Deans' Weblog: Dalhousie Graduate Studies

The Serendipity Engine

Serendipity
 [from: Serendip, a former name for Ceylon + ITY] A word coined by Horace Walpole, who says (Let. to Mann, of Jan 1754) that he had formed it upon the title of the fairy-tale 'The Three Princes of Serendip', the heroes of which 'were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of'.] The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident.
 —Oxford English Dictionary

 "Did you ever observe to whom the accidents happen? Chance favors only the prepared mind." 
— Louis Pasteur

I've been thinking about serendipity recently. It's a word I've liked since I first stumbled over it: the idea of unexpected discovery enabled by (as Pasteur puts it) the "prepared mind". Three events from last week are bound together in my thoughts by the idea of serendipity. I’ll spin them out in this blog, and hope you'll see why I'm interested in both serendipity and the development of the "serendipity engines".

Here's the first event. I subscribed to a newspaper. Not all that interesting on the face of it, but this is no ordinary newspaper and for the paper and its readers, it's an extraordinary moment. The New York Times has made the decision to make its full electronic edition available only to *digital subscribers*. Here's what was in my email on March 17:

 "Today marks a significant transition for The New York Times as we introduce digital subscriptions. It’s an important step that we hope you will see as an investment in The Times, one that will strengthen our ability to provide high-quality journalism to readers around the world and on any platform. The change will primarily affect those who are heavy consumers of the content on our Web site and on mobile applications."

As Dieter and Sunny know all too well, I'm that heavy consumer. I read The Times over lunch and then too often attempt to amuse/enlighten/annoy my colleagues and friends with items that I find there. (Dieter fights back with Der Spiegel online.) And, of course, content from the NY Times shows up regularly in my FGS blog entries. 

I also subscribe to the paper edition of the Globe and Mail. It struck me last week that I don't read the electronic NY Times in the same way I read the Globe. I read the news section of the Globe from front-to-back, picking and choosing, but reading the entire op-ed section. I then read the Arts section completely, and pick at the Sports and Business sections, again front-to-back. I don't look at the Life section. (Does that mean I don't have one?) 

With the NY Times online, the html page design is cleverly thought out. When I open that "paper", I scan the major headlines at the top first (all in blue), click on links and read a few stories. But then...something completely different happens—and here's where serendipity plays in. Just a little further down the long front page are the headlines of three stories from every major and minor section of the paper, lists of the 10 most emailed, blogged, searched, and viewed stories, and via the "Times Wire" a list of the stories that were most recently updated. This online format dramatically increases the likelihood that I'll stumble onto something unexpected that will grab my eye. It does that without any customization to my particular interests (although the Times does offer that customization). By virtue of its format alone, the electronic New York Times encourages serendipity for its readers. I don't think it's accidental, and it's well worth $3.75 a week.

Here's the second event. Although I'm Acting Associate Dean here at Graduate Studies, I still have a day job in the School of Biomedical Engineering. (My musician buddies keep insisting that I keep my day job. Maybe I'm misunderstanding them...) At present, I'm teaching a graduate/undergraduate course called "Biomechanics in Physiology and Surgical Implant Design". As part of that course, each student writes a scientific review paper on an area of biomechanics that interests them. The yearly crazy quilt of topics provides oodles of fun for end-of-term reading: venus flytraps, power lifting, baseball pitching, body armor, concussion injuries, cochlear implants, insect flight, barefoot running, and so on. I learn a lot and, most of the time, so do they.

Preparing the group to produce this assignment in the form of a scientific review paper is an interesting exercise. Very few senior undergraduate engineering students (or entering BME graduate students for that matter) have a working knowledge of how to (i) search the scientific/engineering literature, and then (ii) turn that information into a cogent, organized, and engaging essay. One of the very best bits of the preparation process comes when my good friend Patrick Ellis spends a couple of hours showing my students how to use the many online search engines available to Dalhousie students (PubMed, Web of Science, Compendex, EMBASE, etc.) and how to turn those search results into electronic documents delivered to their computers. Patrick's the Director of the Kellogg Health Sciences Library and he's been a patient tutor to my biomechanics students over the years: generous with his time and willing to hold their hands when they've needed one-on-one help finding information on arcane topics like, say, the Jesus lizard. 

