Comments on: Two chemical problems. What is suspicious about these experimental reports? /pmr/2010/05/05/two-chemical-problems-what-is-suspicious-about-these-experimental-reports/ A Scientist and the Web Fri, 07 May 2010 06:27:38 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.3 By: Tobias Kind /pmr/2010/05/05/two-chemical-problems-what-is-suspicious-about-these-experimental-reports/#comment-2280 Fri, 07 May 2010 06:27:38 +0000 http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=2321#comment-2280 Automatons FTW!
Not only is this useful for finding errors after publication,
but actually before any publication. If natural language processing
will be so powerful we don’t need no reviewers anymore.
But maybe angry scientific luddites will rip the RAM out
of the review computer. 🙂
(1)
Anyway the guy, obviously had an 8 hour workday, he came
to work, prepared the experiment for one hour, then needed
to go home and turned the experiment off after 7 hours.
Seems good to me.
(2)
The other person obviously did the experiment on Saturday,
went to vacation for one week, came back on Monday (10 days)
and took the stuff from the window sill and it was rainy
and hot (mixed weather) so writing “room tmperature” and
after 10 days was correct. Seems good to me too.
Well, I also like phrases “a proper amount was added” and
“zinc shots approximately 5-30 grams” where stored under moonlight….
I guess a lot of Bad Science (B.S.) can be cut out if used properly
before publishing a scientific text (including an automated plagiarism check).
Cheers
Tobias

]]> By: pm286 /pmr/2010/05/05/two-chemical-problems-what-is-suspicious-about-these-experimental-reports/#comment-2279 Wed, 05 May 2010 20:17:11 +0000 http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=2321#comment-2279 In reply to Mat Todd.

Well spotted for (1). I checked the BPt of mixtures and this is about 1:1 molar which is somwhere about 75. My guess is that they put it in a sealed tube and didn’t mention that.
Well spotted also for the yield in (2) but there is also something slightly missing. I agree the language is imprecise and we are also picking up typos.

]]> By: Mat Todd /pmr/2010/05/05/two-chemical-problems-what-is-suspicious-about-these-experimental-reports/#comment-2278 Wed, 05 May 2010 19:12:25 +0000 http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=2321#comment-2278 1) Going to be difficult to get a mixture of MeOH and water to 100 degrees. Though I’m not sure what that would actually boil at.
2) It’s not possible to have a reaction that’s “TLC controlled” and there are some other typos, and chloroform/methanol is not a “solution” However it looks like they’ve calculated the yield based on the molecule without the water in the structure, whereas they say it’s a monohydrate.
If you’re automatically flagging errors like this then that’s awesome.

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