Knowing When To Quit

Slightly over a year ago, my advisor and her former post-doc realized that there was an error in a published paper. They insisted that the finding was valid, especially since the error was found in the process of replicating the results; I insisted that the statistical significance of the results had changed to the extent that the paper would never have gotten published, and the editor should be informed. This was incredibly stupid of me.

It wasn't stupid to think that the editor should be told; I stand by that bit of ethics. But it was definitely stupid to think that I could get two professors to admit they were wrong. We got a letter to the editor drafted - and then it had to be a brief report, so they could explain all the interesting reasons they were wrong. And then my advisor sat on the draft for five months, until I demanded to at least give the *#@%A thing a due date so it wouldn't always be the lowest priority. And the the due date came - and went. My advisor has a grant deadline. Our co-author has "a number of pressing deadlines". Having a due date doesn't even give them an artificial sense of urgency.

I find myself faced with the options of continuing to drag them, kicking and screaming, into telling the editor they made a mistake, or giving up. I chose to give up. The alternative is just too stressful; I've spent a year trying to convince them to do the right thing, and I don't have anything left to fight with. Their reputations matter more than their science, and there's nothing I can do to change that.

Frankly, I don't think our research is important enough that it matters, and we did replicate the results. My advisor and her former post-doc can survive with their reputations intact, in everyone's eyes but mine - and, after all, why should they care about the opinion of a lowly graduate student?

As for me, I have one more year here. Fighting with my advisor over this will only hurt my career prospects. I just need to get the dissertation done, get the PhD, and get out. If I have to publish my dissertation results - well, at least my advisor is likely to be interested in those. And then I'll never work with her again.

How Low-Priority Can Ethics Be?

My advisor has been sitting on revisions to a brief report for over four months now. Last February, we discovered a mistake in calculations in a published paper, that crossed the level of significance. Results that had been acceptably significant could now only be called "marginally" significant. We found the error in the process of replicating the results, so the effect is probably real, but the editor should still be informed.

First I had to argue my advisor and her co-author into agreeing that the mistake should be reported at all, on the grounds that it isn't up to us (them the original authors, me from the same lab). Then I dragged them through drafting a letter to the editor. Then my advisor decided that it should be a brief report instead, because the post-hoc explanation for why the results were only marginal was "interesting". And then she sat on the revisions for months. And then when I started pushing her to get me the draft back, she said that the delays weren't due to her new baby, but because she didn't consider the project a priority. This was right after she updated our lab's manuscripts page, with this revision right at the bottom, after even the revisions with a deadline in March.

I have said repeatedly that I want revisions by the end of December. I gave her several weeks' warning on this. I have explained that I will write my own letter to the editor if I don't get them, because her concerns about the ethics of cutting out the original authors on this are outweighed by my concerns about the ethics of going almost a year knowing that there is an error in the results without informing the editor, or anyone outside our lab.

I'm preparing to negotiate. I just can't sit back and have this always be the lowest priority, because new projects and manuscripts are always being added that will be higher priority, by virtue of having an actual deadline, but I'm not quite so anal as to demand revisions by the end of the month, as reasonable as that seemed when I first set the date. Perhaps I should be more laid-back about an error when the overall idea is probably correct, and this really should be my advisor's lowest priority. But I can't convince myself of that. It's a relatively minor ethical issue, but I can't help wondering if this is how she would react if we didn't have some reason to argue that the results didn't change that much.

Not Plagiarism Again...

I am a very careful grader. I have only 22 students in my one lab section, not all of whom turn in every assignment, so I can afford to be generous with my time. Prior to coordinating with the other lab TA this afternoon (we give the same assignment, and will review the papers together to make sure students neither gave nor received unauthorized help from someone in the other lab), I was just going to read through the papers once, with no pen or intentions of marking anything. I just wanted to get a feel for what the students had said, and sit on that for a while before starting to mess, however slightly, with their GPAs.

