Dealing with disinformation in Science

I spent most of my academic career in the University of Catania. In 2019 this University was the center of a huge scandal: professors were registered while talking openly about rigging up public competitions for the recruitment of new academic personnel. However, what really impressed the public opinion was the language of these old professors: a gangster slang that is certainly not unknown in Sicilian (high) society…

One thing they taught me at the University of Catania was to never see an obstacle when you can see an opportunity, so I got an interest for disinformation and frauds in Science. This topic boomed after 2005. In this year, the famous (and possibly, controversial) epidemiologist John Ioannidis published a paper on why scientific frauds happen. In the next ten years experimental behavioural science went under a crisis of credibility because, according to a influential study, less then half of psychological experiments are replicated in a second study. This means that more than half of published psychology is, fundamentally, crappy, and that other social and clinical sciences are not in a good shape.

But Science was not left without remedies for the incoming credibility crisis. Scientists get jobs if they have good bibliometric records, so a lot of ambitious scientists already got their interest in informetrics, science of Science, scientometrics… I a way these were quantitative revamps of the initial attempt of Robert Merton for a Sociology of Science founded on quantitative methods and insightful theories.

I think that after 2015 something changed, at least among the new generations of researchers. Healthy skepticism rise and important books were published on this subject. I personally took part in one group of research against scientific misinformation.

I learnt a lot from programs like these. I would try to condensate just some tool that I found to be effective and I would apply in future:

I think each of these method has the potential to be expanded into a whole project in future, but for now it’s ok to stick all of them in one single panel.

If you are interested in this venture, then we should have a talk. My mail is: prgcan[at]gmail.com.