Patrick's an expert on literature searches. After 35 years in this crazy business of science I fancy myself an expert as well—but Patrick's better. Because he understands the design and implementation of search engines—and the pragmatic choices that publishers and libraries make when cataloging and categorizing information—he anticipates what won't work and quickly structures a query that will give well-focused outcomes. That approach serves the students in my biomechanics course well given the limited time they have and the narrow focus of their papers for my course. In fact that sort of focused searching generally works just great for senior undergraduates—and even for Master's students. But—I think it fundamentally fails to do something else, something quite important for senior PhD students and post-docs.

Here's where the serendipity thing comes in—and bear with me while at take a bit of a side road. The use of electronic search engines makes reading the literature, planning future research projects, and writing grants much faster than it used to be. With the likes of PubMed, e-journals, e-document delivery, reference managers like EndNote, PDF paper catalogers like Papers and so on, I can get a focused literature review done very quickly. My students give me those campfire horror story stares when I describe what it was like back in the '70s when you'd troll for research papers in the big, bound volumes of Index Medicus and the Science Citation Index, and then physically go through the paper journals to find articles—often without so much as an abstract to guide you as to whether the article would be useful. I remember when, writing my first grants, I would just sit down with an entire year's paper copies of the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery looking for something that might be relevant to what I had in mind. The remarkable thing was that, during those Snark hunts, I'd inevitably stumble onto things that I wasn't looking for—but which would turn out to be valuable (maybe not for what I was doing just then, but for another project, another line of inquiry altogether). Nowadays, well-structured queries under modern electronic search engines (the sort of queries that Patrick does beautifully) don't leave much room for serendipity. And the search engines create a kind of focus in the searcher that precludes long, dawdling wanderings through the halls of knowledge where one might stumble upon the next clever thing to do. One searches—one doesn’t browse.

The problem may be that we need different search engines. There has been a growing interest amongst search engine designers at places like Google in providing search tools that anticipate a user's needs by knowing the searcher well, and anticipating needs—even without a search being initiated. The idea is to produce a search tool that helps serendipity happen. Such “serendipity engines” can be location specific, anticipating what you might want to know when you are some place in particular. You might remember the scene in Minority Report when Tom Cruise's character, equipped with surgically replaced eyes, has his (new) retinas scanned on entering a shopping mall. The scan triggers advertising based on the customer profile of the previous owner of the eyes. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google told the TechCrunch Disrupt conference last September  that the "combination of cloud computing and powerful mobile phones will also enable Google to one day tell people things they may want to know as they are walking down the street, without having to type in any search queries". The catch in all this is that users need to somehow reveal the information about themselves that will allow the engine to correctly target information to them. Mr. Schmidt acknowledged that this will require the consent of users if profile information is to be gathered to power the engine. I note that this sort of I-know-what-you-need search tool is quite different than the sort of "Related Citations" sidebar that pops up on PubMed. It finds papers that share some of the MeSH terms in your search but the engine knows nothing about your interests or needs beyond the present search.

This brings me to the third thing that happened last week. I've been working on a new operations manual and a self-study document for Dalhousie's Interdisciplinary PhD Program. That's meant looking a bit at the notion of what the descriptor "interdisciplinary" means in the context of that program—and I suppose in research generally. 

I lucked onto a paper by two UK researchers, Allen Foster and Nigel Ford, entitled "Serendipity and information seeking: an empirical study" [J. Documentation, 59: 321-340, 2003]. Those authors begin by noting the role that serendipity has played in important discoveries in the humanities, in the social sciences, and in the sciences generally. While they accept the general notion of serendipity as arising from "fortuitous accidents", they ask the question (especially in the context of information retrieval) of whether serendipity happens more to some people than to others—and whether it can be helped along. One key to this understanding is to carefully consider what it means to “browse” the literature (what I did with J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg). Foster and Ford suggest that serendipity is a by-product of browsing. They quote J. Rice (Library J, 113: 38-41, 1988) as describing  serendipity from a library perspective as: 

“…sometimes totally fortuitous but …also, perhaps even more often, actually systematic in a convoluted way that is almost impossible to explain. But reference librarians know that what comes under the rubric of serendipity is often an actual, possibly subliminal, search strategy. Stated differently, the potential for serendipity should be directly related to the number of different access points or potential ways of retrieving from a given system.” 

