Faulty and even fraudulent science circulates in the scientific literature, even after it has been officially retracted. For example, anesthesiologist Scott Reuben had 25 of his papers retracted for fraud but they were still being cited 5 years after they were pulled, potentially harming patients. Stopping the flow of scientific misinformation, and the harm that it causes, is crucial. But how do we do this?
Travis LaCroix, Anders Geil and Cailin O’Connor use mathematical modeling to investigate this question. …
Mathematicians and programmers got into something of a twitter spat this weekend. The dispute started innocently enough, when Freya Holmér tweeted about how mathematical symbols can be translated into computer code.
Holmér started with the following mathematical expression:
Scientists are meant to be honest and truthful, but fraud and other questionable research practices (QRPs) like p-hacking are shockingly common. In a paper forthcoming in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Remco Heesen uses a mathematical model to investigate why scientists sometimes behave badly.
As Heesen and others have shown, what’s known as the credit economy of science is the root of the problem. The credit economy refers to the system in which scientists need to publish their work, preferably in high impact journals, in order to gain prestige so they can get a job, win grants…
