Two big differences between athletics and academics:
1) In athletics, people might reasonably conclude they need to dope in order to be able to compete with others who are doping. In academics, that pressure isn’t there. Dissertation writing isn’t a competition.
2) In athletics, if you get caught cheating, you get suspended and then come back. In academics, scholars who get caught plagiarizing are DONE. Nobody wants to hire someone or award research grants to someone who has been caught plagiarizing or publishing falsified research. Academic integrity is taken very seriously.
Everything you wrote isn't true.
1) Academics have plenty of incentive to doctor data. If you don't publish something of note, you don't get tenure, you don't get funding and you don't get rich.
2) You say integrity is taken seriously yet the academics who have been caught that I cited all still have jobs. Stanford president and Hopkins guy still are employed and Rochester guy has companies that have raised tens of millions on the idea. He also hasn't been fired despite plagiarizing his thesis.
To everyone who says this is uncommon, check this quote out:
Retractions have been rising in recent years, according to Retraction Watch. In 2022, there were more than 4,600 retractions — a big jump from 119 in 2002.
But there should be even more each year, said Ivan Oransky, the co-founder of the site, which has led coverage of Semenza’s retractions.
“I have long said that there probably should be not 5,000 retractions per year, but probably at least 100,000,” he said.
Nobel Prize-winning Johns Hopkins researcher Dr. Gregg Semenza has retracted six articles from prominent scientific journals in the last two years after questions were raised about the integrity of images used in them.
You aren't considering that in scientific fields, every piece of work that matters must be reproduced and built upon. You cannot be real player and cheat in this regime. You can publish and be proven wrong in good faith, but cheating and getting away with it is very hard.
It's different if you are a marginal player publishing in "bob's journal nobody reads".
The other day here in Baltimore on the front page of the paper I read how a local Johns Hopkins researcher - who has previously won the Noble prize in medicine - is having to retract a bunch of papers. It hit me that the amou...
was so kind as to provide their credentials, I’ll provide mine. h-index of 30 with 25 years research and 8 million dollars external funding as a PI (18 years) before going to industry. That’s a solid, but not spectacular record, but I think it meets your threshold for a background.
Before you pronounce something as ‘idiotic,’ I’d like to ask what is so bad about what appears here? The basic lessons are:
1) Don’t synthesize data.
2) Don’t steal data from other people.
3) Don’t misrepresent data, alter it, or ‘curate’ it without justification. As an example, you might use the equivalent of the students t-test to reject an outlier. Thus you need to fess up if you’ve done that.
4) Always preserve your original unedited data. Make it available to those who would challenge you.
5) Give proper attribution.
6) Ensure reproducibility before reporting to the world.
7) Don’t be a dick. Treat people you supervise with care and dignity. Treat peers with respect and check yourself for bias occasionally in your interactions. Be prepared to receive data and insight from unexpected places, but always start from a default position of skepticism.
What’s wrong with this? Every single case of scientific misconduct that was discussed here has involved a violation of multiple rules on this list.
I'm in academia and we are human beings so there is corruption. But if every institution had to show their work and have it reproduced like we do, the world would have far less bullsh!t. So to answer your question, a very small percentage despite your anecdotes. Your anecdotes actually highlight a functioning immune system that identifies corruption. The places with such immune systems are fewer and fewer by the day.
This nails it. The fraction of papers that are "just totally made up"? Very low, I'd wager well under 1% in the fields I'm familiar with (physics, chemistry). But I'll add that this doesn't mean that most papers are *correct*. Science is hard and it's very possible to get the wrong conclusion even when you're doing everything right. And people aren't always doing everything right. While outright fraud is extremely rare, other factors that can lead to faulty conclusions are less so - things like the file drawer affect, researcher degrees of freedom/p-hacking, publication bias, etc.
I think it's also important to keep in mind the distinction between fields. Most published results in mathematics and experimental physics are probably correct, because the methodologies and systems under study are typically relatively unambiguous and well-understood. I'm wading a bit outside my area here, but I'd imagine that more papers in biology would fail to replicate, as biology is so complex and messy, and that things may get even worse in the social sciences. I'm not saying those fields have no value, just that the questions they're tackling are very hard.
(Caveat, I'm not actually in academia. I started a PhD program but dropped out with a masters and now work in industry. This is clearly so I could have the hot wife and $400k salary demanded of every letsrun poster, not because I wasn't smart or committed enough.)
Two big differences between athletics and academics:
1) In athletics, people might reasonably conclude they need to dope in order to be able to compete with others who are doping. In academics, that pressure isn’t there. Dissertation writing isn’t a competition.
2) In athletics, if you get caught cheating, you get suspended and then come back. In academics, scholars who get caught plagiarizing are DONE. Nobody wants to hire someone or award research grants to someone who has been caught plagiarizing or publishing falsified research. Academic integrity is taken very seriously.
