{"id":971,"date":"2015-05-29T09:33:53","date_gmt":"2015-05-29T14:33:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/?p=971"},"modified":"2015-05-29T09:45:52","modified_gmt":"2015-05-29T14:45:52","slug":"are-political-scientists-really-this-delicate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2015\/05\/29\/are-political-scientists-really-this-delicate\/","title":{"rendered":"Are political scientists really this delicate?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been reading some\u00a0news coverage <\/a>about the now-retracted<\/a> paper published in\u00a0Science<\/em>, which purported to show that voters’ opinions on same-sex marriage could be altered by conversations with gay canvassers. Some of the things the senior author, Donald Green, said in one article struck me as very odd, from my perspective in the natural sciences. I wonder if the culture in political science is really that different?<\/p>\n

Here’s the first quote<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a very delicate situation when a senior scholar makes a move to look at a junior scholar\u2019s data set,\u201d Dr. Green said. \u201cThis is his career, and if I reach in and grab it, it may seem like I\u2019m boxing him out.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In case you don’t have your scorecard handy, Dr. Green is the senior author of the paper. There’s only one other author, a graduate student named Michael LaCour. LaCour did all of the actual work on the study (or at least he said he did\u00a0— that’s the point of the retraction).<\/p>\n

In physics,\u00a0it’s bizarre to imagine\u00a0that one of the two authors of a paper would feel any delicacy about asking to see the data the paper is based on. If a paper has many authors, then of course not every author will actually look at the data, but with only two authors, it would be extremely strange for one of them not to look. Is it really that different in political science?<\/p>\n

Later in the same article, we find this:<\/p>\n

Money seemed ample for the undertaking \u2014 and Dr. Green did not ask where exactly it was coming from.<\/p>\n

\u201cMichael said he had hundreds of thousands in grant money, and, yes, in retrospect, I could have asked about that,\u201d Dr. Green said. \u201cBut it\u2019s a delicate matter to ask another scholar the exact method through which they\u2019re paying for their work.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Delicacy again! This one is, if anything, even more incomprehensible to me. I can’t imagine having my name on a paper presenting the results of research\u00a0without knowing where the funding came from. For one thing, in my field the funding source is always acknowledged in the paper.<\/p>\n

In both cases, Green is treating this as someone else’s work that he has nothing do do with. If that were true, then asking to see the raw data would be presumptuous (although in my world asking about the funding source would not). But he’s one of only two authors on the paper — it’s (supposedly) his work too.<\/p>\n

It seems to me that there are two possibilities:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The folkways of political scientists are even more different from those of natural scientists than I had realized.<\/li>\n
  2. Green is saying ridiculous things to pretend that he wasn’t grossly negligent.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I don’t know which one is right.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I’ve been reading some\u00a0news coverage about the now-retracted paper published in\u00a0Science, which purported to show that voters’ opinions on same-sex marriage could be altered by conversations with gay canvassers. Some of the things the senior author, Donald Green, said in one article struck me as very odd, from my perspective in the natural sciences. I … Continue reading Are political scientists really this delicate?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}