Scientific fraud has become an 'industry,' alarming analysis finds

And this encourages the people with integrity to quit.

This is likely a generalized problem with basic science. In applied science you need to be very careful about fraud because ultimately the application of research findings will end up in customers hands who can and will pursue legal action if the original claims turn out to be false.

Great story and it shows what everybody knows but won't say - normal academics are the frauds. Not just mysterious strangers in foreign countries, paper mills, etc. but normal medium or high status academics in prestigious universities in western countries doing the fraud themselves.

You can say it's not their fault - they're forced into it because it's the only way to succeed. But it's still their fault. I remember a case of a politician in China being arrested for corruption and he said that the only way to reach his position was with corruption. Yea he was probably right but he was still corrupt.

> I don't know how to fix it other than several governments and their education ministries making a joined effort to have scientific papers where each result has to be thoroughly reviewed by multiple other labs. It's expensive, but I don't see other ways.

This is just aggravating the problem. Science is mostly fraud because it's mostly done on behalf of a funder who doesn't want it. It's easier to write a paper describing the results you'd like to get than to actually get those results. And the funding agency is indifferent between those two things. So mostly you just get the papers.

> That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.

I regularly see both worlds. What I find more troubling in academia is that it is difficult to openly talk about how flawed the system is, that people make mistakes, that papers have mistakes (the own ones as well as others'). We know all software has bugs; but the code that a PhD student hacks together over night is assumed to be flawless (the more senior people rarely even glance at it), otherwise the paper is all wrong, and papers are set in stone... So I genuinely struggle with the lack of a proper failure culture in academia, as it is designed as a system that is fundamentally geared against openly discussing failure.

Yeah, I would say that my time in academia disillusioned me somewhat, but not to the level that some people here are expressing. I never got the sense that people were falsifying data, directly (but covertly) backstabbing one another, or anything really awful like that.

But there are plenty of disheartening things that don't rise to that level of actual malfeasance. People get so comfortable in their tenured positions that they can lose touch with reality (e.g., the reality of how difficult their grad students' lives are). Even if they don't engage in actual research misconduct, there's a tendency for people to put their thumb on the scale in various ways (often, I think, without being aware of it), many of them connected to a sort of confirmation bias, in terms of who they think is a "good fit" for a job, what kind of work they want to support, etc. In my experience they are at best dismissive and at worst offended by the idea that maybe the current financial/employment model of higher education isn't the best (e.g., that maybe you shouldn't have a two-tiered system of tenure-track and non-ladder faculty with wildly differing payscales, but rather should just have a larger number of people doing varying amounts of teaching and research for varying but roughly comparable levels of pay).

I felt like virtually everyone I met was in some sense committed to the truth, but often they were committed to their own view of the truth, which was usually a defensible and reasonable view but not the only view, and not as clearly distinct from other reasonable views as they felt it was. And they varied considerably in how much they felt it was acceptable or necessary to engage in minor shenanigans in order to keep moving forward (e.g., to what extent they'd compromise their actual beliefs in order to placate journal editors and get something published).

Also, there is often something endearing about how academics can be genuinely emotionally invested, sometimes to the point of rage or ecstasy, in matters so obscure that the average person wouldn't give them a second thought. It's sort of like finding someone who's a fan of some TV show that ran for 12 episodes in 1983 and is adorably gushy about it. Even the people I met who were quite cognizant of making strategic career moves and other such practical stuff still had a lot of this geeky obsession about them.

A lot of this may vary from one field to another. But on the whole there are many worse people in the world than academics.

> care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try to do their jobs competently, look out for their students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be. That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.

That's pretty much my experience from 20+ years ago.

One thing that I didn't appreciate when I left the ivory tower was the extent of the replication "crisis."

If other academics can't replicate your work in some esoteric corner of bio research, it's no big deal--some people get burned wasting time, but the research just atrophies in the end.

But in the biotech / pharma industry, we in-licensed a lot of un-replicatable garbage from academia.

And replication was important to us because we actually had to make a drug that was effective (which loosely translates to ... "clinicians must be able to replicate your drug's efficacy.").*

* I'm not sure how true this is anymore, given politicization of regulatory bodies, but it was an eye-opener to me years ago.

How is it better than the tech industry?

From 1945 to about 2000, academia in the western world was slowly growing. That made the pool of positions not-quite-zero-sum, and way too many people went into it expecting a much more genial environment.

> I become un-fireable

That's not been true in most countries for a long time

Academia.

