Sensory Approach to Manual Therapy
Sensory Approach to Manual Therapy
When good science goes bad: How 10,000 papers got retracted in a single year
The integrity of scientific research is under unprecedented pressure. In this eye-opening conversation, Senior Lecturer Sharmella Roopchand Martin reveals the alarming rise in research paper retractions—10,000 in the past year alone—and the shadowy industry that's emerged to exploit academic publishing demands.
Discover the shocking world of "paper mills," businesses that guarantee publication for a price, offering everything from ghostwritten papers to fake peer reviews. These operations thrive in an environment where career advancement depends on publication counts rather than research quality. Martin explains how the detection of scientific misconduct has evolved alongside increasingly sophisticated methods to commit it, including the emergence of bizarre "tortured phrases" like "counterfeit consciousness" (artificial intelligence) and "bosom peril" (breast cancer) that signal AI-assisted plagiarism attempts.
The conversation explores how retracted papers continue influencing public health decisions long after being debunked, the challenges facing researchers from developing nations, and the ethical dilemmas created by publication pressures. Most concerning is the gap between identifying problematic research and its formal retraction, creating windows where misinformation spreads unchecked through academic and public channels. For healthcare professionals and anyone who relies on scientific evidence, understanding these dynamics is crucial.
Ready to protect yourself from dubious research? Martin recommends resources like Retraction Watch and verification strategies including checking funding databases. If you're involved in research yourself, consider taking a short course in research ethics—many graduate programs don't include this crucial training. In a world flooded with information, the ability to distinguish sound science from misconduct has never been more important.
Hello everybody and welcome again to another podcast with the Sensory Approach to Manual Therapy. My guest today is Sharmella Rupchan Martin. She is a Senior Lecturer and Deputy Dean of Research and Grants at the University of the West Indies. I had the fortune to meet Sharmella about a month ago in Jamaica at the Jamaican Association for Sports Medicine, where she was a lecturer on a wonderful subject, and it was so exciting and enticing that I wanted to bring her on Welcome.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much, Troy. I'm actually pretty happy to be on your podcast today.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's wonderful.
Speaker 2:Looking forward to it. And before we actually get in, I'd just like to declare upfront that anything we discuss would be representing my views only and not the views of the University of the West Indies. So I'm just here on my behalf, you know, having a discussion with you.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So the subject that you had brought up in Jamaica at the Congress that I found really interesting was on the retraction of research papers and the massive uptake in retractions that we've seen over the past few years, but particularly last year. And you had mentioned a few subjects around you know paper mills that I had never heard of all these really interesting concepts that, even though I've been very involved in research for the past 10 years, were not necessarily subjects I was incredibly familiar with, primarily because I'm not at a university. So I just wanted to know if you could introduce our listeners a little bit to what it is that you talked about, because I found it really wonderful.
Speaker 2:One of the interesting things, as you mentioned yourself, being a researcher and not being familiar with some of the concepts I was talking about. It's actually typical of many persons who engage in research, because universities require their graduate students to do research but not every university exposes their graduate students to research ethics. So students will prepare a proposal and submit to an ethics committee, but unless you've actually been asked to do a course in research ethics, some of the concepts apart from, I guess, plagiarism, would be unfamiliar to many persons, which in a sense, I guess sometimes results in researchers running into problems with misconduct for some of it and not knowing that they've been engaged in misconduct, because there are many other types apart from what I spoke about in Jamaica. So the typical things that are referred to as scientific misconduct is looking at whether persons has been deliberately fabrication, falsification and plagiarism. But there are other elements as well that are considered misconduct that people may not be as familiar with, and that would be things like adding high profile authors just to get your paper published would be considered misconduct.
