Ivan Oransky

Ivan Oransky is an American physician, medical researcher, and journalist known for his advocacy of scientific integrity through improved tracking and institutional reforms.^[1] His opinions and statistics on scientific misconduct have been described in the media.^[2][3][4][5]

Education and career

Oransky has a bachelor's degree from Harvard College, where he was executive editor of The Harvard Crimson. He has an M.D. from the New York University School of Medicine, where he was the editorial director of MedPage Today.^[2][6][7]

Oransky has been a vice president of editorial at Medscape, executive editor of Reuters Health, managing editor, online, of Scientific American, and deputy editor of The Scientist.^[8] From 2017 to 2021, he was president of the Association of Health Care Journalists.^[9][10]

Oransky co-founded Retraction Watch, a blog reporting scientific retractions, is a writer in residence at New York University's Arthur Carter Journalism Institute, and Editor in Chief of The Transmitter.

Awards

In 2015, Oransky received the American Medical Writers Association's John P. McGovern Award for excellence in biomedical communication.^[11]

Publications and public talks

In 2011, Oransky and Adam Marcus coauthored an article in Nature pointing out that the peer review process for scholarly publications continues long after the publication time.^[12] In 2014, Oransky coauthored an article in Nature that describes how several authors were caught reviewing their own papers.^[13]

In 2012, Oransky gave a talk at TEDMED titled "Are we overmedicalized?"^[14]

In 2018, Oransky and Marcus profiled in Science magazine two researchers whose investigative work to find inconsistencies in published data has been instrumental in catalyzing retractions.^[15]

In August 2023, Oransky and Marcus coauthored op-eds in Scientific American^[16] and The Guardian.^[17] In the wake of the resignation of Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Oransky and Marcus suggested that scientific misconduct is more common than is reported. They also assess that, despite recent scandals involving research misconduct, the academic community is uninterested in exposing wrongdoing and scientific errors, but that all members of the academic community are responsible for the delays and lack of action.