[HN Gopher] Propagation of mistakes in papers ___________________________________________________________________ Propagation of mistakes in papers Author : greghn Score : 82 points Date : 2022-07-26 16:03 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (databasearchitects.blogspot.com) (TXT) w3m dump (databasearchitects.blogspot.com) | woliveirajr wrote: | > Judging by publication date the source seems to be this paper | (also it did not cite any other papers with the incorrect value, | as far as I know). And everybody else just copied the constant | from somewhere else, propagating it from paper to paper. | | And the Scheuermann and Mauve paper mentions that they picked the | value (0.775351) from the Philippe Flajolet paper that only | mentions it without the extra 5. It's not that it was calculated | again, reviewed or something like that. It was simple picked up | and typed wrong. | sebastianconcpt wrote: | Have you thought what would be needed and what would imply to | have a kind of CI/CD pipeline for unit testing assertions on | papers? | radus wrote: | How do you CI/CD assertions in papers using animal models in | experiments that take months to years? | _Algernon_ wrote: | How would that work? You can't automate testing of papers. | However flawed the process is, this is what peer review is | intended to do. | tinalumfoil wrote: | Reminds me of https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment, | famously described by Feynman, | | > Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment | with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not | to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the | incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to | look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, | after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find | that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next | one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little | bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number | which is higher. | m-watson wrote: | That experiment is also used to teach about selective data | exclusion (potential scientific fraud) as well as a resistance | to challenging an already published value (future experiments | searching to verify Millikan's value rather than show it was | incorrect or off) in a lot of experimental classes. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment | hinkley wrote: | Is that part of the genesis for these conversations about how | perhaps the physical constants of the universe are slowly | changing over time? If you look at the 'right' experiments, the | speed of light slowly crept up over time too, IIRC. When the | movement is all in one direction it's easy to speculate that | maybe that's because the target keeps moving. | antognini wrote: | Another example I recently came across was the early | measurements of the AU using radar. The first two experiments | tried to bounce radar off of Venus had very noisy data, but | they seemed to have a detection that implied a distance that | was pretty close to the earlier measurements that had been done | using parallax. But after the equipment was upgraded, the | detections went away and it turned out that they had just been | noise. Later on an even more powerful radar system was able to | successfully bounce a radar signal off of Venus and it turned | out that the AU was quite a bit different from its earlier | value. | btrettel wrote: | Researchers as a whole need to do more checking. While I agree | that errors like the one identified in the link are rare, they | are not so rare that one shouldn't spend the time looking for | them or assume that everything was done properly. | | I've speculated before that peer review gives researchers false | confidence in published results [0]. A lot of academics seems to | believe that peer review is much better at finding errors than it | actually is. (Here's one example of a conversation I had on HN | that unfortunately was not productive: [1].) To be clear, I think | getting through peer review _is_ evidence that a paper is good, | albeit weak evidence. I would give the fact that a paper is peer | reviewed little weight compared against my own evaluation of the | paper. | | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22290907 | | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31485701 | 11101010001100 wrote: | I just completed a paper review as a reviewer. After I think 4 | rounds, the author finally ran the calculation I had asked for | in the initial review and admitted I was right. We got there in | the end, but I had to sit on my hands. | pcrh wrote: | Peer review can help improve a paper (and it has improved some | of mine); however, contrary to some popular notions, it doesn't | lend "truth" to a paper. | | Peer reviewers are not monitoring how experiments were | conducted, they only have access to a data set that is by | necessity already highly selected from all the work that went | into producing the final manuscript. The authors thus bear | ultimate responsibility. | | When considering published work close to mine, I use my own | judgement of the work, regardless of peer review or which | journal it is published in (for example it may be in a PhD | thesis). For work where I am not so familiar with the | methodologies, I prefer to wait for independent | verification/replication (direct or indirect) from a different | research group, which ideally used different methods. | throwawaymaths wrote: | Well, to be fair, there _is_ the journal "organic syntheses" | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_Syntheses | NegativeLatency wrote: | Somewhere near 100% of my shipped bugs have been peer reviewed | so that makes a lot of sense to me. | michaelmior wrote: | > To be clear, I think getting through peer review is evidence | that a paper is good | | I think this depends on how you define _good_. I 'm sure | there's some variation