Speaker 1:That was an interesting one for me. I found that really interesting because you know in the academic world a lot of authors, they just try to get their names on many papers as they can because it helps them with their status at the university academically as well as sometimes even financially with their status at the university academically as well as sometimes even financially. And that was really interesting to me that researchers would be willing to sometimes just put their name on a paper and you had mentioned that sometimes they don't even read the papers, they just sign off saying, yeah, put my name as an investigator on it, when they have no idea what the research is about, what is being done and let alone how it's being done. And I found that really interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's something that you know. There are people that will even pay persons for their name to be on as an author. So they have not read anything. But you actually pay them because you're just trying to get their name to accelerate the process of your publication. And when this happens, you're talking about people who themselves are well-established researchers, which is why you're using their name. So you're trying to use their name in the hope that an editor looks at it and says, oh, I know this person. They're very well, you know, reputed in this area person. They're very well, you know, reputed in this area. They've got, you know, good work, and then you're more likely to get published as opposed to young junior researcher just trying to get papers out there and you know you're just getting rejections, rejections, rejections, because nobody knows you, so so. So there's a lot of motivation to do something like this, but, yes, there are people out there who will actually put their names on papers without having read them.
Speaker 1:That must make it almost disheartening for junior authors or new researchers because, as most naive individuals including myself would assume with research, if it was a good research paper and it was well done and it was a unique and exciting subject, people would want to publish it. But that's not always the case Because, as you had mentioned, in Jamaica you know a lot of these magazines and articles. They have a finite amount of print space If they still are printing. They have a finite amount of time of editors to look over research papers and so they end up finding, you know, it doesn't necessarily come down to oh, that's a great paper, let's do it. It comes down to what's the best paper that we can get bang for buck. And that almost makes it disheartening for a lot of new researchers who don't have a name or don't have necessarily big clout but yet have a subject that they're incredibly passionate about big cloud but yet have a subject that they're incredibly passionate about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you can then magnify that problem.
Speaker 2:Troy, when you talk about researchers who are like myself, coming from small island developing states, I mean, I've had papers that I've submitted, that including, you know, some of my video gaming work that I've done, that I've submitted in the past to journals, and you're rejected on the basis that you know it's small country, small population, and you know we're not particularly interested in this work.
Speaker 2:So there's the side of junior researchers who are trying to get off the ground in the developed countries that already face that challenge, where there's limited publishing space, which can motivate one to say, well, let me get this big name person on my paper, because at least that will begin to get my foot into the door. And then that problem becomes magnified with all of the low middle income countries or small island developing states, like where I am, where people look at it and it's like, well, you're too small in the scope of the world, we're not interested in anything that is coming out of you know, your space, which then limits us to trying to find, you know, journals that only exist in our sphere, when the work you're doing is relevant to an international community.
Speaker 1:And it also represents one of the big drawbacks that you know when I started looking into the subject that you had brought up. One of the drawbacks that we see a lot in research is that, you know, a lot of research is really done on the same individuals, the same patient populations, the same cultural and genetic background mostly male, predominantly white or Caucasian, predominantly European or Western and it makes it where these research papers aren't necessarily conclusive to the population of the planet and of the globe. They're representative of a specific population and that's it. And then you run into that same problem of now you're trying to introduce paper that represents your genetic background, your culture or the culture of that region or that genetic background of the region, and it's. You're still having a hard time finding it, let alone you're already not represented in current papers, predominantly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what you have now is so, if we now take that to the global scale, so we've got universities that we know pushing to establish ourselves as research institutions. Grad students are growing in numbers, and some of these programs require that your graduate students actually publish as well in order to get their degree. So here you are as a young person. You know you're now developing a researcher, trying to get your degrees, trying to get these publications out, and you're not able to do that in the interim. Your life is hanging in balance and you've got a situation that emerges, that creates a market, basically that you've got people who need to publish and you have entities who see that. You know, hey, I can offer this as a business service, which then leads us to the emergence of the paper mills, which I spoke about at the conference in Jamaica.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this was a very enlightening subject to me because it was amazing, and I'm excited for you to talk about it to the listeners, because to me the idea of paper mills was so foreign and brand new. So I'm really glad you bring this up because it's so interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So here we've got I mean, like everything in the business world right, it's about supply and demand. So we've got a pool of people across the globe that need to produce research, either in order to graduate from their academic programs or to progress within their professional careers, and they need to produce research which is published in peer reviewed journals. But we've got limited space in these journals and sometimes you're not very well established journals and sometimes you're not very well established. So even in the journals that are there, they're looking at it and saying, oh, but I'm not interested in this from your side of the world because you're too small. So we've got a demand in terms of, we've got a need sorry by persons to publish, and you have these entities who recognize that I can turn this into a business.
