Will researchers encourage cheating or manipulation? A question of quality, responsibility and epistemology

Who can touch the content and structure of the document itself? Only scientists if and when they know what they are doing. Relying on an editor, a colleague or a translator is cheating from both parts : that of the scientist who does not assume full responsibility for his doing, and from the part of the translator / editor who thinks / pretends he is helping, "serving the scientific community by helping researchers to get published". Sometimes in an honest move, but without too much reflection on the business of doing science, sometimes in a manipulating endeavour. I have seen many lab heads manipulate the work of their colleagues or referees manipulate the content of the texts they had to review, pretending they were polishing the style. The question is clearly of epistemology and quality.

Anything from light proofreading for spelling and grammar …. : this is the kind of "light"service many editing consultants and professional translators offer to provide and very often researchers are happy to lay their research to such helpful hands. But the cheating and manipulation may well start right here. From experience I have indeed many questions:

• How can one -even with the best intentions - imagine he can add or edit an "s" to a verb or a noun, thinking it is a spelling mistake? To me it is much more: it has to do with the concept used by the author. Take an example : DNA(réalité insécable) vs DNAs (fragments).
• How can one know the order of "cluster-nouns" when the scientist himself has been negligent ? Change the order, you change the meaning! example ;
• How can one know which tense is the correct one to use when he has not done the research himself, knows nothing of the state of the art and current research questions and hypotheses in the field? I would never imagine changing a present into a past or vice cersa on the account that either the "s" third person is missing or that the author has neglected to look up the past tense of the irregular verb ?

I can multiply the thousands of examples I have encountered and which have instilled doubt in me considering the high stakes - scientific, human, societal etc - science has to address.

"…..To major rewriting of the document with proper formatting as required by individual publishers" : in this wider offer, we can see that scientists very often do not consider the norms and rules produced by their evaluators and journals' editors who generally are scientists themselves (Recommendations by the "Vancouver Group", 1978 ; latest edition 1997). They neglect the most basic rules and leave it to others to do the job for them.

Now dealing with the training of PhD students, the question is very similar: who can teach them how to write, i.e structure, move away from experiments to scientific research
worth publishing, select question formulation, evaluate their own work by confronting it to the literature and formulate hypotheses : ONLY responsible supervisors who will take the time, develop a pedagogy, reflect on the doing of science, what it means to be a scientist and to train new scientists.

My purpose too is "to serve the scientific community" by drawing its attention and that of
all the young people who long to be part of it and study hard and accept the situation of a Postgraduate or Postdoc, to their responsibility and to the challenges facing them :

• Return to the basic quality that may be expected from them by the world of research and most of all by society
• Acquire the skills needed inside and outside academia because the writing of research documents is an important learning and character-building experience.