

Prominent Chinese crystallographer faked data for years. - asciilifeform
http://journals.iucr.org/e/issues/2010/01/00/me0406/index.html

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akamaka
When I was in university, I had a friend who had faked her thesis to get a
Master's degree from a university in Beijing. She admitted to me that she had
simply found an obscure English journal paper and translated it into Chinese.

I wouldn't be surprised if this incident happened in the same atmosphere that
existed at her school: new grad students who have grown accustomed to cheating
on their way through undergrad, and professors who don't check their students'
work.

~~~
jacquesm
So what did you tell your friend ?

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r_u_i
Prominent? Based on what? I've never heard of Jinggangshan University before.
It's not even top 5 in Jiangxi province, where there ain't many universities.

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est
Neither do we (in China)

Google says
[http://www.google.com/search?q=%E4%BA%95%E5%86%88%E5%B1%B1%E...](http://www.google.com/search?q=%E4%BA%95%E5%86%88%E5%B1%B1%E5%A4%A7%E5%AD%A6)

Results 1 - 10 of about 367,000 for 井冈山大学

It's not established until 2003.

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drc1912
This is why I couldn't handle working in the hard sciences. While there are
breakthroughs every day, there is little time for institutions to go through
and verify these findings before they become commonly accepted. It is
astonishingly easy to find examples of people basing years of research off of
faulty premises from other papers who wind up losing those years of research.

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yread
Shit so this is a second one already? these were _Dr H. Zhong and Professor T.
Liu_ and the previous one <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006478> _H.M.
Krishna Murthy_ I start to feel good about going to the industry!

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ghshephard
Anybody else make it to Paragraph Five before they were 100% certain they
weren't talking about a "Crystal Structure" file system? This line, in
particular, had me puzzled: "Testing is routinely carried out using cifs"

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joe_the_user
Anyone have an idea just how significant this is in the scheme of things?

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hga
As a rule this sort of fraud isn't.

If the result is important, people will try to do work based on it and sooner
or later figure out that the foundation is rotten and why.

Most of the time the work isn't important, except to the "scientist" himself
in accumulating published papers ("publish or perish").

This is one of the reasons there's no need to directly double check _every_
scientific conclusion, instead you tend to work on good faith and then
backtrack when things get screwy.

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carbocation
I disagree with your assertion, due to the consequence of a similar series of
faked results first reported on earlier this week.

Essentially, people wasted 2 months of distributed computing time trying to
use the data from a fake crystal structure. Unsurprisingly, these were
unsuccessful. Hundreds of thousands of compute hours were wasted and people
were diverted from making real discoveries because the structure was already
'solved'. This is a huge setback, in my opinion.

~~~
gort
_a similar series of faked results first reported on earlier this week_

Wait, is this a separate scandal? What's with all this bogus crystallography?

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adw
A crystallographic paper is more or less just a structure determination in a
common file format (CIF - the article talks about it). There's very little in
the way of interpretation.

As such, they're way easier to falsify than papers in even really closely
related fields. I've spent plenty of time pulling structures from ICSD and
other databases populated off Acta Cryst; my PhD was in computational
mineralogy - but a raw simulation isn't a publishable result in the way data
hot off the diffractometer can be.

By the way, if anyone here gets the chance to visit a neutron source (eg Isis,
isis.rl.ac.uk), take it! Amaaaazing machines.

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gort
That web address requires www: <http://www.isis.rl.ac.uk/>