That is, serendipity is related to the number of possible paths by which you might reach the “fortuitous” material. Browsing, serendipity, and access are inter-related and linked to opportunities for the right sort of encounters. Foster and Ford led me to the work of Sandra Erdelez. She identifies a class of searcher/browsers whose members can be called "super-encounterers." According to Erdelez: 

“[Super-encounterers] encounter information on a regular basis and perceive it as an important element of their information acquisition. [They] count on information encountering. This habit is, however, not something they are willing to talk about casually, mainly because information encountering does not adhere to the traditionally prescribed methods for finding information. Some super-encounterers are therefore concerned that they may be ridiculed because they rely on bumping into information as a "method" for information acquisition. Super-encounterers not only encounter information important to them, but also often encounter information relevant to others – friends, relatives and colleagues…It is as if information super-encounterers have channels for information perception that are more sensitive than the channels of other information users. This in turn may make them more sensitive to noticing information in their environment.”

It seems to me that the best investigators I have known, especially in the type of interdisciplinary fields where I work, display features of super-encounterers. They have browsing methods that enable them to—somehow systematically—bumble into and identify disparate pieces of information that are linked in some way that is important to them. Some of this skill may very well be innate, a feature of the way they see the world and categorize and catalog information mentally. I would love to be able to foster this sort of browsing in my students. For other types of Erdelez’s encounterers (encounterers, occasional encounterers, non-encounterers), it seems to me that tools like the front page of the New York Times online, and serendipity engines that hold or accumulate information on the searcher’s interests can act as  tools to encourage serendipity during information searches—even in a searcher who is not naturally inclined to browse. They increase the number of possible paths to fortuitous material. I am also quite certain that our present, focused search engines for academic use discourage serendipity and inhibit the best browsing habits that we might encourage in senior trainees (PhD students, post-docs) who need to develop new and original approaches for their present and future endeavours. Where are the academic serendipity engines?

"When you work seven days a week, fourteen hours a day, you get lucky." (Louis Pasteur)

 —Mike

Quality Mentoring: A Key to Success

Yesterday, NSERC released this year's PGS-M and PGS-D competition results. Departments of successful applicants have already been notified, but results otherwise remain confidential, until the Minister of Industry has made a formal announcement. That said, however, the release of the results to the Deans triggered some heavy number crunching on my part. Without going into details, I want to share a general observation, which corroborates conclusions drawn from recent tri-council scholarship competitions.

More than in previous years, the success of applications was highly clustered. Successful applications mostly came from programs, which stringently adhere to two principles: early, pro-active indentification of talented students and quality mentoring. For the remainder of this blog, let me dwell on the latter.

Effective mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students by faculty members is one of the most important keys to a successful graduate programs because of the one-on-one nature of most research-intensive programs. That said, one would have expected that academic administrators alike recognize that mentoring takes work, experience, patience, and time. Unfortunately, that’s not necessarily the case. To quote from Nature “Of all the activities that take place [in the lab], perhaps the least remarked upon and the least rewarded is that of the mentorship of young researchers." This is why in 2005 Nature launched its annual awards for outstanding scientific mentorship.

The roles of mentors constantly vary. Often simultaneously, mentors need to be:

• Disciplinary guides.
• Skills development consultants, honing

• Oral and written communication skills,
• Team-oriented/interdisciplinary skills,
• Leadership skills,
• Grantsmanship skills.

• Career consultants.

Quality mentoring greatly enhances graduate student success in many aspects. Graduate students who receive effective mentoring demonstrate greater:

• Productivity/Competitiveness: in research activity, conference presentations, pre-doctoral publications, instructional development, scholarship/grant writing, and awards.
• Academic success: in persisting in graduate school, taking a shorter time to earn a degree, and performing better in academic coursework.
• Professional success, with greater chances of securing tenure-track positions if seeking employment in academe or career advancement if seeking leadership positions in other educational settings or economic sectors.

In summary, good mentoring can make the difference between not only recruiting good students but also retaining the student and helping the student to be marketable upon graduation. With good mentoring, a student will be well prepared to enter his or her profession not only with the requisite disciplinary knowledge and skills but also with an understanding of the pathways to success and the self-reliance to embark upon them with confidence.

Becoming a mentor is like making a wise investment; it can be costly at first but the long-term returns are surprisingly large. Being a mentor can be a personally fulfilling experience, one in which the mentor benefits at least as much as the mentee. The rewards continue long after one's student becomes one's colleague, often for a lifetime.

