This is just one of the ongoing scandals over dubious results published in top journals, including the recent claim that climate scientists had to exaggerate the risks of climate change to be published in Nature . This is a politicized and misleading deflection of a real issue. High-impact journals, including Nature, are biased toward sexy, newsworthy papers, so exaggerating the importance or originality of your work is a deterrent for scientists entering any field. Could be helpful.
If you’re trying to get in touch with nature, “humility is either penalized or strongly discouraged,” says Ivan Oransky, co-founder of the blog Retraction Watch. This may help explain why Nature accepted the second paper from the Diaz group, despite questions about the integrity of the study. If the results of this study are true, they are impressive.
And even with data manipulation, the material could become superconducting as claimed. History shows cases where scientists manipulated data and were still right. Russell Hemley, a physicist at the University of Illinois, recently replicated one of Diaz’s discoveries by experimenting with similar materials. Hemley told me that while he stands by all of his work, other physicists are concerned that this second result of his is erroneous.
Superconductors were a surprising discovery in the early 20th century. When cooled with liquid helium, electrons that normally strongly repel each other pair up. A current of zero resistance flows through this pair, creating a strong magnetic field in the process. Scientists have long been working to realize this phenomenon at more easily achievable temperatures. Room-temperature superconductors were a kind of holy grail.
So while Diaz’s discovery is an extraordinary claim of the kind that Carl Sagan said would require extraordinary evidence, even if true it would not necessarily transform civilization in the way the Times claims. do not have.
“When you discover something in physics in general and condensed matter physics in particular, you never know what direction it’s going to go,” said Peter Armitage, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University. Even room-temperature superconductors may require cooling to obtain sufficient current. How it is used depends largely on the creativity of applied scientists and engineers.
Diaz’s first paper claimed the discovery of a room-temperature superconductor that operates at extremely high pressures. His second, more surprising Nature paper claimed that another material made from the rare earth lutetium, which combines hydrogen and nitrogen, does not work at room temperature and less extreme pressures.
Several physicists, including Armitage and James Hamlin, examined the original Nature paper, published in 2020 and now retracted, and found that some of the graphs representing experiments conducted several years earlier It turned out that it had been copied from another paper. Mr. Hamlin told me that he noticed several passages in the text that looked familiar. It turns out that these were copied from Hamlin’s paper. He later discovered that much of Díaz’s paper had been plagiarized from his own paper.
The now-retracted paper in Physical Review Letters and the second Nature paper surfaced even more problems, and despite these initial problems, the journal inexplicably accepted the paper. (Nature’s editors defended their decision to accept Diaz’s second paper, saying they judged each paper on its own merits.)
Revocations are not as uncommon as you might think. Revocation Watch’s Oransky said that in a typical year, they see about 5,500 revocations. Some are due to innocent but egregious mistakes, but most are due to data manipulation, falsification, or other suspected fraud. Oransky said journals are rarely transparent about their reasons for retracting papers. Their opacity negatively impacts public trust and understanding of science.
Celebrity culture can also lead to escalating hyperbole, as journals, universities, and funding agents heavily promote high-profile research findings in the media. David Saunders, a virologist at Purdue University, was involved in the scientific integrity review after 2009, when another scientist claimed to have discovered an arsenic-based life form. She made the Time 100 list and multiple front-page headlines for possibly discovering a second origin of life and even aliens. None of these major suggestions were supported by the data presented. Sanders said this is not a 15-minute story of the downfall of a prominent scientist, but a failure of integrity and critical thinking in academia, NASA, Science magazine, and the media.
Although there are a few fraudsters in every human endeavor, most scientists make sincere efforts to advance humanity’s understanding of the world. But celebrity culture and the high-profile economy can wreak havoc on the face of science. After all, the only star must be nature itself.
More from Bloomberg Opinion:
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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
FD Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is the host of the podcast Follow the Science.
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