Critical reading of science is the critical need of this time

It is often said that the peer-review process of scientific articles is broken (1). The clamour is more in the field of biology and allied sciences. Retractions of some high profile (2) and not so-high profile papers (3) make a case for introspection on the whole peer review process. It is not that every other article is fraudulent or sloppy.  Even then, individuals doing review of a manuscript must take utmost care to read, analyse, and vet upon the quality, and originality of a work. That's the prerequisite of the culture of peer-reviewed scientific literature.

But we, individual scientists and readers of published articles are supposed to be post-publication critics. Careful reading and analysis of evidences and arguments of a article are essential for further development of science. In fact, peer-review of manuscript by anonymous subject-experts was not always there in scientific publishing. Several path-breaking papers, like Einstein’s paper on relativity (1905), and Watson and Crick’s paper on the structure of DNA (1953), were published without pre-publication peer-review the way we know it today (4). Such papers stood the test of time as hundreds of readers repeatedly read and critically analysed those, post-publication. Are you maintaining that tradition of critical reading? Do we carefully scrutinize published data and the inferences drawn from those? Unfortunately not always. And it seems critical reading of articles are becoming old-fashioned in our culture. The time is over when one used to wait for issues of well-established journals and browse through every page of those, in the library. Number of journals, and the number of articles published every day has increased exponentially. Online publication of journals have increased accessibility, but seer increase in publication volume has reduced our attention span for articles. Though e-mail alerts, tweets, posts in Facebook help to keep track of path-breaking articles, detailed study of a paper, in leisure, is becoming rare. Most of the time, we put a paper under microscope, only when it challenges our own ideas or results or the paper is published by our competing research group. We put efforts to teach our students experimental techniques and data analysis. However, we rarely teach them, systematically, how to read and analyze published articles. Journal clubs organized in many institutions gives opportunity to learn critical reading. However, such occasional events are not enough to systematically inculcate the culture of critical reading of science.

Lack of emphasis on critical reading is evident in different forms. Many a time, a published article is cherry picked, and referred, without thorough evaluation, just because it helps one to substantiate a claim. Such practice is common in articles related to molecules involved in diseases like cancer. Authors often refer published articles to substantiate possible involvement of a gene in various types of cancers without giving adequate thought over the quality of data and inferences in those referred papers. And that cycle goes on from one publication to another. Erroneous use of back-references happens frequently in use of statistical and mathematical tools. Often such published tools are used inappropriately without giving thought about the assumptions and premises mentioned in the original article. Even erroneous work get referred, copied and used repeatedly to make newer claims.

It seems, we have culturally accepted that  anything written in a peer-reviewed journal is khoser. Not just in literature, even in meetings, scholars often avoid putting up arguments and use back-references to justify their work. Back-references are essential as we do not want to reinvent wheel every day. But the culture of surrender to anything written in black-and white goes against the basic tenet of science.

Skepticism is at the heart of science. As Michael Shermer said, " Science begins with the null hypothesis, which assumes that the claim under investigation is not true until demonstrated otherwise" (5). This applies not just to statistical analysis of our data. This should be applied even when we read a published work. One should not accept the conclusions of a work just because it's published. Rather one should read the paper with skepticism, evaluate quality of data, analyze those and dissect the arguments provided by the authors.  The data and logic, presented there, should eventually be able to clear all the apprehensions of the reader.  Therefore, reading has to be dialectic.

Such critical reading enhances post-publication scrutiny. Traditionally, printed journals publish critics of published articles in form of letter to editor. Commenting on published work got easy with the advent of online publication. Various online forums has emerged to for post-publication scrutiny. PubMed Commons is a new addition to that. Critical review and online discussions have helped to discover several fraudulent publication. The recent controversy over STAP cells and subsequent retraction of the paper, is a hand-on example of success of post-publication critical review.

It is true that most of the papers will not get such extensive public scrutiny. Most of us are also not Internet-savvy and will not ever comment in public about a paper. However, we can focus on critical reading of papers in our field, particularly when we use those in our own research. Being individual we can take certain initiative to stop social acceptance and spread of sloppy or fraudulent papers. We can start with some basics:

a) Let us make sure that we refer to a paper in our manuscripts if and only if we have read that paper thoroughly and critically.

b) Let us avoid referring to review articles in our manuscripts and read the original research articles and refer those. This would avoid spread of any mistake or misinterpretation made by the author of the review article. At the same time the original research article would also get scrutinized once again.

c) Let introduce courses on writing and critical reading of scientific literature for  our PhD students. Such course should introduce students to topics like data analysis, logic, and methods of drawing inferences. Through out their schools and colleges, most students learn to follow text books, like blind faith. Learning to question words, written in black-and-white, is not easy for them. We need to encourage them to do so and make it a habit than exception. Let us first make them skeptics, then scientists.

