Impact Factor: a must read for every scientist!

Tuesday, 06 April 2010 15:52

'Science can be pretty boring, most of the time nothing really happens...you work like an idiot, waiting till you get your results and hoping they will be pioneering, revolutionary and worthwhile waiting...'. I bet this thought crossed your mind once or twice. However, sometimes science is everything but boring!! I just read the Dutch novel written by Paul Brand called 'Impact Factor'. It's an exciting thriller describing the fraud and crime within the field of scientific research in medical sciences...I was amazed!!

Although it's fiction, some of the things described in this book made me think about the integrity and the quality of the scientific research. How often does it occur that people are not quite honest about their data? How often do scientists try to make their data look better than it actually does? And how often do we find out afterwards that this really occured? Every now and then few extreme cases hit the news (like the Korean 'cloning-master') or the Vranken-case in the Netherlands...but what about the rest?

Apparently almost 10 percent of the scientists is not completely honest about their data...what can we do to improve the quality of the scientific research? How can we reduce the number of fraud papers? Probably, in the future most of the journals will require our raw data along with the submission of our article...