"Renewable Energy" researcher recycles text; ten papers retracted or to be retracted.

[NNadir]

Just for fun:

Renewable energy researcher recycled material, agrees to withdraw 10 papers

Investigations at two institutions at Taiwan determined in 2013 that a renewable energy researcher duplicated his own work; the researcher agreed to pull 10 papers. A total of six have been withdrawn or retracted, two in November, 2015.

Shyi-Min Lu is the corresponding author on the two newly retracted papers, from Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews. The retractions follow investigations at the Industrial Technology Research Institute, where Lu used to work, and National Taiwan University, his former employer. Lu admitted to committing offenses in 10 papers. He was fired from NTU, where he was a research assistant at the university’s Energy Research Center.

First author Falin Chen — also a co-author on the paper duplicated by the retractions — was not aware that the papers bearing his name had been submitted. He told us how he found out: ...

[Red Pest]

1. This is from January 11, 2016; other than it was an extreme example of plagerism and general bad

behavior (submitting manuscripts without having all the co-authors read and approve the manuscript), why post this?

Clearly the bad guy, Shyi-Min Liu, should never be allowed in a lab again, as he could never be trusted to tell the truth. But I guess that is the point. Such behavior can never be tolerated.

My rule in running a research lab for over 40 years is that if anyone in my lab ever lies to me about anything, they will be dismissed. I have only had to impose the rule twice.

[NNadir]

2. It came up on my "Retraction Watch" news feed.

Personally, I find a great deal written about so called "renewable energy" is fraudulent, including the general term used for it, but that's just my opinion, so for whatever reason it came across my desk, I posted it, just for fun. I very much doubt "renewable energy" is sustainable. There's no evidence that it has any capability of addressing climate change.

Thus I was amused.

"Retraction Watch" is an interesting read, and it covers papers published a very long time ago.

I've only had to fire one person for submitting fraudulent data, and that too was a very long time ago. It was my own fault, in the sense that I didn't supervise - better scrutinize - the guy. It was, however, the only time that I fired someone and didn't feel bad about it in any way.

Obviously though, problems occur frequently enough to justify the existence of "Retraction watch."

Sometimes the existence of fraud, real fraud, may lead to over public reactions though and assume that all work connected to a hypothesis is fraudulent.

I wrote about a case along these lines in this space some time ago: Some remarks on purported fraud concerned with αβ oligomer hypothesis in Alzheimer's research.

The other day I was reading through this popular science book about a subject about which I know very little, psychology: How minds change, where it referenced this case: Author retracts study of changing minds on same-sex marriage after colleague admits data were faked

As I read - more "skimmed" than read - the popular science book, the author was claiming that even though the data in this case was faked by a guy named LaCour, who had an offer to join Princeton's faculty rescinded, the type of approach to getting people to change their minds, "deep canvassing" might actually work.

I suppose, but do not know, that wherever a subject is arcane enough, and/or poorly supervised, an opportunity for fraud exists.

Another mechanism is of course, is popular madness, aka "mass hysteria;" fraudulent ideas go mainstream by the ad populum fallacy whereby criticism of the fraud can lead to serious social consequences: In the case of the claim that so called "renewable energy" is sustainable and a realistic approach to address climate change, this seems to be driving the matter. It's too popular to cause people to allow truth to be seen for what it is.

Many tragic outcomes in history have been driven by similar widely held delusional views, most famously to go full Godwin, the events in Germany in the period between 1933 and 1945, and more recently here in the US, Trumpism, and farther back in US history, the notion (still not completely gone) that dermal melanin concentrations above a certain level doomed human beings to be treated as if they were farm animals or worse.