Lonni Besançon devotes evenings and weekends to rarely appreciated sanitation work. By examining scientific articles after they are published and exposing shortcomings, he has made himself an enemy of both researchers and publishers. It has gone so far that death threats have become commonplace for him.
Lonni Besançon devotes evenings and weekends to rarely appreciated sanitation work. By examining scientific articles after they are published and exposing shortcomings, he has made himself an enemy of both researchers and publishers. It has gone so far that death threats have become commonplace for him.
«The integrity of science is important. It must be credible. Every new study is based on existing studies—if these are wrong, the research continues in the wrong direction, and eventually, the whole thing becomes useless,» says Besançon.
He is an assistant professor at the Department of Science and Technology, where he explores how data can be visualized and used in areas such as health care and the judiciary. But in addition to his own research, he also reviews other researchers’ works after they are published.
This is called academic sleuthing. A job that is both thankless and unpaid.
«No one thanks you for finding something bad. Besides, it’s not part of my contract. No one is employed to check scientific integrity compliance after publication, but this is something I, and others like me, do outside of working hours,» says Besançon.
But what do academic sleuths check? To understand this, we need some background:
The process of getting a scientific article published in a journal can be broken down into a number of steps. Once the study is finished and the data is collected, the researchers write a draft, or manuscript, of an article. That manuscript is then sent to one or more publishers in the hope that it will be accepted by a journal.
For the article to be accepted, it must go through something called a peer review. This is a kind of review that involves other researchers in the field reviewing the article to see that it is of good scientific quality. Hopefully, the article will then be published. It is a process that often takes a long time, in some cases several years.
