Submit What is Hot and Get it Accepted
Update September 15, 2013 below
The most frequently visited science integrity watchdogs and post publication discussion sites (Retractionwatch, Science Integrity Digest, PubPeer etc.) have so far missed an honest confession of a young climate scientist who was lucky enough to publish in Nature and writes, in an article published in The Free Press,
I Left Out the Full Truth to get My Climate Change Paper Published.
Patrick T. Brown, who has apparently left his institution in the meantime and even Academia at large over much frustation (which he explains in his The Free Press article) claims that, only because he stuck to a common narrative (about wildfires and climate change), he got his paper published. The Nature article is behind a paywall, so I can’t check it. From its Abstract,
So far, anthropogenic warming has enhanced the aggregate expected frequency of extreme daily wildfire growth by 25% (5–95 range of 14–36%), on average, relative to preindustrial conditions. But for some fires, there was approximately no change, and for other fires, the enhancement has been as much as 461%. When historical fires are subjected to a range of projected end-of-century conditions, the aggregate expected frequency of extreme daily wildfire growth events increases by 59% (5–95 range of 47–71%) under a low SSP1–2.6 emissions scenario compared with an increase of 172% (5–95 range of 156–188%) under a very high SSP5–8.5 emissions scenario, relative to preindustrial conditions.
Brown, P.T., Hanley, H., Mahesh, A. et al. Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06444-3
In his The Free Press article, Brown explains,
The paper I just published—“Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California”—focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior. I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.
This matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.
To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve. (Emphasis added.)
Brown PT. I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published. The Free Press. September 5, 2023.
Another version of this article has been posted by Dr. Brown on his blog.
Nature‘s Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Magdalena Skipper, was not amused when reading Dr. Brown’s confession. Brown quotes her at X (formerly Twitter),
Magdalena Skipper: “We are now carefully considering the implications of his stated actions; certainly, they reflect poor research practices and are not in line with the standards we set for our journal. We have an expectation that researchers use the most appropriate data and methods when assessing these data, and that they include all key facts and results that are relevant to the main conclusions of a paper.”
I’m not sure about Brown’s motivation and can understand Skipper’s wrath. Brown should be fully aware that he just fuels climate change deniers’ or skeptics’ arguments.
One commenter to Brown’s post (formerly Tweat) in X insinuates, “Springer-Nature is a multibillion-dollar, for-profit, private media empire. They have the same incentives as any for-profit media company- NYT or Fox News- to tell the stories that get audience engagement. Scientists have an incentive, in the form of prestige, to play along.”
Well said, honi soit qui mal y pense. But that is certainly not multibillion-dollar for-profit Springer-Nature’s own perception (although I remember having read long time ago, in Nature‘s instructions for potential authors, that a manuscript describing a sort of sensation would have a greater chance for entering the second round of peer review in the journal).
The whole affair about Brown’s paper in Nature could be a healthy alert for new risks of unreliable, unreproducible, even fake science papers.
But why am I writing here about wildfires and climate change? Well, much of the endeavors here on my blog deal with exactly the same problem of largely exaggerating the effects of, for example, treatment of periodontal disease on systemic health. Or, the stunning revelation that periodontitis is actually associated with any chronic disease (“causes everything?”). The Engebretson scandal has shown that our thought leaders (e.g. EiCs of each and every journal in my field) may even destroy the career of a young and promising academic just for daring to publish (not in our hardcore journals but in JAMA) unwelcome results.
10 September 2023 @ 5:14 pm.
Last modified September 10, 2023.
Update September 15, 2023
Leonid Schneider at forbetterscience.com has more. Patrick Brown’s new affiliation is Breakthrough Institute where he his co-director of the climate and energy team. According to Schneider,
Breakthrough Institute was founded in 2007 by Michael Shellenberger, a known climate change denialist and nuclear power shill. Here a crazy conspiracy theory: what if Breakthrough Institute and Brown meant to publish his study as a sting all along, for no other purpose but to go cry conspiracy afterwards? It sure worked, look at the media coverage worldwide.
That’s what I had first in mind.
Periodontology 