Speaker 2:So the paper mill is really it's referring to a business that has emerged that offers the service of guaranteed publications. So you essentially pay money and you have your work being published in journals, some of which I mean there are many aspects to the process with regards to paper mills. So in some cases you're struggling to write these papers because I'm overburdened in terms of time work, but I still need to get papers out. So the paper mills can offer you a service that says we'll produce the paper for you. So you can see an add outout that says you know where you know if around author you want to be, do you want to be a first author, a second author?
Speaker 1:And then you pay the money and your paper is produced. And when it is produced, it's not necessarily produced, and this was the shocking part to me when you told me this. It's not produced by researchers, it's just produced by employees of this paper mill that is being hired to essentially do the work and follow, in theory, the methodology that the researcher and the investigators have put in place. But it's not being done by someone who's in research, it's just being done by an individual who's paid by a company to write or to accomplish the given tasks. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:That's correct and then. So that's one situation where you're paying them to produce the whole paper. The other situation can be that you're actually submitting to a legitimate journal, but many journals will ask that you recommend reviewers for your paper, and what you're paying for is essentially what is called a fake peer review, that you're indicating that I need to get this paper in terms of reviewers reviewing the paper. So these would be journals that the paper mill has people planted as guest editors or reviewers for the particular journal that essentially just signs off on your paper and said this paper is acceptable for publication. So that's another aspect as well of what you can get with the paper mills.
Speaker 1:And are those editors necessarily researchers who are fluent in the subject, or are they simply considered editors, hence not peers necessarily, because they may not actually be involved in your profession or the realm of research that you're interested in?
Speaker 2:So you can get a mixture. You can actually get persons who may have scientific background. That doesn't mean that they actually read your paper properly, because it's all part of a business process that you're already paid to do this. But you can also get persons who don't necessarily have any background in the work, but there's a fake profile that has been created. Indicate that they do have background, but they may not have the background.
Speaker 1:This is again similar to when I heard you talk in Jamaica.
Speaker 1:To me this is just so interesting because I love the fact that people, the science culture is looking at itself and saying, look, we have issues and you know Nature magazine or Nature website.
Speaker 1:They published an article saying 10,000 papers were retracted just last year alone and you had some interesting graphs, more numbers about going back and some of the papers that were tracked. I mean, I've looked at some of them. Some of them are incredibly well cited papers and some of the papers are still cited today even though they have been retracted. And one of the things I love about science is that it does this to itself. But one of the downsides to it is, in the modern day, you know, the term misinformation is so popular and suddenly now it's all those individuals who don't necessarily like quoting research or don't necessarily like listening to science are now almost justified in saying see, your research is being done unethically, your research is being done poorly and so has. In your opinion, is there a wave of support against research now that these retractions are becoming more prevalent and in the news because of that shift against scientific research?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we live in an interesting era, troy, which is an absolutely fantastic one that allows people like you and I to connect across thousands of miles in the globe real time, different from what we had before. But it's also an age where people are being flooded with information and there's a lot more available to you. So, when we look at the concept of scientific misconduct, scientific misconduct has always existed. We've got lots of situations from you know, way back during the days of you know, world wars, where a lot of unethical research was done, a lot of scientific misconduct. But many of these would not have been made public knowledge unless, of course, you're in the realm of studying bioethics and you know it becomes more topical for you, but the average person would not be exposed. And what has happened with the access to information?
Speaker 2:Now, a lot more of the world is becoming aware of these kinds of misconduct, which I believe, yes, has added to people being a little bit more cautious and more questioning with regards to research, what science is doing, and it's impacting on decisions and also public health in certain cases, as we saw with COVID-19. In many parts of the world, persons think that, yes, there was a lot of misconduct around types of research during you know that period. Which persons will then turn around and say, see, I was justified in my decision. So it's become a really difficult period to navigate and to be able to filter out. You know what is really driven by sound science and what isn't. I mean, I don't envy anybody out there who's the average non-scientist trying to make decisions about anything in your life these days.