When does quality mentoring start. As early as possible, but latest in the two senior undergraduate years. This not only helps in identifying students dedicated to research early, but also in setting them on the right path to a successful career.

Have a good weekend.

 

Dieter

Teamwork and Contribution

As many of you know, I came to academic life relatively late, i.e., after 25+ years working in the public sector, the private sector, and as an independent management consultant. The initial transition was not smooth, and there are a number of people who say it is incomplete :).

One of the biggest surprises to me was around the related question of teamwork and contribution. Outside the academy in absolutely every working environment there were clear teamwork expectations. Of course there was a predictable variation in capacity and contribution, but a combination of performance review processes and peer pressure tended to keep most people on track.

I've talked to many academics about the issue of differential contributions by people; the general view holds the following things to be true:

• there is often a huge variation in the practices and in performance among academic units, and among individuals ostensibly of the same rank and approximately the same pay;
• local peer pressure at the unit level is more likely than anything institutional;
• "social loafing" - to use the organizational behavior term - seems more acceptable in some academic settings.

I had a look in scholar.google.com for research on the last matter.  A quick review yielded lots of studies on student social loafing, "free riding", "coat-tailing" - pick your noun of choice, but I could not find one studying the phenomenon among faculty members.  The phenomenon surely exists. Does anyone know of any research on the topic?

One of the consequences is that we continue to depend on a group of committed contributors for the many "service" needs we have in Grad Studies, needs such as:

• members for a nominating committee for Faculty Council;
• members for an award committee to adjudicate winners of academic and service awards (many of the volunteers on the committee deserve to be nominated for the service award they are judging!);
• members to serve on the search committee for the next Dean.

This last bullet is especially problematic. The choice of decanal leadership is a serious opportunity and risk too. The inimitable Marsha Scott, the administrator in the office, brightly suggested that the selection of the Dean could be delegated to university staff instead of faculty. She's pretty sure she could round up a panel of volunteers in about 15 minutes, even on a Friday afternoon.

Maybe that's worth considering...

In the meantime, one rule continues to be true. If you want something done, you have to ask a busy person. We in FGS are truly grateful for the busy folks on FGS Council that continue to prove the rule. We can name a dozen people who are carrying the load for a hundred.

 

Sunny

 

 

 

Defending Your Dissertation

The Faculty of Graduate Studies here at Dalhousie University wants to be helpful to students, faculty and staff.  The resource crunch we are dealing with makes extending our helpfulness much more difficult  and it is likely to get a lot worse before it gets any better.  But there are a couple of ways to add value that aren't very expensive. Offering useful advice is one way. Hence the lecture this week.

As someone who has chaired something in the order of 85 PhD defences over the last five years, I've seen a lot of interesting things. My "expertise" is data modelling in a management setting; this does not prepare me well for understanding a PhD presentation in biochemistry, physics, oceanography, and three dozen other domains. What to do when the scientists are have a profound debate about polyubiquitination? 

I took notes. Notes on how effective the oral presentation was.  When the candidate got into trouble. What kind of questions were a problem. What common thoughts were offered during the in camera session. What external examiners had to say publicly and privately about the performance of our students.

You get a lot of notes in the course of 85 defences, enough to provide content for a presentation on "How to Defend Your Dissertation." And a very popular presentation this turned out to be.  There were 52 people in chairs, another 12 seated on other horizontal surfaces, and a further 12 students standing, including a number in the hall. And it was not because Lady Gaga or equivalent showed up to perform either.

We tried something a little different and video recorded the session. We will post this once we get it chopped into small enough piece to actually load, and I will adjust this blog with the URL of the page to access it. In the meantime, I offer a little preview of the content. Everything has to be considered in the context of the expectations of the discipline, whose norms almost always trump anything said below.

What is a good dissertation defence? There are 3 parts:

    Dissertation elements

• contribution to knowledge;
• research as conducted and its outcome;
• overall document quality.

    Presentation elements

• overall understanding of the subject;
• clear evidence the student did the work;
• ability to communicate the core of the work.

    Candidate elements

• appropriate socialization into the tacit norms of the discipline;
• appropriate balance between confidence and modesty

What the institution / supervisor can do to increase the likelihood of success?

