Comment by thyristan

I've done scientific work in science. I've been paid for it, but by a public university, so not "commercial" in the strictest sense of the word.

Do you mean to suggest that "commercial work" in science takes shortcuts and ignores the essentials of the scientific method? Do you mean to suggest that commercial science or at least commercial chemistry writing science-like papers are all misrepresenting their results systematically? Do you think the standards for good scientific conduct do not apply to chemists or commercially working scientists? Because any of that would mean that "commercial work" in science is just fraud dressed up as science.

And yes of course an experienced experimenter will get better, easier, more consistent results, everyone knows that. The issue is not about that at all. The issue is about suppressing results and data that you don't like. Those maybe result from initial inexperience or bad luck, normal variations in measurements or whatever. You present all your data, with statistics, with an explanation, and if that explanation is "well, the initial 20 values are excluded from the reported average because of me being heavy-handed with the frobnicator" then that is fine. People can check your values, your reasoning and convince themselves that your reporting is right and your experiment works to the extend you reported. If you just say "the yield is 89%" without mentioning that all the other yields were worse, without mentioning any kind of variance, range, exclusions, you are lying. Those 89% were your single best yield, since they were best you were never able to reproduce that, so it might as well have been leftover product from improperly cleaning your glassware...

Are you really trying to convince me that all chemists are crooked like that? Or all commercial work in science is crooked?