Should We Celebrate Sleuths?
Maybe instead of telling the world, we just fix the problems?
Are our so-called “sleuths” a liability, at least how we’re deploying them?
Given their penchant for sniffing out problems, you think they might have seen this coming, but even they have been surprised by how their work is being used by anti-science forces, twisted in ways they didn’t suspect would happen.
As a part-time member of their tribe — a sleuth on some papers and definitely on the scientific and scholarly publishing space in general — it feels a little odd to be suggesting that the work of these kindred spirits is somehow not helping things.
But there is a crucial distinction upon which the case hinges — the work of sleuths like Elisabeth Bik and others is too often amplified beyond simple functional observations for people in our trade and professions.
What might be just “this image was wrong, and there may be a pattern, so let’s fix it” takes on a hair-on-fire tone in sentences like “image manipulation is found in hundreds of papers, there may be more, and the entire scientific literature is a hot mess,” which is something else entirely.
And then that message is broadcast as widely as possible by some outlets with incentives to do so.