• Ensuring the student is ready, really ready.
• Arranging the most appropriate external examiner.
• Conducting an internal defence, with other graduate students as examiners.
• Giving students as many opportunities as possible to present work, internally and externally.
• Helping students publish early and often.
• Building student presentation skills, using a video presentation and one-on-one critiquing.

Advice for students

• Go to a defense, preferably in a related discipline.
• Backup and version control for both the document and the presentation is vital.
• Make sure you know something about the work of the external examiner.
• Know your “so what”?
• Have absolute command of the vocabulary in your dissertation.
• Have command over your (null) hypotheses. 
• Have command over the literature. That means the most recent literature too, not just the seminal article from 1976.
• Have complete command of the data that you collected. 
• Anticipate and prepare for the obvious questions, (since you did the research, you should know what they are).

• Arrive early to arrange the room. Best practice – see the room a couple of days before.
• Dress for a job interview.
• Do not trust the technology – have a Plan B.
• Get the laptop ahead of time, or use your own.
• Load the presentation the day before and make sure it works.
• Do at least one practice session with laptop & projector.
• Turn off the screen saver. The desktop picture. Turn off Skype.
• Bring water.
• Go to the bathroom.
• Bring your own markers for the white board. 
• Edit your work closely.  What does the phrase "edit your work closely" mean? 
• “As you know, I choose one [bibliography] page at random and check every one. I live in hope of finding one that is perfect.”  One examiners unfulfilled dream.
• People who have already published, especially in good ranking journals, almost always have an easier time of it.
• Be clear with symbols, conventions, figures, tables (i.e., having an appropriate legend).
• A word from the Academic Integrity Officer. If the German Defense Minister can’t get away with it, do you feel lucky?
• If you are an ESL person and your maternal tongue has a speaking rate faster than English, speak more slowly.
• Do NOT read the slides.
• Time management - put your watch on the table.
• Be able to defend every assertion whether you do this by…
• Be prepared to defend your methodology, and your analytical framework by …
• If you have statistical analyses, what do the various parameters and tests actually mean?
• Know what you can say and what you can not say based on the evidence, and the methods used.
• Reference comprehensively including testing precedents.  (i.e., precedents for the testing practices you are using).
  Understand the methods of measurement and the units of measurement you refer to in your dissertation and know exactly what they mean. 
• If there are alternative measures, know what they are and what the choices in using one or the other might be.
• You must understand the specifics of your measurement tools.  If you're working in a lab with specific technology you should have some idea of how it works.
• Do not believe any examiner who claims that one of your chapters is simply over his head.
• Beware of simple questions.
• You are not done after the presentation.
• Think for yourself; there is no point in looking into the faces of the examiners for answers. They may not know the answer to the question they are asking.
• Good phrases to remember:

                                    I don’t know.

                                    That’s a good question.

                                    You are right.

This is a very quick rundown of the presentation, without the horror stories of course.  Good luck to all the defenders!

 

Sunny

 

 

The Co-Authors of Fraud

One of the responsibilities I have here at the Faculty of Graduate Studies is the running of doctoral thesis examinations. At Dalhousie, at least, when a student submits a thesis for examination, the members of the Advisory Committee are required to sign off indicating that they’ve carefully read the thesis and are convinced that it is ready for examination. As I was going over one of those forms the other day, I found myself wondering how many committee members have really gone over the thesis in detail: enough to be individually sure that the work is what it appears to be. And beyond that, in the manuscripts that often form part of the thesis, how many of the co-authors there have done the same. I don’t mean to cast unwarranted aspersions, but...

As readers of this blog will know, I’ve long been interested in scientific fraud. The noble ambitions of science and its reliance on the best part of human nature have always seemed to me too ardently credulous. Maybe even a little nuts.

Fraud first touched my own career some 30 years ago. In an earlier blog (“The Dark Night of the Research Soul”, Nov 9, 2010), I wrote about my own temptation to falsify data while I was a PhD student in the early 1980s. Well, that  wasn’t the only interesting encounter I had with fraud back then. 

My first lead-authored research paper was published during those same years in Circulation Research: a very good journal of the American Heart Association. I had sweated blood over the manuscript and, when the first reviews came back from the journal, I was (like all graduate students) devastated at the length and complexity of the criticisms. It turned out that the reviewers’ advice was sound. After a long and ugly job of editing, a much better paper appeared in the journal.

