“some scientists wondered how a questionable line of research persisted for so long … experts were just too timid to take a stand.” Harvard calls for retraction of dozens of studies by noted cardiologist, New York Times, http://www.staradvertiser.com/2018/10/16/news/harvard-calls-for-retraction-of-dozens-of-studies-by-noted-cardiologist/ . 16 Oct 2018

"A considerable number of individuals are inclined to align with authority, seemingly believing that this aligning somehow validates their own greatness."

Peer Review Antagonist - Peeref

同一个教科书水平的错误反复出现在90篇以上的现代期刊文章之中:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10854-021-07496-9

Comment on the relationship between electrical and optical conductivity used in several recent papers published in the journal of materials science: materials in electronics

Comment on the relationship between electrical and optical conductivity used in several recent papers published in the journal of materials science: materials in electronics | Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics (springer.com)

英文文献

Vazire, S., 2020. A toast to the error detectors. Nature. 577, 9.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03909-2

为期刊文献纠错鼓与呼

Simine Vazire is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis. e-mail: simine@gmail.com

作者：Simine Vazire是加利福尼亚大学的心理学教授。电子邮件：simine@gmail.com

英汉对照

Scientific criticism must not be conflated with bullying

科学批评不是欺凌

Let 2020 be the year in which we value those who ensure that science is self-correcting.

让2020年开始成为珍视确保科学有自我纠正能力的一年。

Last month, I got a private Twitter message from a postdoc bruised by the clash between science as it is and how it should be. He had published a commentary in which he pointed out errors in a famous researcher’s paper. The critique was accurate, important and measured — a service to his field. But it caused him problems: his adviser told him that publishing the criticism had crossed a line, and he should never do it again.

上个月，我收到了一位博士后在推特上的私人消息。他因科学现状和科学本身原来应该有的样子之间的冲突而被棒揍。他发表了一篇评论，指出了一位著名研究人员论文中的错误。批评是准确的、重要的和有分寸的——这是对他的领域应该做的事情。但这给他带来了麻烦：他的导师告诉他，发表这篇批评越界了，你以后不得再这样做了。

Scientists are very quick to say that science is self-correcting, but those who do the work behind this correction often get accused of damaging their field, or worse. My impression is that many error detectors are early-career researchers who stumble on mistakes made by eminent scientists, and naively think that they are helping by pointing out those problems — but, after doing so, are treated badly by the community.

科学家们都毫不犹豫地说科学有自我修正机制。但那些做修正的人经常被指责破坏了研究领域，甚至更糟指责。我的印象是，许多纠错人都是早期的研究人员，他们偶然发现了著名科学家犯的错误，并天真地认为他们通过指出这些问题有助于科学的进步。但在这样做之后，他们却遭到了科学界的恶劣对待。

Stories of scientists showing unwarranted hostility to error detectors are all too common. Yes, criticism, like science, should be done carefully, with due diligence and a sharp awareness of personal fallibility. Error detectors need to keep conversations focused on concrete facts, and should be open to benign explanations for apparent problems.

科学家对纠错人表现出无端敌意的故事太常见了。是的，批评和科学一样，应该严慎，尽职尽责，并明白到每个人都可能犯错。纠错人需要对事不对人，对明显错误也持善意开放的态度。

Even when criticism is done well, error detectors are often subjected to personal attacks. Junior scientists are accused of bullying their seniors. In one case, early-career researchers who showed that a famous scientist had engaged in extensive self-citation and recycled his own publications were accused of being vigilantes and mounting a witch hunt. Scientists who found flaws in high-profile nutrition research that required retractions were accused of cyberbullying and, bizarrely, of holding a grudge against school-lunch programmes. And those are just a few incidents that became public.

即使批评做得很得当，纠错人也经常受到人身攻击。初级科学家被指控欺负他们的前辈。在一个案例中，位卑的研究人员发现一位著名科学家进行了广泛的不当自我引用并只是为了宣传自己，但是这些纠错人员被指控为邪恶的监视和迫害。科学家们发现在高调的营养研究的缺陷，要求撤回发表的论文。但是这个纠错被指控网络欺凌，奇怪的是，纠错人被指责是对学校的午餐研究计划怀恨在心的人。这些只是公开的少数事件之一。

Researchers are often warned against pointing out errors — and sometimes kindness is used as justification. They are told to focus on improving their own research, or to state only the positive aspects of that done by others. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

研究人员经常被警告不要指出错误，这样做的理由似乎是你要善待他人。他们被告知你只需要专注于自己的研究，或者只讲他人所做研究的积极方面。如果你没有什么好话可以说，就什么都不要说。

There are several problems with these arguments. First, we scientists present ourselves as a community of individuals committed to scrutinizing each other. Historian of science Naomi Oreskes, in urging non-scientists to trust science, argues that “scientists have a kind of culture of collective distrust”. We cannot tell people to trust us because we monitor each other, and then appeal to kindness to halt that scrutiny.

