In a new editorial, Eric Warrant lays out a case that well known bee biologist Mandyam Srinivasan was attacked for reasons that turned out to be largely, but not entirely, baseless.
Warrant has several axes to grind, but one is that he thinks that talking about potential scientific misconduct on the Internet is Not How Things Should Be Done.
He takes a bit of a shot a preprints (original emphasis).
A manuscript deposited by its authors on a preprint server has not been peer reviewed by anyone. The claims of any such manuscript – including that of Luebbert and Pachter – are therefore highly preliminary until peer review has ensured they are sound enough to be published. Due to the nature of Luebbert’s and Pachter’s manuscript, peer review by experts in the field of the accusations would have been especially important, particularly when the authors have no history of work in this field.
And social media? Even worse!
The third take-home message is possibly the most important – never resort to a viral internet campaign to expose or bring down a fellow scientist, particularly before you have engaged in a careful, considered and respectful exchange with the person(s) in question and have gathered all the facts.
Before continuing, I want to point out that a “viral campaign” is not something that anyone can create at a whim. It is a description of an unpredictable outcome. Nobody can predict whether a particular post will be widely shared or not. There are many people trying to make their point “go viral” who just end up “screaming at the clouds.”
Let’s set aside the specifics of this case for a moment. We should recognize that many journals are notoriously slow and often poor at dealing with corrections, regardless of whether misconduct is involved, and regardless of the reputation of the individuals involved. Elizabeth Bik frequently notes that when she raises issues to editors about duplicated imagery, she might not get a response and actions can take years.
And many people have pointed out that there are a lot of academics who don’t respond to emails, even for something as innocuous as trying to get data that were promised to be shared “upon reasonable request.”
It would be nice if research communities were small networks of people who generally know and like each other, publishing through journals that are extremely responsive to potential problems of data and misconduct and so on. But that is far from the reality we inhabit now.
The process of correcting scientific error through “approved channels” is so arduous and tedious that it is not reasonable to expect that people will neither post preprints nor talk about it on social media.
Writing some nice emails will not always get the job of correcting the scientific record done.
I will take a counterpoint. This is a case for why researchers should engage social media - at least to some degree. Even as minimally as having an account and checking your mentions. As far as I can tell, we have a situation where a couple of researchers used the online tools effectively, and another who did not. The article notes that the two researchers pointing out issues had large followings on Twitter, but Srinivasan, as far as I can tell, did not. Srinivasan wasn’t outmanoeuvred, he wasn’t even on the field.
References
Warrant EJ. 2025. A plea for academic decency. Journal of Comparative Physiology A: in press. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-025-01745-6
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