Nowhere else do people fight so much and so dirty for so little.

as it turns out an annuity for life in the form of a tenured position is not really low stakes…

It's really hard when there's no metrics beyond "perceived intelligence."

Part of the problem is many academic institutions, even prestigious ones, simply don't prioritize teaching. They don't even really prioritize challenging education. They prioritize prestige and opportunity hoarding. The hardest part about many of these schools is getting in. Once you're in, then grade inflation and the desire for the institution to retain it's prestige brand means the classes aren't particularly hard --- graduating is particularly easy and most students actually barely put in effort. Getting in is the golden ticket more than graduating.

One solution, is for an institution to prioritize accessibility (easier to get in) but also prioritize difficulty (actually hard to graduate). This would reorient incentives around challenging education that pushes students to excel rather than coast after striving just to get in. Unfortunately, the priorities are the exact opposite today.

Two notes:

- Not all labs run this way. Mine doesn't.

- Very few successful grants, in my experience, are "Give money and we'll find X". Rather, they tend to be "We're reasonably sure X is over here for $reasons, but we'd need money to actually confirm that."

> Then there's the quasi-feudal approach of putting the lab head in the authors

Changes from field to field but yes, very common.

And many times, like you wrote, they have no idea about what was even done.

Then you have the gigantic collaborations, where everyone gets a citation and it counts as much as a paper with one or two authors.

And of course, everyone will cite it because there's no real alternative.

probably not. the writing quality will improve but LLM-generated papers will still be ignored.

to the extent they aren't ignored, but seem so plausible that they are taken seriously, eventually people will want to talk to the researchers about their results, invite them to give talks, and so on. at which point it becomes problem 1.

"about to" it is.

In a recent conversation with the editor-in-chief of a journal I am on the editorial board of, a substantial bulk of the submissions we get are LLM written papers that essentially randomly look for associations in accessible data, which are then sold to faculty (primarily in China).

No, probably Not. Nobody is reading these Journals anyway. It's only good one resumes. i think even 3a is Not a problem because fake papers will follow a specific pattern in Meta Analysis. Should be catched in one of the "filter" stages during Meta Analysis.

It is well-known that top-conferences had and still have many problems. Some examples: There used to be the problem with authors adding new co-authors after acceptance, aka "selling seats". There is a debate about how many papers one should be allowed to submit, as some people with money and influence are heavily franchising. It is unclear to what extent there is implicit and explicit reviewer collusion. Even double-blind reviews don't really solve the problem.

If we don't admit that there are fundamental problems that affect all of us (academics) and instead pretend it is only the lesser people who f things up, we'll all be screwed sooner or later.

The more this kind of thing happens, the more it's going to blow back on you. The hacks, ideologues, and frauds have done a lot to destroy trust in science and the image of science. When the public backlash comes, muggles aren't going to be able to tell the difference between someone like you and the hucksters you've trained yourself to ignore. They are ruthless, and nothing of science will remain unless you are as ruthless, to the people who abuse your good name.

i think what people are talking about is that infomercial-level quackery and double-think and dishonesty has now breached the levy into mainstream science. now, instead of seeing papers claiming breakthroughs you will also see papers that are fraudulent but claim to prove or reinforce a hypothesis or model that everyone already agrees is true. obviously most fraudulent papers are like this because the point of fraudulent papers is to avoid detection and create an appearance of legitimacy. now we have a billions dollar drug for alzheimers that literally does nothing. thats what people are talking about. but you refuse to acknowledge it

The incentive structure in academia exacerbates that by encouraging authors to hype up their findings and obfuscate any deficiency in their models. Withholding information and making results difficult to reproduce is a symptom of that, as are academic jargon disconnected from terminology used in the private sector, and obtuse presentation. Those practices make it easier for bad data, bad methodologies, and misrepresentations of findings to slip past reviewers and readers and harder for other researchers to dispute, and undermine the scientific process itself as we get flooded with junk.

Maybe it's a naive outlook but maybe "science" can continue to work... with, without, or despite all the politics, waste, cruft, and scaffolding that academia erects all around it.

There is evidence to suggest that corrections and retractions do not even effect citations.

All of them? That worked well for Alzheimer research, didn’t it

What percentage of papers even reproduce these days? Is it more than 50%?

Every scientist I've talked to about my pie-in-the-sky funding mechanism - getting past a "top 50%" triage and then a lottery has met said idea with "Yeah, that would probably work. better."

I'd also suggest that lower scientific funding levels exacerbate the problems with the current system - risky research is less likely to be funded, as are new investigators, etc. Large, established labs are also better able to weather the storm.