Speaker 1:And that gets me to a subject that I want to talk about a little bit later, about how do we filter out retracted, non-retracted papers. And I know there are a couple of resources available, but before we get into that, one of the other things I wanted to ask about was, when it comes to retractions of papers, there are different ways to do it. We have self-attraction and then we have force retraction. We have, you know, people genuinely making mistakes that they go oops, that was a blunder on my part. And then we have other people maliciously making mistakes, intentionally avoiding, you know, confirmation, bias or ignoring pieces of research that would affect their result. Some people go into research blindly, saying we want to see what the data tells us, and some people go in with a theory and they do everything possible to prove said theory, and in both scenarios we have retractions and published papers.
Speaker 1:Some of them are seen more positively. A lot of the self-retractions are seen as okay they saw their mistake, they caught their mistake, they were willing to take their paper out of circulation or make corrections to it and then others, when they're being forced on, are seen very poorly and unethically. But even in the self-retraction do we see that a lot of these papers that do get retracted, especially in the last. I mean I know China was where the paper mills are. You had also mentioned a lot of the Eastern Asian countries where a lot of these paper mills aren't where their businesses are. Method meaning the peer review wasn't well done, like you had previously mentioned, or they're just hiring these people to write the papers or is it generally falsification of information?
Speaker 2:You actually have a mixture of fabrication, falsification, plagiarism. Plagiarism is probably one of the most common situations that tends to arise with retractions, but you do have even for self-retractions, I think the self-retractions you do have some that occur as a result of recognizing that, you know, maybe my methodology wasn't as sound as I thought, and it may be after the fact. So this could have been even something that it's supervised research that you know graduate students engage in under the advisor and even the advisor themselves didn't detect. Until maybe you've moved along to something else and you realize that, oh, maybe this should not have been done this way. In the previous research that you know we produced and you know what we have may not have been as accurate as we thought, and then you choose to retract it based on new knowledge that you've acquired as well, and you think it's, you know, think it should be taken out of circulation because that methodology may not have been the best.
Speaker 1:So you can get that kind of situation and that sounds like the ethical way to take it out. I realize I made a mistake. I'm taking it out.
Speaker 2:Right, that is the ethical way to take it out. Some have been taken out because of plagiarism and sometimes again it's the person may not have fully understood the concepts of plagiarism and somebody brings it to their attention now and indicate that you know, hey, this is actually considered plagiarism and you choose to take it out. So, again, those are the ethical ones, but the ones that are forced retractions, they're also a mixture of plagiarism, fabrication, falsification. So I think you do see a widespread, but there are a lot of retractions that are related to plagiarism.
Speaker 1:And plagiarism is more that they're trying. You had mentioned to Jamaica that sometimes it's just rewording a specific paragraph using different terminology to describe the same concept, but that plagiarism. Is it also sometimes replicating the same research and again just naming it a different title, essentially to try to replicate it? Or is the plagiarism just in the literature of how it's written, not necessarily in the actual research being produced?
Speaker 2:So you've got both situations. So in some cases you have duplication of papers. So this would now be essentially self-plagiarism that's occurring here and you're producing a paper that you're basically taking all the work that you've done before and you may even cite that paper. You know You've taken the work that you previously published. You've changed a couple of things in terms of the titled approach and it's essentially the same work with just minor changes. So full self-plagiarism that's occurring here. You can see situations where the person has also completely so this is somebody else's work now and have duplicated their entire work without any form of referencing, recognition, even their protocols that maybe it's something that was actually copyrighted and I've replicated, but I've not referenced the work that was done. So it can range from self-plagiarism to plagiarism of other people's work.
Speaker 1:It can range from paragraphs to entire bits of work being plagiarized. One of the things that you had mentioned that I thought was interesting was the terminology that people use when they're writing an article. That kind of should be like warning signs for people reading research papers to say this is potentially a poorly done paper or a paper that needs to be taken out of circulation or a falsification. Could you describe some of that?
