Some Sites Relevant to Scientific Fraud

This page contains a few of the internet sites that are relevant to scientific fraud and misconduct.

Organisational Sites about Scientific Fraud

The Skeptic magazine The magazine is dedicated to skeptical debunking of religious faith, paranormal claims and other belief system that skeptics feel are unsupported by good evidence. The group seems to me rather pro-scientific establishment; happy when debunking soft targets but unhappy when their own approaches are applied to science itself.

Office of Research Integrity This is the office of the US government tasked with the investigation of scientific malpractice. It is a large and informative site.

SCIFRAUD A site for the discussion of scientific fraud and the issues that surround it. This is a listserver, you have to enrol but that will bring most serious issues into your mailbox. The standard of discussion used to be high but it has declined in the past couple of years and suffers from a degree of crackpot posting. This link is to their database of past postings.

American Statistics Society Many organisations have codes of professional practice but this must be one of the best around.

Quackwatch This site is focused on medicine not science but there are a lot of bogus scientists out there who are not so much anti-establishment as selling junk. Many are in the medical field.

Ethics A very useful collection of links to documents on the ethics of science produced by Dr. Brian Tissue, Chemistry Department, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg. I think it is no longer maintained.

Chemists Code of Conduct Explains, in detail, how scientists should act during publication and elsewhere. It offers little advice about what victims should do when chemists act otherwise.

Freedom to Care A group that does a great deal to support British whistleblowers. Their work has included strong support for dissident scientists.
CAFAS A group of British academics who, with good reason, are generally disaffected with the moral and intellectual climate of British Higher Education and who help to fight particular cases. I am a member.

 

Individuals' Sites Relevant to Scientific Fraud

Some of these workers are in fields I know little about, so I cannot comment much. If you know the field, take a look and help the author with a critical feedback. In general, I find these sites much more interesting, though more raw, than the institutional ones. To me they seem closer to the nitty-gritty of scientific dissent than do high-minded statements of principle separated from real science and real life. I would like to add to this list but they seem rare; if you have a similar site, or know of one, let me know.

The James Randi Educational Foundation Homepage James Randi is a well known entertainer and magician who is very interested in scientific studies of the paranormal and the fraud that has sometimes gone with them.

Eleanor Storrs Armadillos are susceptible to leprosy, an important discovery that has enabled much new work on the disease. Storrs asserts that this discovery was made by her then stolen. Her site is large, detailed and I find it convincing.

Brian Martin an Australian sociologist of science whose main research interest is the suppression of dissenting voices. An excellent and extremely informative site that should be read by anyone who thinks it doesn't happen.

J. Wyatt Ehrenfels The author does not give his real name and his site is new to me, in late 2003. It is well worth visiting and has an air of quality about it - being large, well written and displaying an eye for design I could never match. He is a psychologist attacking what he sees as the closed shop approach and intellectual dimness of large parts of his field.

Bernard Hiller's site, "Science & Fraud" includes a link to a mirror of Walter Stewart's now vanished site on scientific fraud. He would like to list individual sites but, unfortunately, only offers three at present.

Peter Bowbrick Asserts that descriptions of the causes of famine in Bangladesh in 1943, which have been very influential, are based on systematic misreporting by very senior figures. Economists should read it and criticise it, but it is far from my field.

Dmitriy Yuryev A Russian Physicist/Chemist/Biochemist who now describes himself as an outlaw and has discovered a common misuse of data in Scatchard plots. It seems that Nature corrected one offending paper but without acknowledging Yuryev's role. Yureyev's approach is very interesting and might even enable retrospective plotting of trends in scientific cheating.

Michael Pyshnov is a Russion, now in Canada, who asserts that his work as a research student was stolen by his supervisor in the "University of Toronto fraud". Such thefts seem very common - universities basically deny that students have rights over their own work - so I am inclined to believe him. His site is very angry, very passionate and, I have to say, quite antisemitic. On the other hand, so he informs me, his parents were Jewish, as is his wife.

Donald Forsdyke A Canadian academic. His site contains several excellent papers exposing the quasi-religious, not to say lunatic, faith the scientific establishment professes in anonymous peer review.

Dewey McLean Is an American Professor who holds, probably correctly, that the great extinctions, such as that which wiped out the dinosaurs, were caused by volcanic action rather than by the meteor impact commonly reported in the popular press. His description of the appalling debating tactics that have been used in this field is an instructive, though very extreme, example of a common behaviour pattern.

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Updated 21 August 2005