In the middle of the four pages of reviewer criticism, though, one comment puzzled the heck out of me. I had cited a review paper from two authors at Harvard (Darsee and Braunwald) and one of the reviewers had responded with a terse bullet comment:

 “The reference to Darsee may be omitted.”

At the time I had no idea why. Since the reference wasn’t central to my arguments—and there were much more substantial issues to deal with—I just omitted it as suggested and got on with business. Later I learned that John Darsee was at the centre of a spectacular case of research fraud that was being investigated even as I wrote and edited my paper. It's impact was such that it's well-remembered today. In a recent New York Times article (July 7, 2010) on the South Korean stem cell research fraud—and the prevalence of scientific fraud generally—that paper noted: 

 “In the early 1980's, a young cardiology researcher, Dr. John R. Darsee, was found to have fabricated much data for more than 100 papers he wrote while working at Harvard and Emory Universities. His work appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and The American Journal of Cardiology, among other top publications.”

That was a lot of papers in some excellent journals! According to an analysis of the Darsee case by Stewart and Feder (Nature 325: 15 Jan, 1987), Darsee confessed to a single incident of fraud in May 1981 (he was 33 at the time) and this was enough to weave together the threads of suspicion that had trailed behind him over the years. Three committees, at Harvard, NHLBI/NIH, and Emory, were convened to investigate. What emerged was a pattern of falsification that startled the entire biomedical research community in both its scope and its consistency.

Amazingly, Darsee’s misconduct went undetected for 14 years—even though he had 47 co-authors on his fraudulent papers. Some were very high profile researchers like Harvard's Eugene Braunwald, one of the pre-eminent clinical cardiovascular researchers of his generation. 

Stewart and Feder’s detailed analysis suggested systemic reasons why the fraud hadn’t been detected by Darsee’s co-authors and superiors. There was a pattern where most of the co-authors were MDs (without PhDs), many of them young career-builders. Often, too, co-authors had no more than peripheral involvement in the work, perhaps encouraging Darsee and providing grant funding. Some were so-called “honorary” co-authors: a particularly nasty practice that persists today. Raw data weren’t retained after publication, and many data were re-used or misapplied. Worse perhaps, there was a pattern of lapses from generally accepted research standards amongst the co-author group—that is, beyond Darsee himself.  

In responding to Stewart and Feder, Braunwald argued vehemently against the tarring of the coauthors with the crimes of an exposed, fraudulent colleague (also Nature 325: 15 Jan, 1987). He criticized their paper by saying it:

  “repeatedly and unfairly connects Darsee’s fraud at Harvard to his coauthors there through a process of guilt by association. As a result, many of Steward (sic) and Feder’s allegations are misattributions of Darsee’s wrong doing to his coauthors.”

Why re-visit the Darsee case after 30 years? Because nothing has changed.

In January of this year, the British Medical Journal published a set of three remarkable articles by journalist Brian Deer. In those articles (BMJ: Jan 8, 11, and 18), and in the accompanying editorial (Jan 8), Deer and Editors Godlee et al. state unequivocally that one Dr. Andrew Wakefield is a dangerous scientific fraudster who has compromised the safety of many children by discouraging their vaccination against dangerous disorders. 

In a now-infamous 1998 paper in The Lancet (a first-rank British medical journal promoting evidence-based medical practice) , Wakefield and 12 co-authors (!) stated that there was a link between the common childhood vaccination against measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) and the development of a form of autism in children (Lancet 351: 637). The paper was a weak, uncontrolled set of case studies of patients who apparently serially reported to a gastrointestinal clinic. Despite the obvious problems, the Lancet published the study and it took off (in modern parlance it ironically “went viral”). Cited widely and given more credence than it deserved, it became the basis for a widespread, celebrity-fueled refusal by scared parents to have their children vaccinated against MMR—and other diseases.

Flash forward to Feb 22, 2004 when Mr. Deer published an article in the U.K. Sunday Times which discredited both Wakefield and the MMR-autism link. The article suggested that Wakefield had not only misled the Lancet and its readers, but that he had financially benefited by about £55,000 from lawyers involved in lawsuits against the MMR vaccine makers. [N.B. These accusations are much more fully fleshed out—and now to the tune of £435,000—in Deer’s January 11 and 18 articles in the BMJ.] The striking conflict of interest was apparently not revealed to his co-authors. In the January 11 article, Deer writes:

 “Another of Wakefield's 12 co-workers in the study said: "I am very, very angry. I would never have put my name to the study if I had known there was this conflict of interest, and had I not done so it would never have got published.”