Everything you wrote isn't true.
1) Academics have plenty of incentive to doctor data. If you don't publish something of note, you don't get tenure, you don't get funding and you don't get rich.
2) You say integrity is taken seriously yet the academics who have been caught that I cited all still have jobs. Stanford president and Hopkins guy still are employed and Rochester guy has companies that have raised tens of millions on the idea. He also hasn't been fired despite plagiarizing his thesis.
To everyone who says this is uncommon, check this quote out:
Retractions have been rising in recent years, according to Retraction Watch. In 2022, there were more than 4,600 retractions — a big jump from 119 in 2002.
But there should be even more each year, said Ivan Oransky, the co-founder of the site, which has led coverage of Semenza’s retractions.
“I have long said that there probably should be not 5,000 retractions per year, but probably at least 100,000,” he said.
@rojo - it’s great that you’re interested in this, just take some of these claims with a grain of salt. Retraction Watch does terrific work, but Ivan’s estimate of 100,000 is a claim without any real foundation. Also, that site should be viewed similarly to Marathon Investigations. There is a little bit of schadenfreude in the ethos.
While there might be incentives to ‘doctor’ data as you put it, it is a difficult thing to do successfully and even REALLY smart people get caught. For example I was an assistant in a lab a few doors down from H. Schön at Bell labs. A lot of people knew something was wrong with the data before the story broke in 2002. Concerns were raised at Bell as early as 2001, but were ignored. It took external pressure to really get anything done.
Know this. If you make an extraordinary claim, it will get checked. And ultimately issues with irreproducibility were what brought him down.
As for 2, this is strange coming from someone who has been a head coach at a D1 school. Few people seem to follow all of the high-minded ideals set out for NCAA coaching, yet I’d say that integrity is still taken seriously. Generally, if you deal in dirt, you’ll pay one way or another.
The thing is, some of these things are akin to fudging an athlete’s seed time to get them in the right heat. Are you saying you’ve never done that?
Two big differences between athletics and academics:
1) In athletics, people might reasonably conclude they need to dope in order to be able to compete with others who are doping. In academics, that pressure isn’t there. Dissertation writing isn’t a competition.
2) In athletics, if you get caught cheating, you get suspended and then come back. In academics, scholars who get caught plagiarizing are DONE. Nobody wants to hire someone or award research grants to someone who has been caught plagiarizing or publishing falsified research. Academic integrity is taken very seriously.
Everything you wrote isn't true.
1) Academics have plenty of incentive to doctor data. If you don't publish something of note, you don't get tenure, you don't get funding and you don't get rich.
2) You say integrity is taken seriously yet the academics who have been caught that I cited all still have jobs. Stanford president and Hopkins guy still are employed and Rochester guy has companies that have raised tens of millions on the idea. He also hasn't been fired despite plagiarizing his thesis.
To everyone who says this is uncommon, check this quote out:
Retractions have been rising in recent years, according to Retraction Watch. In 2022, there were more than 4,600 retractions — a big jump from 119 in 2002.
But there should be even more each year, said Ivan Oransky, the co-founder of the site, which has led coverage of Semenza’s retractions.
“I have long said that there probably should be not 5,000 retractions per year, but probably at least 100,000,” he said.
The reproducibility hurdle makes science very different from running. Think of the need to reproduce and build upon important work like every race winner not only being tested on the day of the race, but having their blood frozen, and then tested repeatedly throughout history, by different people, with new tech.
I appreciate the appeal to your authority. You are a valuable person - seriously!
There is nothing wrong with ethics training. It can be very good at adding field-specificity to the general ethics that someone has learned while growing up. However, this training is wholly inadequate for those who do not already solidly possess basic foundational ethics (established long before receiving the ethics training).
People can be so smart & accomplished in some areas and yet so incredibly naive and obtuse in other areas at the same time. You should continue with your good work today (whatever it is that you're doing) and drop this thread as you are not helping your position at all. Meanwhile, I shall consider taking an ethics class so that if anyone in the future challenges my morality by suggesting that I could possibly fudge numbers, I can whip out my certificate of course completion to prove them wrong because obviously the training will be my guide and keep me from going astray. hahahaha lolololol you're hilarious!
(Caveat, I'm not actually in academia. I started a PhD program but dropped out with a masters and now work in industry. This is clearly so I could have the hot wife and $400k salary demanded of every letsrun poster, not because I wasn't smart or committed enough.)
HAHA - upvoted purely for this little gem. Has inflation taken us from $250k to 400k while I was napping?
If not, at least a lot is misguided when better solutions exist outside the field they're funded by.
That is anti-science nonsense. Of course this whole thread is kind of a right wing talking point. The idea that there’s massive fraud in science totally unconnected to reality.
Cornell Statistics star William "Matt" Briggs answers the questions:
Academy for Science and Freedom presents: The Broken Science Initiative with guest, William BriggsWilliam Briggs is a writer, statistician, scientist, and co...
