ABSTRACT
Are personal blogs merely personal diaries online, rehearsals of trivialities of
interest only to their creators, intimate friends, and nosy neighbors? Yes and no.
In some cases, personal blogs have been reconfigured so as to preserve the
immediacy inherent in the genre and the moral purpose inherited from famous
ancestors, like Boswell’s London Journal and The Diary of Anne Frank, works
that shape scattered incidents into meaningful lives. In Ivan Oransky and
Adam Marcus’s Retraction Watch, and Joerg Zwirner’s Abnormal Science,
everyday professional life is encountered, reflected on, and infused with moral
purpose. Marcus, Oransky, and Zwirner see themselves as successful only to the
extent that scientific journals openly retract erroneous, plagiarized, or fraudulent
articles and at the same time tell the scientific public exactly why they are
doing so. They are conservatives, motivated by the pressing need to keep science
true to an established principle: self-correction. In my view, Retraction Watch and
Abnormal Science succeed in the task they undertake: setting the scientific record
straight by turning their personal blogs into a form of investigative journalism,
reborn on the Web. They do so by activating a set of institutional imperatives,
shared by the scientists and science journals they criticize, norms first articulated
by the sociologist of science, Robert Merton (1968): the expectation that pub-
lished research is original, that it is generated by agreed-upon methods, that it has
survived the skeptical scrutiny of the authors’ peers, that it is free of the influence
of special interests unrelated to science, and that it will be shared freely with
one’s fellows. Because of this shared legacy, the error, plagiarism, and fraud that
Marcus, Oransky, and Zwirner expose and publicize cannot be easily dismissed;
nor can their insistence on open acknowledgement be readily gainsaid.