Perhaps so, since two of Wakefield’s co-authors were senior clinicians at the Royal Free Hospital and past colleagues of Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet. Brian Deer did, of course, contact The Lancet and an editor’s meeting with him is described in detail in the January 18 BMJ article. According to Deer, after the editors were presented with what should have been convincing evidence of the serious problems with Wakefield’s 1998 paper, they contacted the vice-dean at the Royal Free to launch an internal investigation. As was later shown, that “investigation” was done in large part by co-authors of the paper! It won’t come as any surprise that Wakefield et al. were exonerated in a statement by the editors in The Lancet (363: 820, 2004). Editor Horton wrote:

 “allegations of alleged research misconduct have been answered by clarifications provided by the senior authors of this work . . . We do not judge that there was any intention to conceal information or deceive editors, reviewers, or readers about the ethical justification for this work and the nature of patient referral.”

That wasn’t the end of the matter. Later that year, again in The Lancet (363: 750, 2004), 10 of the 12 co-authors who were either feeling the heat or having fits of conscience issued a partial retraction of the paper. In it they said: 

 “We wish to make it clear that in this paper no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient. However, the possibility of such a link was raised and consequent events have had major implications for public health. In view of this, we consider now is the appropriate time that we should together formally retract the interpretation placed upon these findings in the paper, according to precedent.”

It was more than 3 years later, though, before the General Medical Council of the U.K. finally convened a “Fitness to Practise Panel Hearing” into Wakefield and two of his (retracting) clinician co-authors on the 1998 paper: Drs. John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch. You can read the outcome report from late January 2010 if you have the patience. It's 146 dense pages long. (The panel hearing was the longest inquiry in the GMC’s history at a cost of perhaps $9 million.) 

The Panel found Wakefield guilty of dishonesty “concerning the study’s admissions criteria, its funding by the Legal Aid Board, and his statements about it afterwards”, while only one of the co-accused, “the paper’s senior author Walker-Smith, was found guilty of misconduct”(Godlee et al. editorial). At long last, 12 years after the Wakefield et al. paper’s publication—and it’s lasting damage—The Lancet (375: 445, 2010) retracted the paper, citing the GMC Panel’s report. The grounds for retraction were disappointingly narrow and the journal took no particular blame for what had happened:

 “...the claims in the original paper that children were “consecutively referred” and that investigations were “approved” by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false. Therefore we fully retract this paper from the published record.”

As the Godlee et al. editorial points out, Wakefield has refused to back down and continues to deny that his work was fraudulent. Where was the responsibility of the many co-authors in all this? Again, from Godlee et al.:

 “There are hard lessons for many in this highly damaging saga. Firstly, for the coauthors. The GMC panel was clear that it was Wakefield alone who wrote the final version of the paper. His coauthors seem to have been unaware of what he was doing under the cover of their names and reputations. As the GMC panel heard, they did not even know which child was which in the paper’s patient anonymised text and tables. However, this does not absolve them. ..(T)hey all failed in their duties as authors. The satisfaction of adding to one’s CV must never detract from the responsibility to ensure that one has been neither party to nor duped by a fraud. This means that coauthors will have to check the source data of studies more thoroughly than many do at present—or alternatively describe in a contributor’s statement precisely which bits of the source data they take responsibility for.”

[N.B. I’d encourage anyone interested in this case and it’s broader context to have a listen to the interview that Brian Deer had with Michael Enright on CBC’s The Sunday Edition.]

So here’s two spectacular cases, three decades apart, where fraudulent research work was carried out with the cooperation (or at best the willful blindness) of large groups of co-authors. How do we parse out the blame in these circumstances between the principal author, the co-authors and the journals’ reviewers and editors? Or is the mechanics of science itself somehow to blame?

Let me take the latter points first. The New York Times article cited above notes that there are now more than 54,000 scientific journals worldwide, with “foreign” journals doubling to 29,098 in 2005 from 15,300 in 1980. The sheer volume of material to be reviewed, the very low probability of duplicate studies being funded or published, and the cleverness of the fraudsters, together make it difficult in the extreme for journals and their editors to police fraud—even were they equipped to do so. Journals and even highly respectable funding bodies like NSERC and CIHR have to rely on the author’s home institution to investigate potential malfeasance by authors or researchers. As we have seen in the Wakefield case, the self-interest of institutions makes such investigations blunt tools.

