We’ve covered Dixson’s and Munday’s work on ocean acidification and fish behavior previously and how it broke down under scrutiny.
And here.
Now the University of Delaware has concluded:
…that marine ecologist Danielle Dixson committed fabrication and falsification in work on fish behavior and coral reefs. The university is seeking the retraction of three of Dixson’s papers and “has notified the appropriate federal agencies,” a spokesperson says.
This article in Science goes into detail.
Finding against Danielle Dixson vindicates whistleblowers who questioned high-profile work on ocean acidification
A major controversy in marine biology took a new twist last week when the University of Delaware (UD) found one of its star scientists guilty of research misconduct.
A major controversy in marine biology took a new twist last week when the University of Delaware (UD) found one of its star scientists guilty of research misconduct. The university has confirmed to Science that it has accepted an investigative panel’s conclusion that marine ecologist Danielle Dixson committed fabrication and falsification in work on fish behavior and coral reefs. The university is seeking the retraction of three of Dixson’s papers and “has notified the appropriate federal agencies,” a spokesperson says.
Among the papers is a study about coral reef recovery that Dixson published in Science in 2014, and for which the journal issued an Editorial Expression of Concern in February. Science—whose News and Editorial teams operate independently of each other—retracted that paper today.
The investigative panel’s draft report, which Science’s News team has seen in heavily redacted form, paints a damning picture of Dixson’s scientific work, which included many studies that appeared to show Earth’s rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels can have dramatic effects on fish behavior and ecology. “The Committee was repeatedly struck by a serial pattern of sloppiness, poor recordkeeping, copying and pasting within spreadsheets, errors within many papers under investigation, and deviation from established animal ethics protocols,” wrote the panel, made up of three UD researchers.
Dixson did not respond to requests for comment. She “adamantly denies any and all allegations of wrongdoing, and will vigorously appeal any finding of research misconduct,” Dixson’s lawyer, Kristina Larsen, wrote in an email to Science. Larsen describes Dixson as a “brilliant, hardworking female scientist” who was “targeted” by a group of scientists who “chose to ‘convict’ Dr. Dixson in the court of public opinion” by sharing their accusations with a Science reporter last year. “Their vigilante approach all but assured Dr. Dixson would never be able to receive a fair and impartial review elsewhere,” Larsen writes. UD says it will not comment on Dixson’s future there.
The accusations against Dixson have sharply divided marine ecologists, with some scientists suggesting the whistleblowers acted out of professional envy or to advance their own careers. The accusations were “stalking and harassment” and “one of the most disgusting and shameful things I‘ve ever seen in science,” John Bruno, a marine ecologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, tweeted in March. (Bruno—who wrote a commentary accompanying Dixson’s 2014 Science paper—did not respond to an email informing him of UD’s findings.)
UD “did a decent investigation. I think it’s one of the first universities that we’ve seen actually do that,” says ecophysiologist Fredrik Jutfelt of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, one of the whistleblowers. “So that’s really encouraging.” But he and others in the group are disappointed that the committee appears to have looked at only seven of the 20 Dixson papers they had flagged as suspicious. They also had hoped UD would release the committee’s final report and detail any sanctions against Dixson. “That is a shame,” Jutfelt says.
https://www.science.org/content/article/star-marine-ecologist-committed-misconduct-university-says#.YvKM57NC73Y.twitter
Read the complete article at Science Mag here.
via Watts Up With That?
August 10, 2022
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