.
Peer or Pal Review
I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth, a colleague] and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!
Dr Phil Jones’ email to Michael Mann, 8 July 2004
When debating scientific work, people constantly judge the veracity of research on whether it has been peer reviewed. The concept of peer review is a noble one. However, like anything involving prestige and money, which in scientific circles are closely linked, the process is open to abuse.
Scientists are, to a large degree, at the mercy of their peers, who act as gatekeepers for the journals. Peer reviewers don’t get paid, so the incentive to spend a lot of time assessing a colleague’s paper is limited.
With the surfeit of papers, peer review is a drain on time, penalises departures from “consensus”, and guarantees banality.
A reviewer’s job is supposed to look at the methodology, see if other relevant literature has been considered, check if quotations from other resources are accurate, see if the conclusions match the data and are defensible, and if the hypothesis is relevant and supported in the introduction, check the argument is well constructed, and does the research present new information or support existing knowledge?
It isn’t a proof of anything. Proof comes later when colleagues get a chance to replicate the study. Peer reviewers do not do the experiment again. They don’t assess the observations or try to produce any results from the data.
Most peer reviewers are anonymous, and the process is carried out behind closed doors. There is little transparency. The belief that peer review guarantees proof of scientific fact and demonstrates that experts carry out a thorough, unbiased evaluation and review is wrong.
A science professor at a university told a colleague that, in the past, peer reviewers offered two or three pages of detailed comments.
Today, they are all so busy that a couple of paragraphs are the norm. Academia is drowned in peer-reviewed publications. He says it’s all about the number of papers, not their relevance or quality. So, peer review is not a gold standard for ensuring that credible work is appropriately assessed before publication. One thing for sure is that peer review does not guarantee the truth and does not mean a paper is beyond questioning.
Just recently, the 217-year-old science journal publisher John Wiley & Sons didn’t even know that papers were fake but still published them. It lead to an embarrassing retraction of 11,300 published articles, despite going through the peer review process.
It turns out fake scientists pay professional cheating services who use AI to create papers and torture the words so they look “original”. Wiley, a $2 billion dollar publishing company, has been forced to close down 19 of its scientific journals due to the fraud.
As noble as the peer review practice seems, it gets corrupted by the reviewers themselves. There are many instances of the abuse of the peer review system. Here are a few.
One name that always bobs up when people talk of misuse of the peer review system is climate scientist professor Michael Mann, famous for his “hockey stick” graph and his emails in Climategate.
Roger Pielke Jnr is a political scientist who has written extensively on the politicisation of science. He has publicly agreed with the IPCC findings about climate change.
However, because he has offered pragmatic appraisals of policy decisions to deal with the issue, different to his peers, he has been labelled a “climate denier”. A hacked email reveals the steps a cadre of climate scientists took to sack him from the FiveThirtyEight website. He was also accused of receiving funding from fossil fuel companies, a typical tactic used by many people to circumvent debate away from arguing based on scientific merits.
Pielke relates a story outlining how he discovered Mann manipulated the peer review process to stop a paper he co-authored from being published. The evidence came to light only recently during the Mann vs Steyn court case.
Before submitting the paper to Geographical Research Letters, Pielke shared it with colleagues for comment and suggestions. Somehow, the draft paper ended up on Mann’s desk.
Mann contacted the journal’s editor, Professor James Famiglietti. His email directed Famiglietti to assign the paper to hostile reviewers. Mann then wrote to his colleagues he expected Famiglietti to obey his directive:
“But I can promise you that Famiglietti follows my recommendation … this thing [the draft paper] probably won’t stand a chance [of publication]”.
It wasn’t published. However, that isn’t the end of the story. A short while later, a paper by Mann and his “hostile” reviewer mates published a paper that included a claim that was “remarkably similar to the main thesis” of Pielke’s rejected paper.
For some reason, scientists manage to cancel other scientists or force the retraction of papers, not because they find examples of any research misconduct but simply because they don’t like the paper. A group of climate scientists successfully set out to remove a peer-reviewed paper published in European Physical Journal Plus. It was titled “A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming”. The lead author was Professor Gianluca Alimonti.
The paper drew heavily on data from IPCC reports to argue that extreme weather and related disasters were not increasing, contrary to claims made by some climate scientists and the media.
The Australian and Sky News Australia provided coverage of the study, but other mainstream media ignored it. The paper was widely read – it had 80,000 downloads – and has been cited in numerous other studies, but clearly, it contained politically inconvenient conclusions.