That said, as I noted in my earlier blog, eventually even the cleverest serial scientific fraudsters get caught out by the obvious brashness and contempt of their sociopathic personalities—almost never by independent investigations. As the example that proves the rule, Brian Deer's exposé is a rare bird indeed. It is a lesson in wisdom that, while he could discredit Wakefield, Deer couldn’t make him go away. Martin Tobin describes this sort of hollow victory in his editorial “The Role of the Journal in a Scientific Controversy” (Am J Resp Crit Care Med 168: 511, 2003):

 “Science has no official machinery for closing a controversy...Proponents of a minority view are not expected to recant in public, and they can still advance their views, as did Linus Pauling (1901–1994) on vitamin C...Discredited claims are not killed-off. They simply fade away. The final sanction of the scientific community is the sanction of the skeptic: the less believable side of an argument is ignored.”

The question of the role of co-authors is thornier and more revealing of the wobbly legs upon which scientific practice (not science the method) stands. R. Grant Steen very recently published a fascinating study entitled “Retractions in the Scientific Literature: Do Authors Deliberately Commit Research Fraud?” (J Med Ethics 37: 113, 2011). He cleverly looked at all 788 English language research papers retracted from the PubMed database of 6000 journals between 2000 and 2010, extracting and analyzing instances of fraud and innocent error.

Here’s what he found. First, it's interesting that the ISI journal impact factor was higher for papers retracted for fraud than for those retracted for errors. Then, in a beautiful summary from the paper’s abstract:

“Roughly 53% of fraudulent papers were written by a first author who had written other retracted papers (‘repeat offender’), whereas only 18% of erroneous papers were written by a repeat offender (...p<0.0001). Fraudulent papers had more authors (p<0.001) and were retracted more slowly than erroneous papers (p<0.005)...This study reports evidence consistent with the ‘deliberate fraud’ hypothesis. The results suggest that papers retracted because of data fabrication or falsification represent a calculated effort to deceive. It is inferred that such behaviour is neither naïve, feckless nor inadvertent.”  [My Emphasis}

This is, of course, a study of just those authors who got caught out. Steen points out that it is likely that if an author has one paper retracted for fraud, other retractions would follow and perhaps inflate the connection. However, that plays nicely into the personality issue I brought up earlier. I especially find interesting the data in Steen’s Table 4 where he shows that, amongst the cohort of lead authors with more than one paper retracted, the average number of retractions was 5.6 papers per author. And amongst such lead authors' co-authors, there was an average of 6.6 co-authors who also had more than one paper retracted! Taking to heart the inflation issue above, this means that serial fraudsters likely have serial co-authors along for the ride. Collateral studies suggest that such co-authors are often “distinguished co-authors” and the papers are published in high impact journals with strong editorial practice (Claxton, Mutation Res 589: 17, 2005).

If that’s what really bad co-authors are like, what are the characteristics of good coauthors? The essence in my view lies in a clear, conscious recognition of responsibility to community and to society. In a cogent opinion piece in the Annals of Internal Medicine (99: 266, 1983) that was spurred by the Darsee affair, the Editor wrote:

 “Authorship is a meal ticket. All who have been in the academic world know how academic appointment, advancement, tenure, and the associated economic rewards may hinge on the length, if not the quality, of one's bibliography. So authorship has come to be seen as a right and a reward, the kind of shift in definition that one sees in politics when "need for medical care" is rewritten to read "right to medical care," But authorship as a "right" is how authorship may be seen from the position of the author. From without—as seen by editor and reader— authorship is a responsibility...Authors in science are those who identify themselves as the persons who are making public statements on paper for the scientific community...and are taking responsibility for those statements.”

As I read the list of Advisory Committee members who’ve signed off on doctoral theses, and see their names on papers co-authored by our doctoral candidates, I find myself hoping that they take their responsibilities seriously. But at the risk of quoting President Ronald Reagan, maybe the best approach for all co-authors is: “Trust but verify.” 

P.S. The story goes that after hearing it once too often Mikhail Gorbachev responded, “You repeat that at every meeting.” Reagan apparently answered "I like it."

So do I.

 —Mike