Speaker 2:Sure. So one of the other aspects to plagiarism in our lovely current day is using AI as well to help with rephrasing. So to try and avoid plagiarism, people will they're not actually writing this work themselves, else's work and then you're putting it into software and asking your AI to rephrase the work for you and, of course, your AI can only do so much in terms of rephrasing words. So one of the things that actually began to alert editors that you know these papers were probably not produced by an individual in terms of doing original work, but you know, plagiarized and plagiarized with the use of AI to help with paraphrasing, is the detection of what are called tortured phrases. Phrases. So you take a paragraph, you put it into the AI, you ask it to rephrase for you and it's going to generate phrases to try and avoid being identified as plagiarism. And I gave some examples, like artificial intelligence being referred to counterfeit consciousness, kidney failure.
Speaker 1:I think that was my favorite one counterfeit consciousness.
Speaker 2:It was one of my favorites.
Speaker 1:There was one about breast tissue, that was really funny as well.
Speaker 2:My favorite was actually the breast cancer one which was bosom peril.
Speaker 1:Bosom peril is a wonderful way of describing it.
Speaker 2:That's right. And then there's kidney failure, which was being phrased as kidney disappointment. So those are, you know, some of the kinds of things that began to alert editors to. You know, we've sort of moved into a different realm here, which is not. It's no longer somebody just taking people's work and rewriting the paragraph and you pick that up easily. You're now having artificial intelligence being to rewrite and then things are being put into papers that when you read them it's like this is a very strange expression. This does not make sense. What are they talking about sense.
Speaker 1:What are they talking about?
Speaker 1:With that in mind, would this not perpetuate the cycle, then, of individuals who are coming from a different culture, who language you know, english is not their first language and they may have descriptive text that is different? For example, in German you can have a word I cannot remember the word, but you can have a word that describes self-guilt, that is minor, and then you can have a different word that is anger around, guilt towards something that is major, and in English we would just say the word guilt. But in German they're two different words and they mean two different concepts. And so when they say something like bosom peril as an example, sure we're using that as an AI or a counterfeit consciousness description, but would it also not perpetuate the idea that individuals coming from non-English speaking countries would have a harder time getting research published because perhaps they actually are being ethical, they are doing their best, but their translation is poor or just not exact? Or would the editors of said magazine that's publishing it actually go back and change the wording to make sure it's reflecting what is intended?
Speaker 2:So that actually is a challenge for persons who are non-English speaking trying to publish in English speaking journals, especially given that the amount of journals in some of the other foreign languages are limited as well. Trying to get their work translated for publishing in English, they really do need to work with someone who can help with the translation. With regards to context and making sure that it's appropriately represented, Editors may flag it like you recognize that this paper looks like a pretty good paper. It looks like sound quality work and you reach back to the authors in terms of asking them to liaise with someone whose first language is English to aid them with ensuring that these are correctly done. So it may not be rejected straight off, but it would go back with a request for revisions with a recommendation to work with someone whose first language is English to aid them with the translations.
Speaker 2:But the editor would not necessarily make that change, because the editor would then be running the risk that they may also be misinterpreting and you're making a wrong.
Speaker 1:You know correction I'm specifically thinking as well of, like chinese medicine. You know, in chinese medicine there's a lot of terminology that is described that doesn't translate into western medicine, when it comes to, like metal or fire, wind in the body and the healing that you know a lot of acupuncturists or Chinese medicine practitioners will do, and there's no direct translation. And so I often wonder how much that gets flagged and is either falsified or retracted because it doesn't seem to be accurate, versus AI, which is out there deliberately, you know, having plagiarism being the result.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I suspect that you do get some of these being flagged as well in our current context.
Speaker 2:But again, it would be something that if it goes back to the authors, they're actually given the opportunity to respond and then you can show where this was genuine errors that occurred. And then you work with you know your editors in terms of figuring out what's the best way to do this. Because when your work is flagged as misconduct, you are notified and you're asked to come forward with sometimes. So if it's a case that your data is being questioned, you may be asked to produce the original data set for assessment and evaluation. In the cases where you know the words, the phrases are looking strange, they may ask you to again produce some stuff or you know to explain. And if you can't provide that explanation or you can't come forward with the original data that supports the work that you've done that other people can look at and evaluate, then the work ends up being retracted. So it's not just automatically straight off retracted and says you know it's flagged, but you go through a process of investigation and the person does have the opportunity to respond.
