I Have a Research Support System

On Wednesday, Xu Qiu made an appearance in Wei Xingsi's "Lectures on the Frontiers of Materials Science" course.

After greeting the students, he sat down in a corner of the classroom, turned on the computer, and continued to write his own article.

There are not many students in this course, only seven people.

The reason is also very simple. "Lectures on Frontiers of Materials Science" is all in English, from the courseware to the lectures are all conducted in English, and it is positioned as a professional elective course.

Even in Shanghai Comprehensive University, very few students will take the initiative to choose elective courses for majors taught in English.

On the one hand, not everyone has a good English foundation. Reading and writing are better, but listening and speaking are the shortcomings of most people. After all, English is not the first official language, and basically only in English classes. Involves listening and speaking in English;

On the other hand, even if you have a good foundation in English, you can still take elective courses taught in Chinese. There is no need to force yourself to increase the difficulty.

Most of the students who choose Wei Xingsi courses are students who plan to study abroad. Taking an all-English course can be regarded as getting used to it in advance.

In addition, Wei Xingsi is shown as a "B+ Unlimited" teacher in the private GPA TOOL, which also attracts a small number of students for him.

In fact, at the beginning, Teacher Wei followed his habit of being given points in the beautiful country, that is, according to his real grades. Later, Wu Feifei persuaded him to go back and chose to do as the Romans do, which became B+ infinite.

Originally, it was not easy for students to choose courses in English. If the scores were not good, students would not come.

Once the number of candidates for a course is less than 3, the course may be forcibly canceled by the school's Academic Affairs Office.

Every teacher has a certain mandatory teaching time requirement every year. If a course is cancelled, a new course needs to be opened. Opening a new course means facing a series of troublesome things such as preparing new courseware.

In the evening, freshmen from the Department of Materials gathered again in classroom 3208 of the third teaching building to listen to the course of "academic standard education" given by the old professor Wang Shaoxian.

Simply put, this course is to popularize science for students what is "academic misconduct" and what is "academic misconduct".

The leaders of the departments were also in attendance, the counselor Luen Zhen, the class monitor was in charge of signing in, and beside Xu Qiu sat the two humming generals Sun Wo and Mo Wenlin.

There is no PPT this time, so Wang Shaoxian holds the speech script and draws a long tone:

"Academic misconduct refers to behaviors that violate academic norms and academic ethics. It is generally used internationally to refer to three types of behaviors: fabricating data, tampering with data, and plagiarism."

"The first is falsification, including falsification of data, information or results, and recording or reporting..."

"Second is tampering, including falsification of scientific research materials, equipment, or processes, or tampering, omission of data or results, so that scientific research records do not accurately reflect research..."

"The last is plagiarism, which consists of stealing another's ideas, methods, results, or writings without adequately explaining the other's contribution..."

"Although there are still some new variants of academic misconduct, such as multiple submissions, embezzlement of academic achievements, and falsification of academic resumes, the most important and worst are the above three."

The students in the audience were drowsy. On the one hand, it was because of Wang Shaoxian's hypnotic tone, and on the other hand, it was also because most of them were freshmen with master's degrees who had just stepped into the road of scientific research. In fact, I probably understand it in my heart.

Therefore, there is more or less disapproval: "How can I intentionally forge, tamper or plagiarize? Impossible, absolutely impossible."

It's not surprising that they have such thoughts, they are still new, and it's not time to test them.

If you have been on the road of scientific research for a while, you may encounter such a situation:

"Xu from a research group surnamed Wei has published N top journals at the AM and NC levels in succession this year..."

"A 25-year-old Cao has already published 5 articles in "Nature"..."

"Mr. Han in the same dormitory won the national award and has 20,000 yuan. I only have a basic school-level second prize, which is only 2,100 yuan..."

At this time, they may change their minds: Why is there such a big gap between people? I can’t even send an SCI to the third zone. Do I need to change the data?

Or is this the case:

The 28-year-old Zhang is already a direct doctoral supervisor, and I am 35 years old, and I can't even be rated as an associate professor...

What should I do, should I change the data?

If the above are all induced by jealousy or greed, then the following situation:

The fourth year of Ph.D. has been postponed for one year, and now there is no article in SCI three districts. If this continues, there will still be no article in the fifth year, and I will be expelled...

