Peer review, ‘a mighty creator’ and an almighty row - February 15, 2008
A strange scandal over what has been labelled a “baffling failure of peer review” shows no sign of abating, even though the paper that sparked the row has been withdrawn.
Bubbling under in the bloggosphere for a few weeks now, the episode has begun to attract the attention of the traditional press.
Our starting point is a paper in the peer-review journal Protemoics with the slightly odd title, ‘Mitochondria, the missing link between body and soul: Proteomic prospective evidence’. All that’s left on the journal page is the retraction notice but you can read an abstract here.
Staunch atheist PZ Myers found the title alone enough to “make you wonder what the authors, Warda and Han, were smoking”. That was presumably before he noticed the line in the paper that declared, “More logically, the points that show proteomics overlapping between different forms of life are more likely to be interpreted as a reflection of a single common fingerprint initiated by a mighty creator than relying on a single cell that is, in a doubtful way, surprisingly originating all other kinds of life.”
The ‘mighty creation’ bit had people quickly crying ‘Creationists!’ The fact that an apparently creationist paper had slipped though peer review was not going to pass without mention. Other bloggers also got on the case (Shifting Through Science; Genomics, Evolution, and Pseudoscience; Hyphoid Logic; for example).
Another bombshell – the paper has chunks of content very similar to previously published work. Many suspected plagiarism, as set out in this pdf.
One of the authors surfaced, but failed to really deal with the questions.
The Guardian managed to extract a press release from the publishers after some shenanigans (it’s strangely absent from the publisher’s website). “We are fully aware of the considerable interest that the article by Warda and Han has engendered, as well as the controversial viewpoints expressed by the authors,” says Proteomics’ editor-in-chief, Michael Dunn. “Clearly human error has caused a misstep in the normally rigorous peer review process that is standard practice for Proteomics and should prevent such issues arising.”
However the paper was only retracted for “a substantial overlap of the content of this article with previously published articles in other journals.”, not for the strange “mighty creator” line. Peer review isn’t perfect but you’d hope it would catch something like this.
Comments
As far as I know my post was the chronologically first on Warda-Han on January 29.
http://pimm.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/can-you-tell-a-good-article-from-a-bad-article-based-on-the-abstract-and-the-title/
The paper was published online on 23, January and the abstract was available on my Google Reader as a feed on January, 25. I noticed it only 4 days later and instantly wrote a post.
Posted by: Attila Csordas | February 15, 2008 05:42 PM
Yes, Attila has priority. It was brought to my attention a few days earlier, but in a break from my usual habits, I bounced it off a few colleagues at the Panda's Thumb before posting on it.
And it wasn't the title that got my attention - I assumed that was just some odd allusion -- but the part in the abstract where it claimed to have a disproof of the endosymbiotic hypothesis. My atheist antennae didn't start tingling until I started reading deeper.
Posted by: PZ Myers | February 15, 2008 07:20 PM
You're right about shenanegins. Since when does anyone get to decide that a "Press Release" is not available to the press? These people think they're above the law.
The response so far from the journal has been lame. Human error? How about catastrophic failure!
In order for ANY credibility to be restored in this journal, some concrete answers are required, and FAST! Who were the reviewers? Have they been fired from the editorial board? Who was the senior editor responsible? What steps have been taken to make sure this never happens again? The longer this drags on, the more damage it will do to the reputation of this journal and the field of proteomics as a whole. The LAST thing we need is everyone thinking that proteomics is a euphemism for creationism. Thanks Wiley and Dunn... please do the right thing!
Posted by: Guardian Reader | February 15, 2008 08:54 PM
A shocking revelation!Where has the western wisdom gone these days ?But kudos to watchdogs of the spirit that is called science the culprits are caught !
Posted by: arvind mishra | February 16, 2008 03:04 AM
I am sure many PubMed or Proteomics active scientists noticed the weirdness of the paper within hours or days after publishing. They just didn't have a blog or familiar bloggers to send the pitch. It was clearly just the question of time. The real credit goes to the science blogosphere, specially to PZ Myers' commenters who deconstructed the paper to its bare bones. Without the Pharyngula post the alarm would not have reached the threshold level necessary to trigger such a nice case of the web's collective intelligence. That's why (to attract enough attention) I wrote on the story again on February 6 and sent mails to PZ and others, authors and the editor-in-chief of Proteomics included.
Posted by: Attila Csordas | February 17, 2008 06:30 AM
Really distressing revalation! Since 35 years I - now Reviewer of three peer-reviews... - have been devoting myself to CLINICAL researches in the field of inherited mithocondrial dysfunction, ended in the discovy of Congenital Acidosic Enzyme-Metabolic Histangiopathy (CAEMH), now accepted by most famous peer reviews all around the world. CAEMH is the conditio sine qua non of the most common and serious diseases: diabetes, ATS, osteoporosis, dyslipidamias and especially CANCER, a.so. In fact all biophysical-semeiotic Constitutions are CAEMH-dependent. Well. I consider this paper on mithocondria one of most fascinating, interesting, and useful among those I recently read.
Surely, the responsability of honest reviewers i really great, particularly when "difficult" topic must be evaluated. In any case, the invited reviewer may give up!
Posted by: Sergio Stagnaro MD | February 17, 2008 09:03 AM
I do not think its fair to attribute the published article to 'western wisdom'.
And if people equate creationism to proteomics, then perhaps they dont know anything about it. People make wild conclusions all the time.
Posted by: Andrew | February 17, 2008 11:47 AM