Speaker 1:So with that in mind last year I mean the big number was 10,000, but there have been retractions before that but it rose sharply Does that mean that those 10,000 were essentially all reviewed, because that seems like a very large number to potentially have reviewed and retracted in the same year? Or was it more that one of these paper mills was put out of circulation and because of that they said no, all the papers that came out of there were shown to be unethical and things like that?
Speaker 2:So we've got a situation where many of those still would not have been reviewed. So they've been taken out. They've been flagged for retraction but they still need to be investigated. So you won't get a label retracted on it yet because it's still being investigated. The other situation that occurred is a clear identification or tagging to a lot of these articles being published in Hindawi journals.
Speaker 2:So Hindawi was shut down in 2003 because of the link with a lot of paper mill work being presented in these journals. So the brand has been discontinued and some of these journals are now out of circulation altogether by the owners widely. So some of those will probably not be reviewed at all, but in that 10,000, you'd also have, you know, numerous things that are there that were not necessarily in the Hindawi journals and would still need to be reviewed. And this is part of the problem. Like you know, something will be flagged as questionable and it's flagged in terms of, you know, needing to be investigated. That time period between the article being flagged and having an official retraction stamp on the article can be a pretty prolonged period. Stamp on the article can be a pretty prolonged period, which means that you can have data that is out there that is not legit being in circulation for a period with lots of readers.
Speaker 1:I think, one of the ones that jumps out for me.
Speaker 1:There's two of them, I think the first one is the vaccinations and autism, and I think that's one of the most popular ones and most well-known for retracted research papers. You know the doctor had falsified a lot of information, including, you know, the permission of the children being tested and all these things. And the other one that I think was more surprising to me was the cardiovascular research that was done on the Mediterranean diet, because that one I mean I'm in massage therapy and you know my world is circulated with a lot of people who focus on well-being and health, wellness and health profession industry, and that paper when it came out, just you know, went global so fast, especially in the alternative health professions where they said look, you know, this diet can really impact your cardiovascular health so significantly. And I don't think enough people are actually even aware that that's been taken out of retraction because the paper was done poorly and the findings were shown to be inconclusive. And those to me are two really big ones that shout as OK.
Speaker 1:These, these came out of retraction and there was no major announcement showing it was poorly done, except perhaps the vaccine one where it made news, especially around during COVID. Are there any other major papers that for you are striking that have been retracted and are either still cited, still in circulation or still part of common myth in our culture?
Speaker 2:One of the ones that is added to that list in terms of being famous is the work that was done by Huang Su, which was tied up with a lot of work related to cloning.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the stem cell research.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, relate to cloning, yeah, and the stem cell research, right, yeah, that's another one that some of that work is still being cited and you know people are still applying and you know, still still using, um, some of that work. And then, um, there are, uh, the covid ones, um, as well, that would have come out I mean, many of these would have been picked up during COVID-19 itself, the pandemic period, and then you know the year following as well which are there in the retraction. So some of these that were related to the use of the anti-malarial drugs, the medications in terms of treatment that had quite a bit of work in there as well, that involved misconduct. So there are some of those as well that are out there.
Speaker 2:The thing about information is and the society in which we live in, it's the negative that often gets re-recited and re-tweeted, right, and then, when things come out, the push with regards to the fact that you know we recognize this and we've pulled it and we're not encouraging people to use, you know, these things that doesn't get the same level of push out into our virtual spaces. So there's a lot of work that gets out there and that becomes part of what people are using to drive behaviors, to make decisions, but they're not aware that they should not be using this work anymore, because that aspect doesn't really make the news the same way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I talk about that a lot with pain with my clients. We say, you know, everybody focuses on how bad they feel. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says I feel good, they go, I feel normal or they don't even think about it. But on the days that they feel bad, they definitely comment on it. And that's an interesting you know, everybody likes focusing on how uncomfortable or how bad or the big news is, but they don't necessarily pay attention to how good things are or how positive things are. It just is not as big of a splash. That actually brings me to my next question, which was with everything you're saying, with, uh, you know, 10 000 last year, I think you said the year, there was 3 000 the year before, something like that.