across fields, but peer review generally | seeks to establish that what is presented in the paper is | plausible, logically consistent, well-presented, meaningful, | and novel. That list is non-exhaustive, but _correct_ is very | hard to establish in a peer review process. In my experience, | it would be rare for a reviewer to repeat calculations in a | paper unless something seems fairly obviously off. | | As a computer scientist, it would be even more rare for a peer | reviewer to examine the code written for a paper (if it is | available) to check for bugs. Point being, there are a lot of | reasons a paper that appears good may be completely incorrect. | Although this is typically for reasons that I as a casual | reader would be even less likely to distinguish than a reviewer | who is particularly knowledgeable about that particular field. | magicalhippo wrote: | I've got a close relative who reviews papers all the time in | their field (not CS). Based on that my take is that if a paper | passes peer review it is a good indicator there's nothing | egregiously wrong with the stuff that's written. | hinkley wrote: | I wonder if there's a trick we're missing related to the dead- | tree history of papers that we could address. | | Namely, paper references always reach back in time. Papers don't | reference papers that were written after they were written. And | if that sounds stupid, bear with me a second. | | We've talked a lot about the reproducibility problem, and that's | part of propagation errors in papers (I didn't prove this value, | I just cribbed it from [5]). If we had a habit of peer reviewing | papers and then adding the peer review retroactively to the | original paper, both for positive and negative results, would we | slow this merry-go-round down a little bit and reduce the head- | rush? Would that help prevent people from citing papers that have | been debunked? | renewiltord wrote: | Solid point. The paper is a delta-mapper: it provides a p --> | [?]p prior to posterior-change. However, it does not tell you | anything about p or p'=p+[?]p itself. To get true value of p^n, | we sum over all [?]p in some way (affected by the path we take | through papers addressing). | | You're modifying the thing so that future [?]p^{i+k} are added | to the delta-mapper so that [?]p is appropriately modified | accounting for that [?]p^{i+k}. It's like path-compression in a | union-find structure. | | It is interesting as a helpful approach but does suffer from | the pingback spam problem, right? And I have a slightly | sneaking suspicion that it is not an accidental oversight in | science that leads to these problems. | jdougan wrote: | A different kind of replication crisis. | bluenose69 wrote: | I don't think this sort of thing is all that unusual. | | I once did a web-of-science search for citations to a | foundational paper in my field. It was published in volume 13 of | a particular journal, and that was listed in a little over 90% of | the citations, but the other citations all listed the journal as | 113. My assumption is that somebody cited it in error, and that | others were basically copying the citation from the bibliography, | rather than going back to the original paper to get the original | metadata. | | Does this mean that about 10% of writers were basically lying | about having read the original paper? Well, maybe. But I fear | that the number might be higher than 10%, because the correct | citations might also have resulted from just copying from a | bibliography. | | I tell this story to my students, in hopes that they will | actually _read_ the original papers. Quite a few take my advice | to heart. Alas, not all do. | marcosdumay wrote: | Or maybe that's because somebody published a bibtex entry for | that paper that got that volume number wrong and those people | just copied and pasted the entry without reading. | RC_ITR wrote: | This is somewhat a criticism of how contemporary citations work | though. | | Primitive science (or even pre-publishing science) doesn't get | cited because humanity figured it out before our current system | was in place. | | It may sound silly, but no one feels the need to cite | Eratosthenes when implying the world is round. | | But many people _do_ feel the need to cite the colorimetric | determination for phosphorus (an SCI top 100 paper) even though | it was published 100 years ago and is generally considered | "base-level science." | | It is certainly an interesting paper to read, but I'm not sure | I need every scientist to read it in order to believe they know | how to do colorimetric analysis. | actuallyalys wrote: | I'd be curious to know whether the percentage of incorrect | citations varies over time. I would guess more recent authors | would be more likely to search by title in Google Scholar or | SciHub (or use the DOI link, if available) rather than actually | use the volume and page number, which could result in more | authors who _did_ read the article nonetheless getting the | volume number wrong. | gwern wrote: | There's a semi-famous line of research by Simkin which uses | citation copying errors as 'radioactive tracers' to estimate | the rate of copying & nonreading, under the logic that (in a | pre-digital age), you could not possibly have repeated the | '113' error if you got an ILL copy or physically consulted | volume '13' (if only because you would be pissed at wasting | your time either checking volume 113 first or verifying there's | no such thing as volume 113): | | https://www.gwern.net/Leprechauns#citogenesis-how-often-do-r... | | Your 10% isn't far off from the 10-30% estimates people get, so | not bad. | hunglee2 wrote: | same thing happens in the news - we assume due diligence has been | satisfactorily (and honestly) conducted by publishers we hold in | high esteem, and happily propagate without scrutiny, so long as | it fits our preferred narrative ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-26 23:00 UTC)