Retractions of scientific articles are becoming the most relevant institution for making sense of scientific misconduct. An increasing number of retracted articles, mainly attributed to misconduct, is currently providing a new empirical basis for research about scientific misconduct. This article reviews the relevant research literature from an interdisciplinary context. Furthermore, the results from these studies are contextualized sociologically by asking how scientific misconduct is made visible through retractions. This study treats retractions as an emerging institution that renders scientific misconduct visible, thus, following up on the sociology of deviance and its focus on visibility. The article shows that retractions, by highlighting individual cases of misconduct and general policies for preventing misconduct while obscuring the actors and processes through which retractions are effected, produce highly fragmented patterns of visibility. These patterns resemble the bifurcation in current justice systems.

This paper examines the peer review procedure of a national science funding organization (Swiss National Science Foundation) by means of the three most frequently studied criteria reliability, fairness, and validity. The analyzed data consists of 496 applications for project-based funding from biology and medicine from the year 1998. Overall reliability is found to be fair with an intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.41 with sizeable differences between biology (0.45) and medicine (0.20). Multiple logistic regression models reveal only scientific performance indicators as significant predictors of the funding decision while all potential sources of bias (gender, age, nationality, and academic status of the applicant, requested amount of funding, and institutional surrounding) are non-significant predictors. Bibliometric analysis provides evidence that the decisions of a public funding organization for basic project-based research are in line with the future publication success of applicants. The paper also argues for an expansion of approaches and methodologies in peer review research by increasingly focusing on process rather than outcome and by including a more diverse set of methods e.g. content analysis. Such an expansion will be necessary to advance peer review research beyond the abundantly treated questions of reliability, fairness, and validity..

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Abstract:The primary purpose of this study is to open up the black box of peer review and to increase its transparency, understanding, and credibility. To this end, two arguments will be presented: First, epistemic and social aspects of peer review procedures are inseparable and mutually constitutive. Second, a content analysis of written reviews indicates that certain elements of peer culture from the 17 th century are still active in the scientific community. These arguments are illustrated by a case study on the peer review practices of a national funding institution, the Swiss National Science Foundation. Based on the case study and the two arguments it will be concluded more generally that peer review procedures show a distinctive specificity to the reviewed objects (e.g. papers or proposals), the organisational format (e.g. panels or external reviewers), or the surrounding context (e.g. disciplinary or interdisciplinary). Scientists, administrators, and the public may conclude that appraising peer review procedures should not be done by way of general principals but should be based on concrete factual knowledge on the specific process under discussion.3

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Dieser Beitrag widmet sich der fallvergleichenden Analyse des unübersichtlichen Evaluierungsphänomens Peer Review. Ausgehend von der Vielfalt des Peer Review als Gegenstand der Soziologie des Bewertens wird eine Untersuchungsperspektive entwickelt, die Peer Review als Entscheidungsmechanismus über knappe Ressourcen in seiner Verfahrensförmigkeit und Steuerungsfunktion einer empirisch vergleichenden Verfahrensanalyse zugänglich macht. Der Forschungsansatz kombiniert die praxeologischen (Stefan Hirschauer) und funktionalistischen Verfahrensanalysen (Niklas Luhmann) mit konzeptionellen Ansätzen aus der Soziologie des Bewertens und ermöglicht es, relevante Parameter zur Differenzierung und Typologisierung von Peer Review in der Wissenschaft zu bestimmen. Anhand dessen werden spezifische Tätigkeiten herausgearbeitet, die als elementare Bestandteile von Peer-Review-Verfahren identifizierbar sind. Unterschiedliche Peer-Review-Prozesse lassen sich damit anhand ihres Komplexitätsgrades bestimmen und im Spannungsverhältnis von Selbst- und Fremdsteuerung als Evaluationspolitik verorten.

The Lottery in Babylon' is the title of a vivid dystopian short story by Jorge Luis Borges. It envisions a society in which every individual's destiny is determined and changed every 60 days by a lottery that is 'secret, free of charge, and open to all' (Borges 1991 [1941], 103). The introduction of this lottery by 'the Company' has turned Babylonians into a speculative people wholly consumed by an 'infinite game of chance'. It is easy to read this story as a parable to how we deal with the most existential questions: Are we here because of destiny or because of a historical accident? Am I here because I was lucky or because I deserve it? As anthropologists and sociologists have stressed time and again, every culture begins with an explanation for the contingency of its existence and, thus, with (religious) answers to these questions. This is nowhere more apparent than in the culture that we scientists have built over the last 350 years. We see the world as ruled by universal laws of nature and whenever this view is called into question, we tirelessly produce new arguments and data, to leave as little to chance as possible in our explanations. 'God does not play dice' was Einstein's reaction to quantum mechanics. Science is supposed to be open to all, and, despite the infamous reviewer 2, we hold the deep-seated view that those among us who receive prestigious prizes and the most citations must deservedly be primi inter pares. As a scientist, it is difficult to not hold such a meritocratic view. Believing that success in science were only about luck or privilege, is discouraging and, thus, not just a bad motivator. It will also lead to colleagues labeling you as a fatalist and, consequentially, a morally unfit scientist. Should you believe that successful scientists have, for the most part, been lucky, you would best keep this to yourself. Explaining your own success by luck, however, is unproblematic. It will make you seem humble, or it will at least make your success more tolerable for your colleagues (Loveday 2018). In light of the steep hierarchies and the highly skewed distribution of recognition (citation numbers are as unevenly distributed as music downloads or movie revenues), a culturally supported belief in a scientific meritocracy is what keeps the peace and motivation up among scientists. Enter: The Lottery. Funding organizations are currently introducing lotteries to science. Not 'The Company', but the Health Research Council of New Zealand and the Volkswagen Foundation in Germany have started using lotteries in two of their funding programs.

At first sight the fields of magic and science do not have much of an overlap. This notion however is completely untrue for the fairly long period between 1860 and 1930. A surprisingly high number of scientists and inventors of this time were fascinated by spiritualism and believed in the existence of paranormal forces. Marie Curie for example regarded mediumistic séances as "scientific experiments" and thought it possible to discover in spiritualism the source of an unknown energy that would reveal the secret of radioactivity. Thomas Ava Edison for his part announced an extension to his phonograph in 1921 that would extract thoughts and feelings from dead bodies in order to store and play them back. He claimed that this was possible due the existence of "life units" -tiny energy particles that are the scientifically proved equivalent to the human soul Away from ideological judgment these examples illuminate an interesting crossover between the utopian vision of a boundless technology that helps to reveal even more mysteries of the immaterial world and an anti-modernist thought-space that is filled and nourished by ghost stories, an animistic world outlook and a dazzling array of esoteric philosophies. In this context the praxis of the commercial magical show plays a very interesting and intermediate roll that connects and correlates these two assumed opposite spheres.