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Uh oh. Many of my papers had gin and tonic as an uncredited co-author. Except not the ones written during winter.

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Unrelated to the topic of this blog, but the reference to gin and tonics reminded me of a former colleague’s critique of the job strain model using a gin and tonic example;-)

It’s a dissertation worth reading. “P-hacking in academic research: a critical review of the job strain model and of the association between night work and breast cancer in women.”

“They clearly state that they compare the job strain group (i.e. high demand and low control) with “all other combinations of demands and control”. As discussed in chapter 4, this is the equivalent of comparing a group drinking Gin Tonic with a mixed group of people drinking either only gin, only tonic water or nothing at all; and we would expect the Gin Tonic group to become more intoxicated, simply because they all consumed gin. They claim that their “approach” is “consistent with” the original theoretical model of job strain; but what does that mean? If we go back to the Gin Tonic example: observing people getting drunk on Gin Tonic is consistent with a theory that an interaction between gin and tonic takes place; but observing people getting drunk on Gin Tonic is hardly evidence of such interaction. Why would they want to fit a model that is only consistent with a theory but not able to provide any evidence for it, in a scientific investigation? Their use of the phrase “consistent with” may be the result of recent criticism pointing out that you cannot test the presence of an interaction with such a composite variable model (Ingre, 2015a); but the question remains: why did they not report the proper interaction model instead, so they could present valid evidence in the report?”

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I know zero about EDX. However, I have a suggestion based on my 30 years of looking for bugs in software. That is, to recognize the cases where I needed confirmation from an expert third party.

EG, while QAing the output from a mass spectrometer, I thought that the listed charge for a peptide was incorrect. I checked several times and felt that I was right. However, since I have no expertise in chemistry, I asked a colleague, a post doc in biochemistry, to confirm the buggy result. She did.

You, of course, _are_ a scientist. However, I still hope that you have asked some people who are experts in EDX to confirm your findings.

Respectfully,

paul

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Asking for a friend.

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At the SG site, one need to register with an active university account, but the comments can be made anonymously. It appears almost all comments at SGs are anonymous. I guess if a person has multiple university accounts (e.g. because they have multiple affiliations), they could create multiple pseudonymous accounts. On PubPeer, I have mostly commented under my full name, but I have used multiple pseudonyms in the past, to report concerns about some litigious authors.

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Its dumbfounding, it speaks to the little literacy and vulnerability of my people in Africa and the weak government policies and regulation when it comes to bioprospecting.

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Do they allow multiple pseudonymous accounts, like “Clare Francis” supposedly has at PubPeer? What would be the reason for either platform to allow that?

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