A plea for academic truth.

Abstract

In her book Why trust Science?, Naomi Oreskes examines the question of what it means to say that "science corrects itself", highlighting the importance of the social process of science and specifically the importance of scientists challenging each other in the pursuit of truth. In a recent preprint, a colleague and I did exactly that, reviewing a corpus of work by Australian neuroethologist Mandyam Srinivasan and identifying numerous problems across ten of his papers, including several instances of identical data being reported for different experiments. In a recent editorial, Eric Warrant dismisses our critiques of Srinivasan's work as "sloppiness all of us are capable of", and instead focuses on attacking us, sometimes conflating criticisms of others of Srinivasan's work with ours. Here I review his claims and argue for the importance of truth in the advancement of science.