Speaker 1:Like with all these papers being retracted and with the push to have all these graduate students produce papers, um, and, and a lot of professions pushing to be more scientific I mean, even in the massage profession in north america they're pushing, uh, pushing in that direction quite a bit more to try to get it to be even more professional or scientific, I guess.
Speaker 1:I guess my question would be have we hit this point culturally where research is almost kind of too easy. Not that it's easy to do by any means, nor inexpensive, but it's almost too easy to lean on one random control trial or on one case study and say, see, research says XYZ, therefore, everybody's doing research. I'm thinking about a very poor paper that was done by a company talking about copper peptides on this patch that you put on your body, and the paper was I mean, I think the p-value for statistical influence was 0.0000002. And they said see, it's statistically significant, when that's absolutely not, and questions like that. So is it something where research has become just too easy to lean on as a justification of a statement or of a fact and that too many people are being asked to do research in order to justify either their profession, their intelligence or their academic value, or their finances, their salary, essentially?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a very tricky one, troy, and you know, sitting in an academic position myself, I have such mixed feelings about the push to do research, because there are two elements to that and again you have to look across the board. Now I'm looking at it on a more global scale. We have many different situations and scenarios. So academic institutions trying to increase research output, because that's your marker, that you're doing well, but then we've also got so we're trying to take more graduate students in and in some cases people are also including research into undergraduate curriculum. So we've got undergraduate students in many areas now being asked to do research as well as part of their program, not at the same level as a graduate student. Then we've got your graduate students and we're trying to increase the number of graduate students, but are we increasing the number of supervisors? Are we increasing the hours a supervisor has to give to the student in terms of, you know, the research that they're doing?
Speaker 2:So sometimes it's not so much what has become easier in my mind and I could be totally wrong here, so I'm just speaking from my perspective. As I've said, what to me has become easier is not so much that you know. Let's just cite one paper and we use this one paper to do the work. Know, let's just cite one paper and we use this one paper to do the work. What has become easier is the circumstances that allow for poor quality work to get out there, to then be published and then make it to a large reader audience to guide their actions. That whole circumstances has changed over the years and it's become easier.
Speaker 1:So because there are so many people trying to publish paper, the quality of the papers are being diminished Essentially. The quantity is being increased but the quality is not necessarily being supervised as diligently in the past.
Speaker 2:Right, and then now you've got readers. So if you think of who your end user is now for, whatever comes out right so I'm looking to lose weight, for example and you get onto YouTube or TikTok or whatever other social media platform you're using and the person that you follow and you see them putting out there that you know, oh, do this program. You get results in six weeks and they talk about you know research and science showing this, but then the end user of you know the product itself. You're not trained in. I need to read all these other things and I need to gauge responses from different areas and I need to compare and contrast. That's not yourest voice out there. Their work is then seen as hey, this is work that we probably should be following and using.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you used a great example of weight loss and I use it a lot with athleticism because people will say, oh, they're training for something they'll use. Oftentimes, I'll hear people talk about using vo2 markers for the training and I go well, have you had your vo2 checked? Do you get it checked? Do you do you know how to the stress tests and all that, and a lot of them don't do that, and I go well, then why are you training using vo2 markers? Because you you're not doing it accurately and I think that's a good example. They follow a lot of the wisdom that is online but don't necessarily have the time, energy or resources to gather all the information to make what they're reading valuable and contextualize it into a global scale of their health. I think that's really. I think that's really tricky.
Speaker 2:It's a tricky one, and they're trusting that the wisdom that they're following has done the due diligence. So they've done the work and they've, you know, reviewed, and what they're giving them is legit stuff. But then that's not always the case, and I would actually go further and say it's very rare.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would actually say it's rarely the case.
Speaker 2:There you go, there you go, there you go.
