University of British Columbia

Top comment from u/threads_of_measure:

tl;dr: both the UBC prof mentioned in OP’s article (Dr. Mohammad Arjmand) AND the author of OP’s article (Dr. Leonid Schneider) seem a bit sketchy. The author of OP’s article has been sued multiple times for libel and in at least one case a German court has ruled against him for the German equivalent of libel. To be clear there is a lot of stuff in OP’s article that ranges from concerning to scandalous, but it's presented in a completely scattershot and rather unsubstantiated way that is a giant red flag for me. That being said, personally if I were a prospective student I would wait on publishing/working with Dr. Arjmand until I had first talked to other people in the material engineering field who aren’t his coauthors or have significant personal interest in his reputation about the stuff raised in OP’s article. Research misconduct is surprisingly hard to prove but UBC does investigate this stuff on their own and has kicked multiple faculty out for doing research misconduct before.

I'm not going to comment one way or the other on whether or not Dr Arjmand is guilty of research misconduct because engineering is no where close to my area of STEM and it's a rather weighty accusation to throw around. However, there's a lot of things about the blog post OP linked to that made the allegations as well as that blog in general that seem more than a bit off and just rubbed me the wrong way which I'd like to talk about.

If you want to publicly accuse someone of research misconduct it's usually a good idea to get someone in their field to look over your evidence first instead of just publishing it in your own (obviously not peer reviewed) blog. After talking with people in that field you are more sure that research misconduct has occurred, there are multiple avenues to try and address this such as filing a report with the funding agency (who usually have a dedicated process/team to review research misconduct), the journal the published in if they published in a credible journal, or if they didn’t publish in a legit journal you can write up your findings and get that published in a legit peer reviewed journal.

I would like to compare OPs article to another article alleging research misconduct (fraudulent data) that I think is a good example of what this looks like when it is done right. That example is the following paper, where the authors allege a case of research misconduct around fabricated data where a team of researchers published a paper using fabricated bird genomes: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305197821000417

First things to notice is that in the owl paper the authors have the relevant expertise to judge whether fraud occurred (it is their sub field) and their article is published in a peer reviewed journal where the reviewers would also have the necessary expertise. That is not true for OP’s article. While Dr. Schneider does have a formal academic background and had a research career, he’s a cell biologist not an engineer and describes himself as an “independent scientist” with no current institutional affiliation. The lack of current institutional affiliation is a red flag, but by itself not immediately discrediting, in that you can get away with things as an "independent scientist" that you can't get away with when you are accountable to an institution.

Second thing to note is that in the fake bird genomes paper it is abundantly clear who they are accusing and what they are specifically accusing them of doing – even going out of their way to bring in what research misconduct is understood to be and how their accusation meets that fields definition. With the forbetterscience article we don’t get this focus and clarity, instead the author puts Dr. Arjmand at the center of some sort of research misconduct sh*tshow but the author also brings in other names left and right, sometimes trying to use past allegations of misconduct as evidence against Dr. Arjmand and other times the connection is alluded to but isn’t that clear. At sometimes he’s accusing Arjmand, at other times his coworkers, sometimes he’s railing against the field general, “science” as a whole, various references to “chinese papermills” or “iranian papermills” (Schneider really goes out of his way to mention if someone/something is from a non-western country, particularly China), and so on. There is a similar issue with the “what” aspect of Dr Schneiders accusations are in that he dumps a slurry of things that if true would be a huge deal (making up data/graphs altogether) mixed in with things that are bad but not super bad (messing up the scale bars on graphs) and don’t meet the “deliberate intention to deceive” standard that has be met for something to be actual research misconduct of the fraud variety. To top it off everything is written in this scandalized tone where everything is the most serious, egregious, how could anyone do this tone.

This scattershot approach of guilt-by-association and mixing together of accusations is what got Dr. Schneider in trouble with the German legal system where he was successfully sued by two coworkers of someone who was absolutely guilty of research misconduct, however, those two coworkers weren’t the guilty parties and Schneider accused them of research misconduct anyways without having the evidence to back it up.

Article here: http://blogs.mediapart.fr/seraya-maouche/blog/060117/entretien-avec-leonid-schneider-l-integrite-scientifique-et-la-justice-allemande Google translation here: http://blogs-mediapart-fr.translate.goog/seraya-maouche/blog/060117/entretien-avec-leonid-schneider-l-integrite-scientifique-et-la-justice-allemande?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en

Third set of things to note is the specific length that the authors of the fake bird genomes paper go to show evidence for each of their specifically enumerated accusations. They restate the specific accusation, they show their evidence for making that accusation, and then they discuss why that specific misdeed is bad and what the impacts are for the field. They got everything in the correct form so it is very easy for someone with knowledge of the field to evaluate their specific conclusions. The evaluating the substance part is trickier and I really think unless you have experience with a specific field it can be easy to get things wrong which is why I’m comfortable looking at the bird genomes paper and saying “oh yeah, those are some fake ass genomes” and am not comfortable saying whether or not Dr Arjmand is guilty of research misconduct.

Second to last thing to note is just the overall tone and worldview of the writing. The tone of the forbetterscience.com author comes across as unserious, self-absorbed, bitter towards the profession as a whole, frivolous and rather callous towards all of the people he is talking about which is a huge problem given the heavy weight of the accusations he is leveling. If you are doing something that could end/derail someones career you should take that seriously enough to write clearly and professionally. From reading the machine translated article on the German defamation case, Dr. Schneider also has a bit of a victim complex going on where he is constantly saying things like “it is obvious that Germany views blogging and whistle blowing as such a despicable activity that someone like me is guilty in default”. Because it’s a machine translation I don’t want to put too much weight on how he comes off but the tone seems consistent with the tone on his blog, which is that he is the lone truth teller against a hopelessly corrupt institution and the world is out to get him.

And finally to make a point about his unserious writing when making accusations:

The real problem here is UBC. Ethics for them is something to wipe their bottoms with while they count the money they make with bad science.

As far as bad scientific methods go, there is this thing called cherry picking your data where you sift through all the data and pull out the data points that support your argument and discard (without mentioning or accounting for) all of the data that don't support your argument. Dr. Schneider is cherry picking anecdotes of research misconduct, some well established and others less so, to argue that UBC “wipes it’s bottom” with research ethics. If you want to say that UBC as an entire university is the problem here you need to show me what the standard for research universities is for handling research misconduct and then show me how UBC is not meeting that standard by either not doing what they are supposed to do or going out of their way to cover up for bad actors. This is necessary because the unfortunate reality is that at a sufficiently large institution you will have bad actors that will attempt some kind of misconduct, of the HR type or research ethics variety, and the measure of the institution isn’t that the presence/absence of cases but how the cases are handled. Schneider can’t be bothered to do that, but he doesn’t let that stop him from trashing an entire university.