这些论点有几个问题。首先，科学家说科学就是质疑因此他们能审视科学结论。科学史学家Naomi Oreskes敦促非科学家相信科学，他认为“科学家有质疑的文化”。我们不能以我们相互监督为理由，让别人信任我们，然后以善待他人为理由停止这种自我审查。

Second, when we suggest that those working on error detection and correction are being unkind, we are the ones being unkind. Imagine that you are a trainee. You feel that science values self-correction, and that it’s not about any one person’s ego, but the collective motivation to find new knowledge, to check everything thrice or more, to discard false hypotheses and so to move ever closer to truth. Thus, when you find an error, you trust that it’s okay to point it out. And then you find yourself accused of being a destructive, sanctimonious second-stringer — all for applying the ‘scientific values’ that you’d been taught.

其次，当我们认为那些纠正错的人是不与人为善时，我们就都成了老好人。假如你是一名实习生。你认为科学重视自我修正，大家都在寻找新知识、反复核查一切、抛弃虚假假设，从而越来越接近真理，这与任何人的自我为是无关。因此，当你发现一个错误时，你相信指出它是可以的。然后你发现自己被指责为一个破坏性的、道貌岸然的二流货色——所有这些都是你所学到的“科学价值观”导致的。

Yes, error detectors can make research less comfortable — but that discomfort is healthy. We should feel responsible for minimizing errors in our work, and worried that we might have missed some.

是的，纠错会让研究变得不那么舒服——但这种不舒服是健康的。我们有责任尽量减少工作中的错误，并担心一些错误未被发现。

Scientific criticism must not be conflated with bullying. It’s not fair to victims of actual bullying to use the term so loosely and inappropriately. Instead, we need mechanisms to protect those who engage in scientific criticism. These mechanisms would make science fairer and more inclusive. Advisers can get away with awful behaviour — bullying, harassment and other abuses of power — because their trainees are so dependent on them for funding, recommendations and other opportunities. Universities need to hold themselves and senior faculty members accountable for preventing abuse, including intimidation and bullying of error detectors.

科学批评不是欺凌。如此对纠错者随意地使用欺凌这个词是不公平、不恰当的。相反，我们需要机制保护那些从事科学批评的人。这些机制将使科学更加公平和包容。导师不得有欺凌、骚扰、和滥用职权等可恶的行为—因为他们的学生在资金、推荐信、和其他机会方面非常依赖于他们的导师。大学和高级教职员工有责任防止对纠错人员的虐待，恐吓、和欺凌。

We should do more to make criticism an established part of science. Universities need policies that assess inappropriate responses to criticism. Responsible research training should include sessions on how to assess whether apparent anomalies could be substantive problems, how to communicate concerns and how to respond when issues arise. Funders and research-evaluation committees should find ways to support and recognize all the work that error detection requires.

我们应该做更多的工作，使批评成为科学的既定组成部分。大学需要有对批评的不当回应的评估政策。负责任的研究应该评估明显异常的应对纠错的事件导致的问题、纠错过程应该如何沟通、以及关于纠错而发生纠纷时应该如何回应。资助者和研究评估委员会应设法支持纠错所需要的一切。

Furthermore, journals need to make clearer and firmer commitments to self-correction. In my opinion, they have a responsibility to share replication attempts for the work that they publish, including creating explicit criteria to enable publication of high-quality replications. Consider the Social Science Replication Project (C. F. Camerer et al. Nature Hum. Behav. 2, 637–644; 2018), which focused on systematically repeating 21 experiments published in Science and Nature. It was an author, not either journal, who said that both journals had rejected the submission and shared the reasons given for doing so. As a former editor-in-chief of Social Psychological and Personality Science, I was shocked at how easy it would be to reject or hide criticism of the editorial process. There should be greater transparency and other measures of accountability over editors, senior authors and reviewers.

此外，期刊需要对自我纠错做出更明确、更坚定的承诺。在我看来，他们有责任分享他们发表结果的重现性工作，包括制定明确的高质量重现性标准。以社会科学重现性项目为例（C. F. Camerer等人，Nature Hum.Behav.2637-644；2018）。该项目系统地重复了发表在Science和Nature杂志上的21个实验。这位作者说这两本杂志都拒稿，作者分享了编辑部拒稿给出的原因。作为《社会心理与人格科学》的前主编，我对编辑部如此轻率拒稿感到震惊、我对编辑部如此对地编辑过程进行隐瞒感到震惊。对编辑、被纠错的资深作者、和审稿人应该更透明度和有其它问责措施。

It’s time to be kinder to those doing the criticizing, and to demand more accountability and humility from those in power. Instead of punishing people who flag errors, we should scramble to hire them, give them prizes and award them grants so they can keep improving science. The least we can do is provide a space for fact-based criticism that is safe from intimidation and retaliation. It’s only thanks to error detectors that we can proclaim that science is self-correcting.

是时候对那些进行纠错的人更加友善了，并要求当权者对自己的错误负责和更加人道。我们不应该惩罚那些纠错的人，而应该争先恐后地雇佣他们，给他们颁奖，并授予他们研究资助经费，这样科学才能不断进步。我们至少可以为基于事实的批评提供一个免受恐吓和报复的空间。正因为有就错的人，我们才能宣称科学有自我修正能力。