Speaker 1:So then, before we wrap up, I wanted to ask you about what people, because a lot of my listeners are healthcare professionals and interested in science and research, and a lot of the stuff I teach has a lot of research in it, and so what are some of the resources? I know that there's a few resources that you spoke about. One of the ones that I use is Retraction Watch, but what are some of the other research or resources people can use to find out? Is this paper something that one is under review, retracted, that I shouldn't be citing anymore, or that I should go back and correct my citations?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Retraction Watch is one of the most heavily used one as well, which I use, but there's also situations like you might see, for example, that the paper is indicating that they've been funded and they're listed on their sites. So, for example, if it's research that has been cited that you know it's been funded by the National Institute of Health, you can go onto their database and you can check to see you know if this is in fact funded research by putting in the reference numbers that they give, so anything that's been cited as funded research and they give you a grant number. You can check those on the databases for the funding agencies, because most of them, if not all, are listed and available at the public can see that this grant, this is sanctioned funded research, that this grant, this is sanctioned funded research. So that's the other area that I use in terms of, you know, looking to see if something's legit or not, and retraction watch. I mean those are my heavily used methods.
Speaker 2:The other thing, though, is as a reader. If you're looking at things in your area, you know your area as well. So you know looking very carefully when you're reading, read carefully to ensure are you picking up other kinds of anomalies that would make sense to you. So, for example, if you are a researcher who is doing work with cell lines and you're seeing, you know, something listed and it's like huh, does this exist? You can then go and search to see does this truly exist and you can detect that you know, but this is not true Chemicals, reagents being named wrong in terms of the work. Look for things like that, the websites, just double checking the websites themselves to see if it exists. Or are you seeing that it's permanently under construction and looking in bibliographic databases? So you run the references in a database and then you're not seeing it showing up in these? You know reputable databases, your Medline, you know, etc.
Speaker 1:PubMed things like that.
Speaker 2:PubMed yeah.
Speaker 1:And one of the other ones that I was wondering about was third-party resources. So, like when I want a research paper, I will write the author frequently if it's not publicly available. There are a few organizations I subscribe to so I can get the articles, like the ISP and Elsevier and things like that but if I can't get an article through them, I'll often write the author and honestly, I don't think I've ever been rejected so far. Authors are happy to share their papers, but when you look at third-party pirated research sites like Science Hub or Sci-Hub and things like that, do you find that? Or are you familiar with them enough to know? Do they do a good job of filtering out those retracted papers as well, similar to PubMed and NIH and things like that, who do have these filters to make sure retracted papers aren't still being circulated?
Speaker 2:or, if they are, they have tags on them saying retracted or under review uh, yeah, don't have enough knowledge of those to speak to the level of, um, you know, scrutiny and and what they're doing. Unfortunately not as, yeah, it's one of those it's one of those ones.
Speaker 1:I'm not a fan of the pirated stuff, but a lot of people use them and it's one of those tricky ones.
Speaker 2:I'm not a fan of the pirated stuff, but a lot of people use them and it's something that, because they get used, I want to make sure people think about.
Speaker 1:Maybe they're not being filtered as diligently because they are being pirated, maybe they're not looking to see, oh, are these retracted? And so you might be coming across papers that are available but not necessarily ethical anymore, ethical anymore. Well, thank you so much. I mean this was wonderful. I really hope my listeners enjoy this, because this, for me, is an important subject that people have to pay attention to that I was enraptured by when you presented it and I really enjoyed that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you very much for having me, troy and I really would seriously recommend that anyone who is involved in any form of research.
Speaker 2:If you've never done a course in, you know just basic research, ethics and scientific misconduct. There are, you know, short courses out there that are offered by the funding agencies like the NIH, by the funding agencies like the NIH, who has a short ethics one as well. Just get familiar with it, because life is becoming more and more complicated with regards to research and if you understand some of these concepts that are related to you know scientific misconduct, scientific integrity, on the whole, it makes your life easier as well when you're trying to produce your legit work. So, you know, just being able to write a paper and stay on track with sound science and understanding the ethics side of it. Science and understanding the ethic side of it, it really is important and it's not something that most researchers are exposed to in a structured way At the PhD level, yes, but we also have, like I said, a lot of undergraduate students now doing research as well, many more master's students, and in many parts of the world, they have no exposure to ethics training and scientific integrity.
Speaker 1:So I'd strongly encourage it. Thank you, that's awesome.
Speaker 2:You're welcome, thank you.