Some months later, The Guardian’s Graham Redfearn penned a story, quoting a couple of professors from the University of New South Wales and Mann, saying the Alimonti’s paper cherry-picked data. The argument came down to the impossibility of disentangling global warming and natural variability.
Mann’s criticism didn’t focus on the study or its scientific credentials but rather was an unprofessional personal attack on the authors:
“Another example of scientists from totally unrelated fields coming in and naively applying inappropriate methods to data they don’t understand.
Either the consensus of the world’s climate experts that climate change is causing a very clear increase in many types of weather extremes is wrong, or a couple of nuclear physics dudes in Italy are wrong.”
News agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) followed suit with a piece published in The Australian, arguing the study was “fundamentally flawed”.
It should be noted here that AFP and the other two leading international news agencies get their climate stories from the green activist group Covering Climate Now (CCN) via funding from extreme left-leaning billionaires.
They specialise in ready-to-publish climate change material focusing on negative impacts, usually concocted, of climate change. CCN was started in 2019 and feeds over 500 media organisations with written stories and climate narratives, including Australian news outlets. They openly seek a “reframing” of how journalists cover climate change.
What this means in practice is amplifying an invented “climate emergency” by constant catastrophising while denying any inconvenient science and casting doubts on any stories on this topic that are factual and unbiased.
All it does is reinforce how climate science is infested with frauds and grifters using manipulative language to sponge public money.
The remarkable thing about this particular event isn’t that the media piled against a paper that goes against climate science orthodoxy.
It was the fact that there was no allegation of research fraud or misconduct. It was merely some scientists who did not like what was written.
If a scientist believes there is a fault, it is handled in journals after a paper is published by countering arguments and providing evidence via letters or subsequent documents. Usually, the authors of the paper get the final say.
These days, editors of journals do not like publishing criticisms of papers as they reflect poorly on their peer reviews, and there is reputational damage.
In this case, however, activist scientists teamed up with activist journalists to pressure a publisher, Springer Nature, to retract a paper they didn’t like. Unfortunately, this is a common practice in science these days, especially in the politically charged climate science field where bullying and censorship are rife.
In 2009, the Climategate scandal revealed emails admitting researchers manipulated the peer review process to keep papers out of journals and attempted to have journal editors fired for publishing documents that raised questions about the climate crisis narrative.
It is worth noting that the IPCC reviews continue to support the conclusion in Alimonte’s paper about the difficulty in finding any evidence extreme weather is increasing.
Yet, there are researchers out there who are so ensconced in their belief in “consensus science” that they do away with objective research and get away with publishing this sort of work that seeks to find a better way to present their climate change propaganda by arguing research needs to “find out who is persuadable” and how to “frame and message climate communication” to a higher standard.
In another example, Patrick Brown from San Jose State and John Hopkins Universities was a lead author in a paper published in Nature Communications titled “Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire risk in California”. The paper’s findings weren’t based on real-world data but on computer models.
The authors admitted the models were inadequate for the task, so they used AI to make estimates of climate’s influence on wildfire behaviour.
The media loved the paper, with the Los Angeles Times headlining their story with “Climate change boosts risk of explosive wildfire growth in California by 25%, study says”. The only problem is that Brown later wrote that they had left out the truth so they could get their paper published. He admitted:
“I got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work … Savvy researchers tailor their studies to maximise the likelihood that their work is accepted. I know because I am one of them”.
In another peer reviewed paper, “Rapid onset gender dysphoria: Parents reports on 1655 possible cases,” published in March last year, empirical data was analysed to propose a new pathway to gender dysphoria in kids who had never previously exhibited gender-related issues. It was widely seen as a crucial paper and the need for a new, specialised treatment approach for youth with gender-related issues.
However, the journal cancelled or, in science-speak, retracted the study not because of any gross error in their design or analysis but because activists hated it. They believe the rise in trans identities stems only from an increase in societal acceptance of gender diversity.
The journal’s capitulation to the activist’s demands represents a betrayal of scientific integrity and the publisher’s commitment to truth in science.
As a result, we will continue to see doctors prescribe treatments based, not on evidence, but on ideology. And this is unlikely to change while ever the activists are allowed to get away with their constant, aggressive, and bullying drive for suppression of medical evidence.
Unfortunately, the same trend is happening with forest science, where empirical data has gone missing. It adds little to scientific knowledge and doesn’t settle anything about science.
A colleague alerted me about his experience when he tried to question work presented by Murdoch University in Western Australia during a Climate Science Initiative Public Lecture to:
“Share information and answer questions from the public”.