In this case, the doctoral student may have been paddling for four years, or he may have worked hard but objectively lacks the ability to produce results;

There may also be bad luck, various accidents, such as extreme cases, with a doctoral supervisor, and the doctoral supervisor has an accident, and then changed four supervisors and four research directions in four years, and they were all halfway done. If you are forced to give up, naturally there will be no results.

Of course, the reason is not important, what is important is how the doctoral student should choose, should he change the data?

If you stand from the perspective of an outsider, you will naturally make a choice without hesitation:

Don't change the data, how can we change the data, we must insist on..., promote..., resist academic misconduct, and maintain the purity of the academic circle...

But what about the parties?

Just imagine, if a Ph.D. can't graduate and is dismissed directly, he will have neither the status of a freshman nor work experience, and it will waste five years, and he will be out of touch with society for more than eight years, and everyone is already 30+. If the direction of research is still similar to "cutting-edge science" such as organic photovoltaics, which cannot be applied in a short time, then basically you can only change careers, and it is difficult to change careers to fields that are too cutting-edge. After reading books for 24 years, there is no competition He may not be as good as an undergraduate in terms of enterprise employment considerations, so he may only be able to engage in low-threshold industries, such as writing web articles...

The most important thing is that at the age of 30, most of the people around have already taken root in Shanghai, the mortgage is about to be paid off, and the baby is already born. When I think about myself, I feel that this is a terrible word...

Most of the time, I am not afraid that I am not doing well, but I am afraid that everyone around me is doing well, but I am not.

There is no harm without comparison.

In this case, if you choose to change the data, the possibility of SCI graduation is still very high.

Wang Shaoxian continued:

"There are also some behaviors that fall between academic integrity and academic misconduct. These gray areas are academic misconduct, such as abusing peer review privileges, harming the interests of research subjects and concealing them, and unethical experiments. , deliberately ignoring the negative results of the research, etc.

"In the academic norms (trial implementation) of our Modu Comprehensive University, we have clearly regulated the performance of improper scientific research behavior."

"For example: improper use of scientific research information, unauthorized publication, disclosure to third parties or personal use of information obtained when reviewing manuscripts, project applications and other documents, unpublished works or research plans of others;"

"failing to truthfully disclose the known flaws, flaws or side effects of the published academic scientific research results;"

"Exaggerating the significance and utility of relevant scholarship; inappropriate use of data."

"In addition, it also includes improper signature and unintentional multiple submissions and repeated publications."

Xu Qiu was full of emotions below: "The scope of this academic misconduct is a bit too wide..."

If we look closely, it is conservatively estimated that at least 30%, or even more than 50% of the researchers have committed academic misconduct.

"Inappropriate use of scientific research information..." This is relatively not a common phenomenon, but there are still many precedents. This is why major research groups prevent undergraduates and joint training students from participating in group meetings.

"Don't disclose truthfully..." This is basically the default unspoken rule of the industry. After one's work is published, one must brag about it, highlighting the advantages and downplaying the disadvantages. This is a routine operation.

For example, the stability of devices in the field of organic photovoltaics is poor, especially in the field of fullerenes. The efficiency tested is basically one-time. If you scan multiple times for a long time, or test it every few days, the efficiency will be at the highest. On the basis of value, the loss is 10-30%, the first day is 10%, and the efficiency is 8% after a few days, which is very normal.

In addition, there are various other disadvantages, including low efficiency, poor stability, inability to coat thick films, spin-coating solvents are not environmentally friendly, and cannot prepare large-scale devices, etc., but most researchers will not discuss them in the article. All these shortcomings are mentioned in the book, even in the introduction part, these shortcomings may only be mentioned in a targeted manner.

This is obviously "untruthful disclosure".

"Exaggerating the significance and function of relevant academic achievements" is similar to "not truthfully disclosing...", and it can be regarded as the unspoken rule of the industry.

Most scientific research directions have little application value in a short period of time, but if you look through the literature and look at other people's prospects, you will feel that this field is about to take off.

Taking organic photovoltaics as an example, many literatures will mention in the introduction part "one of the advantages of organic photovoltaics is that it is cheap...".