My intentions were lost by the second paper. In the very first paragraph - because I foolishly thought it unnecessary to go over such things as "introductory paragraph" - was a sentence that just couldn't be right. I hadn't even read the journal article they were reviewing yet, for this first pass, and yet I knew it couldn't possibly be the students' writing. It was in the vocabulary, the use of acronyms without explaining them, and a certain sinking sensation. The student wrote three pages of "summary" that are more properly described as "blatantly plagiarised recitation of the methods and results, with a bit of introduction and conclusion added for variety".

After my fiasco with plagiarism last year, in which I decided "they're juniors and seniors, they know what plagiarism is and I can just say 'don't do it' ", I spent an entire lab session on research ethics, including a group activity on plagiarism. So far - I've only read through half the papers - it seems that the only person who didn't get the message was someone I'm pretty sure wasn't there that day. I should be encouraged by this; there's just no way to reach students who don't come to class. But all I can think of is that my careful planning changed nothing, because I'm still caught in the web of figuring out what to do.

Last year's plagiarism fiasco resulted in one student completely pissed off because she got a D (the plagiarism wasn't so extensive, and I was impressed enough with her evaluation that I gave her credit for everything but the summary) and one student who got a 0 with an option to rewrite that he didn't take. I am still sitting on the paper, decided how much credit, if any, to give. I'm inclined to do a 0 on principle. I could give some credit (like 20%) for attempting the evaluation, but I can't decide if that's based on any principles or just on not wanting another student confrontation in my office. I'm also trying to decide if perhaps I should buy a six-pack before I actually grade these things.

A "Thorny Ethical Question"!?

After discovering a stupid mistake in what's supposed to be a trivial matter of my Me,Y & Z paper in preparation, which fortunately didn't result in any qualitative changes in my results (things that had been significant/meaningful were still significant meaningful), we discovered that the same error was in Y & Z (2007). This time the re-analysis was bad; what had been reported as significant was in fact not quite significant. The trend was there, my results showed the effect was real, but the published data set would normally have been presented as "not meeting conventional levels of significance" and so wouldn't have gotten published.

Y, my co-author and lead author on the first paper, had the following response:

"What do you think? Are we obligated to point out the PS flaw in the earlier paper? Would doing so help or hurt the current paper? A thorny ethical question..."

And I went off and had a mild conniption fit.

I was fully on-board with Y's attempts to find a spin to put on the sudden non-significance of the results. The finding is valid, check this other paper; there was this or that confound so we can explain why those results didn't actually turn out. But the suggestion of just ignoring the problem, even on the basis of "more recent/better studies do show the effect is real..." entirely set me off.

The problem is that the original paper, and our summary of the original paper, make a great deal of "is significant even controlling for PS". And it turns out that there was no control of PS at all, there was just control for some nonsensical number value they/we thought was PS. The stats show the important effect is still significant when PS isn't controlled, but all those arguments about how it's beyond and better than this trivial measure are suddenly invalid.

Z, the established name on both papers and my advisor, has not yet weighed in on this issue. The two dozen emails we sent on this matter had panic only in the body, not the subject lines, so s/he prioritized other things and may not even know about the problem yet. I'm hoping, almost desperately, that Z will state that they must issue a correction about the recently-published paper and address this in the current manuscript. I don't care if our almost-ready-for-submission paper has to be changed drastically over another three months of drafts in some attempt to salvage the original set of results. I am going to have a mild nervous breakdown if my advisor decides to let wrong results stand. It's bad enough that the possibility of errors in the papers I read looms large in my mind every time I even glance at a journal. I will lose all my faith in science if faced with respected members of the field explicitly deciding not to correct mistakes they find after publication.

The arguments against correction would boil down to this: that original data set isn't significant, but we can look at Me, Y & Z to show that the effect is real, and the original data would have been significant if we'd kept the experiment going a little longer. To me, this is an excellent basis for the letter of correct, just lacking the specific details, but is completely unsatisfactory for not sending a correction at all. It's the slippery slope of ethics. If people don't correct mistakes that change the meaning of the results for a "good" reason, they might decide not to correct results for a "bad" reasons. Full disclosure is one of the foundations of science, that allows us to decide whether to trust the results (of a specific paper or an author's body of work) and figure out for ourselves what might really be going on instead of taking the author's word on it.

Now, if my advisor argues against making a formal correction, do I go to someone about it? That's where the nervous breakdown comes in...