Is it bad?:m:

First, welcome to sciforums! :D

And no, it's not bad or good. It's a tool. Like nuclear power, good or bad apply only to what we do with it, not to the technology itself.

I saw a documentary on tv a few days ago that said ..don't remeber his name...the scientists that came up with all these new amazing discoveries in nanotechnology was in fact lying. He had faked reports and results and other scientists were apparently not interested enough to double check so they signed under his reports, which were fake.
So much for scientists! ....:D

So Bebelina who found out his faking? I would put my money on scientists.


:D

you are probably refering to Hendrik Schön. He publsihed 17 papers in 3 years (that is a lot), many of them in 'Science' and 'Nature'.

However, someone noticed that some of the graphs he used to were identical for different data. As you might guess that is impossible. It turned out that he had deleted most of the raw data (or it had never existed), didn't possess the actual samples anymore, and what is even stranger, nobody actually saw him do the actual experiments (although this is usually the most thrilling part of this kind of research). and he didn't really keep his labbook up to date.
They fired him from the Bell labs in New jersey, but strangely enough his co-authors were cleared. Apparently they never bothered to check the data in any of the papers which included their own names. It is of course common practice to fill up the author list with authors, even if they haven't really contributed anything. Scientists need papers to survive. Publish or perish.

Did peer review fail here? Temporarily yes, in the end not really, he got caught in the end.
Is it unethical for authors to have their names on papers of which they don't even check the data...i think so, but i have my name on one paper too, which i never even got to read until it was already accepted.