Back in the halcyon days of May 2021(!), I wrote a bit about Martin Enserink’s article on what appeared to be the case of a researcher making up data that favoured the cause of climate alarm.

This blog was initially intended to be a mere comment under that blog, by way of an update. However, there was too much to put in a single comment, so here we are.

The researcher who had been accused of cutting’n’pasting data was Danielle Dixson, by then an associate professor at the University of Delaware. The “work” had been done much earlier at James Cook University, and spawned a series of papers on the effect of acidification and other chemical changes on fish behaviour. Under conditions of acidification (such as might occur, say, if the CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere rose noticeably, if you carried on driving your diesel SUV) the poor old clownfish were just going to lose their marbles, squirt out into the open sea and get swallowed whole by a reef shark. Or something. In 2012 Scientific American reported the findings as,

“Ocean Acidification Can Mess with a Fish’s Mind”

Researchers are not sure what is causing the peculiar behaviors…

[Wait. I think I know the reason! Me! Is it because the peculiar behaviours never happened?]

Of course, with striking “worse than we thought” results, Dixson’s star rocketed into the firmament, and in 2015 she went to the White House to brief the staff on her “findings.”

A bunch of actual scientists tried to replicate the results, by actually doing the work that the earlier “researchers” had claimed to have done, and found nothing. They published their results in 2020, and then, convinced the original studies were fraudulent (by implication, though I don’t suppose they used that word), they asked various funding bodies to investigate 22 papers.

They also provided testimony from former members of the Dixson and Munday labs, some of whom monitored Dixson’s activities and concluded she made up data.

Enserink, 2021

Initially, the wagons were circled. James Cook University “investigated” and then dismissed the allegations.

Dixson denies making up data as well. “I fully stand by all the data I’ve collected, I stand by the papers that we’ve published,” she told Science in a February interview. “The data was collected with integrity. I mean, I preach that to my students.”

Enserink, ditto

That statement did not age well…

Next, in 2022, Science issued an expression of concern over one of the papers, Dixson, Abrego & Hay 2014. That paper was retracted in August, 2022. The retraction notice reads:

On 22 August 2014, Science published the Research Article “Chemically mediated behavior of recruiting corals and fishes: A tipping point that may limit reef recovery” by D. L. Dixson et al. On 17 February, we published an Editorial Expression of Concern after being made aware of data manipulation accusations pertaining to this paper. In August, the University of Delaware informed us that the data in Figures 1A, 2, 3, and 4 were questioned and that they no longer have confidence in the validity of the data. In agreement with the recommendation of the University of Delaware, Science is retracting the paper.

It followed the results of an investigation by the University of Delaware, which 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.

Enserink, 2022

Next, in February 2023, Proceedings of the Royal Society B declined to retract a Dixson paper. Here’s the intrepid Enserink’s 2023 headline:

“Journal declines to retract fish research paper despite fraud finding”

University of Delaware’s investigation labelled the paper as fabricated. The Royal Society shrugged. However, by June 2023, they cracked, and pulled it.

But a month earlier, in May, 2023 Dixson was able to report that a faculty panel at University of Delaware had ruled in her favour, contradicting the disciplinary committee.

That was as far as I had followed the case. Subsequent events can be set out in short order:

According to Dixson’s wiki page, she was fired by Delaware in 2023 [the link proffered says only that the president planned to fire her four months later, in September 2023].

Then, this month, another retraction, as reported by Retraction Watch. This was probably the most important paper, and perhaps the keystone to the entire edifice. The journal, Ecology Letters, concluded that the data was made up [they actually said “the data provided contained substantial errors, including repeated blocks, missing data, and structural errors”]. The authors, Dixson, Munday & Jones hand-waved about slapdash recording not affecting the main conclusions, but were rebuffed.

And so, for now, and possibly for ever, the tale of fishy science rests.

What have we learnt? Science is invincible, of course. Those who invent data probably thought they would have got the same result anyway, had they been bothered to sit for days watching clownfish choosing between two swimways. [It is somewhat ironic that it would be far simpler to invent messy data that would still be significant and would not set off any BS alarms, than it would be to actually do the work, yet data inventors are just too lazy – at least the ones who get caught are.] Because their inventions mirror their belief in reality, the inventors of data probably have no fear of being contradicted, in the unlikely event that anyone can be bothered to undertake that rarest of studies, the replication effort. That confidence was misplaced here. Scientists are human; science is not. It might lose its way from time to time, but it grinds on, and eventually fraud is pulverised to dust. It might be a decade later, or it might be a millennium later. But facts, in the end, are facts, and fictions… well, they’re made up, aren’t they.

/message ends