Did Stephen J. Gould Fudge The Data ?

I will assume that most archaeologists have read some works by the late biologist and public intellectual Stephen J. Gould. His works on history and evolution (Gould 1986, 1987, and 1989) are of fundamental importance for those who (like me) consider archaeology as a historical science. History, archaeology, geology, paleontology, astronomical cosmology, and other historical sciences share a number of conceptual problems concerning how we can understand what happened in the distant past. Reading what Gould says about how these problems have been addressed in geology and paleontology helps archaeologists think about our own methods and data. And while I am on this theme, Darwin's book on worms is also of great use here (Darwin wondered why ancient Roman ruins became buried, and did fieldwork to investigate the actions of worms in the burial of old ruins -- great stuff!!), and Gould's introduction to that book is very good also. Don't forget Toulmin and Goodfield (1965), another important work in this area. And by coincidence, today I am wearing a T-shirt with Darwin's portrait, wearing a Che Guevara-style beret, with the logo, "Viva la evolución!"

Anyway, back to Gould possibly fudging data. In Mismeasure of Man, Gould uses Samuel Morton's measurements of human cranial capacity (in the 19th century) as an example of how a scientist's personal bias can influence his work and skew one's results. Morton wanted to show that Causians had the biggest brains, and Gould claims to show that this desire led to subtle "fudging" of Morton's data in favor of his preconceptions. Even since 1981, this has become a "textbook example" of bias in research. Well, now some anthropologists have gone back and remeasured a bunch of Morton's skulls at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and re-analyzed Morton's and Gould's data. They concluded that Morton's results were NOT biased or skewed, but that Gould's analyses were biased, with some aspects evidently made up. Wow, this is disheartening -- Stephen Jay Gould has long been one of my intellectual heroes.

The article is:

Lewis, Jason E., David DeGusta, Marc R. Meyer, Janet M. Monge, Alan E. Mann, and Ralph L. Holloway
    2011    The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias. PLOS Biology 6(6):1-6.  .


The University Museum is using the study to generate publicity. There is information on their website, including a short video about Morton and his collection. The video, narrated by Janet Monge, does not have the best discussion of the collection and the new research, however.

For a nice summary of the new article, see John Hawks' blog.

References:

Darwin, Charles
1985    The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits. Orig. pub. 1881 ed. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Gould, Stephen Jay

1981    The Mismeasure of Man. Norton, New York.

1986    Evolution and the Triumph of Homology, or Why History Matters. American Scientist 74:60-69.

1987    Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

1989    Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. Norton, New York.

Toulmin, Stephen and June Goodfield
1965    The Discovery of Time. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Another Elsevier scandal: Paying for positive reviews

I just saw an article from Inside Higher Education, June 23, 2009, called "Elsevier Won't Pay for Praise." Here is the first paragraph:

"Elsevier officials said Monday that it was a mistake for the publishing giant's marketing division to offer $25 Amazon gift cards to anyone who would give a new textbook five stars in a review posted on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. While those popular Web sites' customer reviews have long been known to be something less than scientific, and prone to manipulation if an author has friends write on behalf of a new work, the idea that a major academic publisher would attempt to pay for good reviews angered some professors who received the e-mail pitch."

This and other recent scandals from commercial presses make one wonder about the trend of the commercialization of scholarship. What if we just had independent scientific journals, posted on the internet, with strict peer review but no commercial sponsorship? Wouldn't that be a good thing for resesarch, for researchers, and for disciplines? It's called Gold Open Access. Does it sound expensive or unlikely? Then perhaps we should think about posting our peer-reviewed published papers in institutional repositories (Green OA). Again, this is a way to make scholarship openly available without relying on commercial publishers, who don't always seem to have the highest ethical standards.

Hoax paper accepted by Benthan Publishers OA journal

One of the new mass-produced Open Access journals published by Benthan Scientific accepted a bogus hoax paper. A Cornell grad student and an editor from the New England Journal of Medicine submitted a paper to the “Open Information Science Journal” titled “Deconstructing Access Points.” The text is complete gibberish; the authors (acting under pseudonyms) listed their affiliation as the “Center for Research in Applied Phrenology” (C.R.A.P. for short).