But in fact, apart from the early donor and acceptor materials such as P3HT and fullerene C-60, the molecular structures of the donor and acceptor materials are becoming more and more complex.

For example, PCE10 and PCE11 have fluorine atoms connected to the molecules, and the synthesis difficulty and cost are much higher than those of P3HT. In addition, the synthesis of the new non-fullerene derivative ITIC also has five or six steps. If it is an IT with better performance -4F, the synthesis steps are close to ten steps, the efficiency has indeed improved, but the cost of materials is also going up.

In the end, the cost of organic photovoltaics may be tens or hundreds of times higher than that of commercial inorganic silicon cells.

Therefore, even if the efficiency and stability problems of organic photovoltaic cells are solved in the future, the cost will still be a mountain that cannot be overcome unless simple and efficient materials can be designed.

This is why a bunch of people are obsessed with the inefficient P3HT system, because its molecular structure is simple enough and the price is cheap enough.

"Inappropriate use of data" is not uncommon.

Most complex data fittings have subjective factors in them, and people will subconsciously or deliberately make the data results more in line with their own conclusions.

For example, when a test curve obtained from TRPL is used for data analysis, is it single-exponential fitting, double-exponential fitting, triple-exponential fitting or quad-exponential fitting?

A common practice is to try one by one, whichever result is conducive to analysis, then use whichever one.

In fact, this can already be regarded as "improper use of data", because it is not objective enough.

Finally, there are many examples of "improper signature".

For example, tutors snatch students' work, send SCI articles, buy and sell SCI articles, and take SCI articles as dowry gifts...

Including the previous postgraduate supervisor who helped the graduate student who had difficulty graduating to write a graduation thesis. In fact, it was also "improper signature", because the result belonged to the supervisor, but the student's name was written.

After talking eloquently, Wang Shaoxian continued: "Here, I am quoting Academician Zhu Bang's point of view: we must vigorously promote responsible scientific research behavior; clearly oppose and crack down on scientific research misconduct, and implement "one-vote veto"; We must start with education and criticize scientific research misconduct.”

Xu Qiu thinks this point of view is quite reasonable. There are still a large number of academic misconduct issues that cannot be cleaned up. If academic misconduct is also given across the board, it is estimated that the academic circle will suddenly be in chaos.

If you are sick, you have to be treated, but you must treat the serious illness first. If you let the cancer die, you must treat the cold first, which is putting the cart before the horse.

Wang Shaoxian went on to quote: "Zhu Bang used two 'unprecedented' to describe the current situation in the academic circle."

"First, with the moral decline of the whole society, eagerness for quick success prevails, and a generation grown up in a certain era has become the leaders and backbone of the academic circle, the scope and severity of scientific research integrity in my country are unprecedented; the second is that with the national With the increase in investment in science and technology and the popularization of the Internet, all sectors of society have paid unprecedented attention to the issue of scientific research integrity."

"Why can there be academic misconduct? Zhu Bang believes that there are both reasons for the bad academic environment and personal responsibility. The bad environment includes: bonuses based on the number of papers; awards based on the impact factor of the journals published by the papers; the number of published papers is related to the graduation or Teachers' promotions and appointments are linked; the unit still neglects to investigate or cover up after the report."

"In terms of personal responsibility, the main cause of academic misconduct is the moral fault of the researchers themselves, because any system design inevitably has loopholes, which cannot be used to justify their mistakes."

Xu Qiu felt that objectively, the unfavorable environment does exist, especially the current situation in the academic circle of "judging superiors by hats and judging strengths by SCI". persist in.

Because if you don't use these quantifiable things to evaluate a person's scientific research results, is it all based on the evaluation of experts, then it will probably be more confusing.

And it will also intensify the development of "students". Whether you can do it or not depends on what I say.

Sometimes, many systems do have problems, but they cannot be replaced objectively, because everything has advantages and disadvantages, and choosing other systems may have more side effects...

"Finally, I hope that all students can stick to their hearts..." Wang Shaoxian finished, and after talking a lot of chicken soup, the counselor Bao Wei answered: "After listening to Professor Wang Shaoxian's two lectures, everyone must have gained a lot, then we Everyone should write a 2,000-word speech about laboratory safety and academic standard education, and hand it in after the National Day."

The students were on the spot...