References:

1. Healey, N. The Problem with Peer Review. Laboratory News, March 22, 2013

2. STAP retracted. Nature,511, 5–6, 2014

3. IMTECH: CSIR scientist used faked data in seven papers. The Hindu, July 17, 2014

4. Baldwin, M. Is the Peer Review Process for Scientific Papers Broken? Time, April 29, 2014

5. Shermer M. What Skepticism Reveals about Science. Scientific American, June 15th, 2009

Why iPad is unproductive for me

Ok! Here am back again with anti-iPad ranting. Last time, I wrote at length why I dislike iPad. That was just after I purchased my iPad 2. That's  long back. iPad has got updated, though the main complain on file structure still remains.
Even then, I thought to be rational and unbiased. I need a tablet for my work. Being an experimental biologist, I want to use the tablet for productivity: search and surf web, read books, read papers (pdf files) and comment on those,  take help of my reference management tool Mendeleye, read documents and edit those (MS Word, PowerPoint, Excel), look into my experimental results (all either MS Office files or images). I want all these files neatly synchronized between my office desktop and the tablet. And I should be able to work on these files offline too, as that's my status most of the time when am not in office.

With all these in mind, I was looking into different Android tablets. Am using Android for long and I meet all these productivity requirements with my Android phone (and a Micromax rudimentary tab). But I gave a second thought, to get away from the 'fixation' with Android. So comes iPad mini. It's 7.9 inch screen is good for me. It's light weight but well built. I could comfortably hold it in one hand while working. It's super smooth and battery life is much better than an Android device.

So I looked back to my iPad that has been hijacked by my daughter. And tried to check for my requirements. With last update and recent apps, iOS allows me to do almost all the way I want. But it still suffer from the the problem of file handling. In office, I use MS Windows. My files are organized in folders and subfolders with suitable names.  All the important  folders are autosynced with my Dropbox. I want all these files and folders autosynced in my tablet too. And the autosync should be two way. So, if I do some editing on a file in the tablet, I should get that updated file in my desktop too. And all these without disturbing the folder architecture that I am using in desktop. I already have this in my Android devices. With such synchronization, the Android phone in my pocket is essentially a smaller version of my office desktop. Don't bother about memory, I use a fat external SD card. Unfortunately, I can not achieve these in an iPad (mini). The Dropbox app in iPad does not allow two-way autosync of folders. You can use another app Documents to achieve autosync for Dropbox. But it can work two-way only when you open and edit the file within this app. That means if I comment on a synced PDF file, using Adobe PDF reader in iPad, that will not get autosynced in my Dropbox and my desktop. Android has no such limitations. I keep folder synced in the external SD card. Just like a desktop, I can access those files using any file explorer of my choice and open and edit using suitable app of my choice. Any modifications gets autosynced in all machines through Dropbox. That's call productivity.

Sorry iPad (mini), you are still an entertainment device and I will go for an Android tab.

Making scientific research participatory

Most of the scientific research, through out the world is public funded. That's true for Indian science too. One issue that is repeatedly raised, at various forums, from grant meetings to public discourses, is the public accountability of scientific research. Understanding of accountability has various shades. For managers of our science funding bodies, it's to create some product or service for public use, even if that's reinvention of wheel. It's seer political pressure, in a sense, to show something tangible to our people and political masters. For some others, it's the relevance of the topic of research in social context: should we, in India, focus more on diarrhea or on cancer? In this context, one can even have a class analysis of our research and can even look for the shadows of imperialism. Social accountability is often zoomed in, even with excessive pixelation, to justify research on something related only to one's own region, state or even district.

Going beyond the topic of research, we can look into another issue of accountability. That's to make our research participatory. Whatever be our research topic, we do not regularly communicate that to public. We never include the public in any discourse and debate. And am not talking of individuals. There exist no institutional mandate for a researcher to discuss, explain and debate about his/her work with fellow citizens. There exist no organized forum for that too. We debate over scientific agendas, national priorities and policies, but keep the people out of it. We consider public as a passive agent and believe, that we know every thing, that we know what is good for them,  that our fellow citizens are not capable to understand what we understand!

"We understand  and they do not" : that's what breaks the accountability. 

It is true that most of the people are not aware of basic tenets of modern science. They do not keep track of recent developments in different fields of science. They are not well versed with the specialized languages of superspecialities of science. All these makes it very difficult to communicate scientific research, particularly basic science research, to general public. But common people do have common sense. Can't we rely on that and attempt to break the barriers? Our citizens have limitations because we have not taken any initiative to interact and educate them. Because we do not have any systematic effort to build scientific temperament in our communities. In a sense, we keep them ignorant and then blame them for the same.

Science communication is difficult, even to a fellow scientist. Even then we write articles in science journals and give talks in meetings. And we spend lots of time to improve our skills for better writing and presentation. That's essential for our professional survival. Then why can't we make it mandatory for researchers to discuss science with general public? It will be difficult for most, but eventually they will develop the required skills.

The DST INSPIRE program for school children is very successful. In this program scientists working in the cutting-edge fields deliver lectures to school students on topics that are far beyond their text books. I agree most of these scientists are good orators and they do it voluntarily out of their passion. But it shows that if you want, you can communicate even to a school kid. And surely one will give some extra effort, if such public interactions are attached as a string to our research grants.

Such push can also come from individual research institutes. They can encourage their scientists to give public lectures, and write general science articles in news papers. They can organize regular public lectures, open weekend classes for general public. All these should be done through administrative mandates so that participating in such public programs become part of the job profile.

I know such efforts will be distractions for most of us. And may affect our primary objective, to do research. But beyond the debates accountability, such institutional efforts would eventually help back the research community. It will not only increase scientific temperament among the masses, but in long run it will improve the the public appreciation of scientific research. In a democracy, politicians keeps an ear to the street. And if we can impress the men on the street, our political masters would also be forced to be generous to research.