Six red flags for suspect work

摘要

A few months ago, I received a desperate e-mail from a postdoctoral scientist. Researchers — including me and my colleagues — had just reported that the majority of preclini-cal cancer papers in top-tier journals could not be reproduced, even by the investigators themselves1'2. The postdoc pleaded with me to identify those papers, saying: "I could be wasting my time working on that project." This was true, but we had signed confidentiality agreements that prevented us from revealing the specific papers. Furthermore, identifying them would not address the broader, systemic issues in research and publishing that create a plethora of papers that don't stand up to scrutiny.