The Western Australian Government set up the Climate Change Initiative to provide:
“Comprehensive climate change projections for Western Australia extending 75 years into the future”.
My colleague knew the university had ignored empirical data and attended the seminar to try to make a brief statement before asking a question. The organisers didn’t like him questioning their modelling, and he was gagged or censored.
My colleague is concerned about the university using a baseline of 1950 to model climate change in Western Australia after several decades of above-average rainfall preceding 1950. He has studied longer-term records for Perth and has seen studies providing tree ring data dating back to 1350 BC, which do not support the conclusion bandied about by Murdoch University’s modelling that concludes that a reduction in rainfall in Western Australia since 1950 is due solely to climate change.
He subsequently raised his concerns with Dr Kala from the university, offering to meet.
That option was not taken up. He then wrote to the minister, who, after all, would use the modelling given to him by these scientists about climate change predictions in the future to help determine important policy decisions that will affect every Western Australian.
The Director-General of the Department of Water and Environment Regulation responded to his letter and gave him the usual bureaucratic response that admitted and said nothing. No problem here; move on.
In Victoria, researchers have published questionable peer-reviewed papers about Leadbeater’s possum. An online publisher based in India published a paper in the journal Biodiversity and Endangered Species about preventing the extinction of the possum. It was published just 18 days after the journal received the paper.
Mark Poynter and Mike Ryan wrote a critical review of two papers about the Leadbeater’s possum in Australian Forestry. One contained several errors in its contextual description of the threats faced by the Central Highlands forests, and the other was allowed to keep an unsubstantiated claim that harvesting trees had converted the forests to young regenerating stands, implying this had a significant impact on the habitat for the possum.
I have outlined in this blog recent work on surveying Leadbeater’s possums that disproves many of the claims made in these papers.
In another example and a significant blow for activists campaigning against the native forestry industry, a widely disseminated, high-profile, error-filled research paper had to be retracted after the journal was alerted to numerous errors in the research. Despite this, it is still available to read on ResearchGate and here. The University of Tasmania employed all three co-authors.
Experienced foresters immediately picked up obvious errors in the paper using published coordinates of the data points and Google Earth.
Among the mistakes were complete misclassifications of forest types, such as button grass plains identified as forest and burn severity claims that couldn’t be reconciled with publicly available fire spread information.
It got through peer review because the process is not designed to go to that level, even though the errors were obvious to experienced local foresters as soon as they read the paper.
The paper was published in a special issue of the journal Fire, with two of the three special issue editors responsible for the scientific standard of its content also being University of Tasmania academics.
When the paper was published, it prompted a slew of media articles as it tried to show a causal link between bushfire severity and the harvesting of native forests.
A media statement was released during the 2019-20 Bushfire Royal Commission, and the Bob Brown Foundation, the Wilderness Society and the Tasmanian Greens used the paper to attack the integrity of professional forest management.
The public were misled and the aggressive way the results were shared in the media and government constitutes misconduct by the researchers.
One of the study’s co-authors disclosed her association with the extreme green activist group Bob Brown Foundation in an opinion piece.
The Foundation employed her as a campaigner. She is also the Tasmanian Independent Science Council co-chair, which purports to be a source of independent, non-government advice.
QTasmanian politicians were bombarded by letters from her after the publication, on behalf of the Independent Science Council, calling for the end to all native forest operations in the state.
According to Tasmanian Labor politician Shane Broad, the publication fees for the paper were paid for by none other than the Bob Brown Foundation and the Wilderness Society, not the academics themselves nor the university, raising more questions about the impartiality of the researchers, happy to be bought off by money provided by extremists whose goal is to stop logging, no matter what evidence scientific research offers.
Activists are the first to trash peer-reviewed publications from forestry agency scientists, yet they have no problem funding erroneous anti-forestry research.
The Bob Brown Foundation tried to blame the errors in the paper on the forest agency Sustainable Timber Tasmania (STT). However, STT was never involved in providing the data.
The University of Tasmania was pressured to demonstrate how their academics with such cosy links with activists could produce unbiased scientific research about forestry practices.
Their reputation was on the line. Predictably, after many organisations asked the university to take measures to ensure that their researchers did not produce faulty scientific work again, they dealt with the issue behind closed doors and did nothing, waiting for the storm to blow over.
They didn’t even apologise to the people bombarded with false media statements and false letters, after allowing their staff to publish bogus claims through a faulty peer review system.
It would be impossible for anyone not to suspect the integrity of future research by these authors.
This example shows how easy it is for faulty science to gain credibility. It also demonstrates the importance of rigorously reviewing scientific claims.