This hoax is all over the internet; see:

The original exposé by one of the authors, Philip Davis, in the Scholarly Kitchen blog.

An article in New Scientist

Peter Suber's reporting and comments in an entry called "Hoax exposes incompetence or worse at Bentham AO journal..

In subsequent news, the journal's editor resigned, and members of the Editorial Boards of other Bentham OA journals are also resigning.

I have blogged on Bentham's journal "Open Access Anthropology" before: (my post from June 22, 2008). I can't say for sure that this journal would not accept a bogus nonsense paper, but I wonder if it may accept low-quality papers (I say this very tentatively, since none of the papers published so far are close to my own areas of competence).

It is possible that this event may give ammunition to some ignorant people who think that Open Access means lack of peer review. But the problem here is not open access, but rather the LACK or peer review. Peer review is peer review, whatever the kind of journal. Bad peer review exists in respected print journals (I'm sure anyone reading this can think of some examples), and the problems are not open access or peer review in general, but rather poor scholarly implementation of these processes. In many cases, the lapses can be attributed to commercial factors, whether Elsevier's drug-company publicity rags masquerading as scientific journals, or fake fee-generating conferences (see below), or fee-paying OA journals like Bentham's.

One final note on this affair. The authors used SCIgen to produce their bogus paper, a text generator that produces context-free prose in computer science in article format, complete with tables, graphs, and references. In other words, the paper produces gibberish that is gramatically correct and looks like scientific prose at first glance. (the SCIgen page also has information on bogus for-fee conferences that accept all papersfor a large fee, including hoax, nonsense papers; I've been invited to a few of these and you may have been invited also, if you ever received in invitation for a large conference that seemed too broad and strange in its coverage). Now SCIgen will not produce papers that look at all archaeoelogical, but the Post-Modern Text Generator may be closer. When you visit the site, hit the refresh button to generate new meaningless postmodern papers.

I am very tempted here to try an experiment, but I really dont have time for such fun and games right now.....

Elsevier published fake journals

These comments are from Peter Suber's Open Access News, Monday May 11, 2009

"Elsevier confirms 6 fake journals; more comments Bob Grant, Elsevier published 6 fake journals, The Scientist, May 7, 2009.

Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted."

[Elsevier called these pseudo-journals "sponsored article publications." --MES]

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"When is peer review not peer view? (hint: when Merck pays Elsevier), Small Gray Matters, May 8, 2009.

... The bitter irony is that Elsevier, along with the other major academic publishers, have spent the last few years ceaselessly lobbying against the open access movement, on the grounds that open access journals can’t be trusted to maintain the high quality of peer review that the commercial publishers provide. Any guesses as to whether Elsevier will rethink that stance following this fiasco? ..."

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Peter Murray-Rust, Trust in scientific publishing, A Scientist and the Web , May 9, 2009.

... So – as many have noted – here is a commercial company which has campaigned to rubbish Open Access as “junk science” behaving in a manner which totally destroys any trust in their ethics and practice. I have no option but to say that I now cannot absolutely trust the ethical integrity of every piece of information in Elsevier journals.
The need for Open, trusted, scientific data and discourse is now clear. The scientific societies are well placed to help us make the change from closed paper to open trusted semantic digital. They clearly need a business model that transforms the new qualities into a revenue stream. This will not be easy but it has to be tried – there is no alternative. Some of the modern tools will help – the ability to mashup, aggregate, etc. will lead to new forms of high-quality information that will have monetary value. Certified validated information will lead to productivity gains and may be a valuable commodity. ...

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Archaeology, of course, does not have anywhere near the level of commercial incentives that can generate this kind of unethical practice in journal publication. But what about junk edited volumes? Could commercial incentives trump scientific value for some of these? I remain puzzled at the program of evidently non-peer-reviewed edited books put out by Nova Scientific Publishers, but I have no evidence that commercial factors outweigh scientific factors in these books. And most professionals could tell a story or two about cases where journal peer review went out the window for one reason or another. But then we don't have a venue for discussing such activities. I hear from one or two colleagues each year with complaints about unethical or capricious or bizarre behavior by editors, reviewers, publishers, and others. Other than give personal advice, there is not much I can do because I typically lack both definitive data and some kind of official status that might warrant meddling in other peoples' business.