I will end by discussing a dirty secret that scientists and universities refuse to discuss. Roughly 50 per cent of the recent scientific reports which have been peer-reviewed can’t be replicated. It is called the “replication crisis”. Simple fraud is a factor contributing to irreproducible data, according to more than 40 per cent of scientists.
World-renowned statistician Dr William M. Briggs conducted a study where scientists “became the mice” and were analysed on their reliability.
He sent a whole lot of data to a thousand scientists on whether immigration affects attitudes of government responses.
Each scientist was asked to analyse the data to see if the answer was ”yes there was an effect” or ”no there wasn’t an effect” or “whether you couldn’t tell from the data”. A quarter said no effect, a quarter said yes there was definitely an effect, and half the scientists said yes there was an effect, but it wasn’t statistically significant.
The data should provide one answer. It means that between half or three-quarters of the scientists got it wrong. Unfortunately, that is typically what is produced in peer review work. It is yet another example of how science is failing us and why the scientific profession is increasingly becoming the least trustworthy profession.
Concluding remarks
“If you have facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table” – Old legal proverb.
I could write at least five more articles of similar length about the problems in science. There are so many examples. When people question peer reviewed science, they fight against others who give disproportionate weighting to the sanctity of peer review as a “debate-ender” without understanding how naïve they are over the real problems in science.
A young, cheeky, but affable medical researcher at the University of Sydney recently published a paper about “experts” downplaying the risk of myocarditis caused by the COVID-19 vaccines, particularly in male teens.
He wrote a blog on Substack, and one of the comments was exactly what I was thinking when I read it:
“Not sure what your status is at Sydney Uni Raphael, but if you continue muck raking like this, you’re unlikely to be on track for tenure!”
To which the young researcher replied:
“I pretty much only look into stuff that challenges the status quo, so am very much resigned to never having ‘a career’!”
Boom! There it is folks, trust “the science” at your peril. Anyone questioning the groupthink is doomed and scientists know it.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that the great researchers and the good results will not see the light of day, particularly in the science fields that have become politicised.
The rampant flaws in how researchers conduct science these days provide many reasons why we need to question “the science” from governments, experts, scientists, and once-trusted government agencies, such as CSIRO and BoM.
The most scientific approach is to be sceptical, question, critique, and research rather than blindly accept what you are told if you think something is amiss. Science is all about a contest of ideas and debate over data and what it means. Academic freedom and the peer review process foster a greater understanding of facts that may seem uncertain and stimulate debate.
The least scientific response is to silence debate and censure dissent. Scientists aggressively interfering with the peer review process to prevent a paper from being published because they don’t like it is pounding the table; scientists calling for journal editors to retract papers after they are published because they disagree with them is also pounding the table.
There is too much pounding the table, and that is what is wrong with science today.
See more here Robert on Fray
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Jerry Krause
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Hi PSI Readers and Robert OnFray,
Robert’s article began with “Science requires open debate. It does not advance by consensus or political pressure”. The truth is that historically scientists have used REPRODUCIBLE OBSERVATIONS to prove WRONG IDEAS to be WRONG.
Have a good day
Reply
Saeed Qureshi
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@ “What is science
“The scientific method requires scientists to test all theories. Science progresses not by claiming a theory is true but by proving a theory is false”.”
I started reading the article and got annoyed and upset with the above phrase.
Read the question and then the answer – it is really absurd, all with due respect to the author.
It is like someone asking for an apple. The other person responded, apple is to start digging some land, treat it with water, add some ingredients (fertilizer), and then wait for things to happen (like rain and sunshine), and you get apples.
This caused me to visit the author’s website, where it states, “Now settled again, Robert plans to continue writing and is working on his second book documenting the forestry history of Fraser Island before it disappears.”
So basically, he is a historian of forestry, which is not at all a science subject. No wonder he has to define science from his imagination, which has no link to reality. I am sorry.
People just like to promote themselves as science experts or scientists because it sells well and provides some authenticity to their claims, although it is false and fake.
On the other hand, the simple and direct answer to the question of what science is is studying chemistry, physics, and/or mathematics in greater depth – end of the story.
https://bioanalyticx.com/what-is-science-and-who-are-scientists/
Reply
Jerry Krause
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Hi Saeed,
Based upon my experience, “have many years of hands-on working experience.” is critically important plus reading what other scientists, with unquestionable achievements (such as Richard Feynman who details his personal life. Or Madame Curie who just keeps working despite all the negatives of her life.) did.
Have a good day
Reply