1) Academics have plenty of incentive to doctor data. If you don't publish something of note, you don't get tenure, you don't get funding and you don't get rich.
2) You say integrity is taken seriously yet the academics who have been caught that I cited all still have jobs. Stanford president and Hopkins guy still are employed and Rochester guy has companies that have raised tens of millions on the idea. He also hasn't been fired despite plagiarizing his thesis.
To everyone who says this is uncommon, check this quote out:
Retractions have been rising in recent years, according to Retraction Watch. In 2022, there were more than 4,600 retractions — a big jump from 119 in 2002.
But there should be even more each year, said Ivan Oransky, the co-founder of the site, which has led coverage of Semenza’s retractions.
“I have long said that there probably should be not 5,000 retractions per year, but probably at least 100,000,” he said.
Rojo, sincerely, you have no idea what you are talking about. My credentials- 44 years as a biomedical journal editor. I have 145 publications, and have been an investigator on 12 NIH or HRSA funded grants. Some of these are clinical trials, some are basic science. Fraud is incredibly rare- of course it happens, just as crap happens in every field where humans exist. But it is news when it does, because it is so rare. Academics do not doctor data in order to get rich, because, friend, academia is not the place where you will ever get rich. That's inane. Yes, you need to publish if you are on a research or tenure track- but the key is publish, not just make things up, because you can publish all kinds of papers- book chapters, pieces of your doctoral thesis, reviews, whatever. Young researchers need to work with mentors since the system makes it hard for a novice to get an independent grant on their own. The fact that some people are still working indicates that the process in those cases has not been finalized. The Stanford president is guilty of not paying attention (improper oversight) , not of fraud on his own. That's bad, to be sure. But I can point to more cases where the firing was swift- you just don't hear about it because the players are not people you would know or care about. You have 3 here that you use as indicative of all. And as another poster has stated, Ivan Orlasky is making a point that is based on feeling, not data. Retraction Watch is a valuable service, but that is all it is.
And quoting Ioannidas, as one person did, does tell the real story of his article. What Ioannidas is claiming is that replication in science if often hard- and often when something is repeated it ends not being published, because that conclusion is already out there (or conversely could not be replicated). This is a form of publication bias, a long recognized problem in science publication. I wrote a paper on that issue in my own profession, and found it present to a small degree. Knowing that, how is it fixed?
People conflate academic dishonesty with research fraud- lots of people are actually discussing academic malfeasance in this thread, not research fraud.
I've helped by now more than 2000 people publish papers across the 6 journals I've edited. Not once in 44 years were any ever retracted.
The big problem in science publication right now is not fraud- it is peer review. There are so many journals now that editors are finding it hard to obtain peer reviewers for papers. I review for other journals something like 100 papers per year- 2 per week, on average. As an editor, I have lots of people turn down my request to review- even for those on my editorial board. Life is getting busier, and I understand. But I am choosing the best people to review those papers. And often they cannot do it. This is a known problem. One answer now is to require authors to provide their datasets as well as the code they used to analyze it. See the work of Ben Goldberg. Anyway, you have it wrong. I am not going to comment on the internal workings of letsrun,, since I lack knowledge. I think you, in your desire to enhance clicks and play devil's advocate, have not thought through the issue. You will no doubt disagree. And people will continue to riff on this issue, though without any real knowledge of how it all works. Sigh.
1) Academics have plenty of incentive to doctor data. If you don't publish something of note, you don't get tenure, you don't get funding and you don't get rich.
2) You say integrity is taken seriously yet the academics who have been caught that I cited all still have jobs. Stanford president and Hopkins guy still are employed and Rochester guy has companies that have raised tens of millions on the idea. He also hasn't been fired despite plagiarizing his thesis.
To everyone who says this is uncommon, check this quote out:
Retractions have been rising in recent years, according to Retraction Watch. In 2022, there were more than 4,600 retractions — a big jump from 119 in 2002.
But there should be even more each year, said Ivan Oransky, the co-founder of the site, which has led coverage of Semenza’s retractions.
“I have long said that there probably should be not 5,000 retractions per year, but probably at least 100,000,” he said.
Rojo, sincerely, you have no idea what you are talking about. My credentials- 44 years as a biomedical journal editor. I have 145 publications, and have been an investigator on 12 NIH or HRSA funded grants. Some of these are clinical trials, some are basic science. Fraud is incredibly rare- of course it happens, just as crap happens in every field where humans exist. But it is news when it does, because it is so rare. Academics do not doctor data in order to get rich, because, friend, academia is not the place where you will ever get rich. That's inane. Yes, you need to publish if you are on a research or tenure track- but the key is publish, not just make things up, because you can publish all kinds of papers- book chapters, pieces of your doctoral thesis, reviews, whatever. Young researchers need to work with mentors since the system makes it hard for a novice to get an independent grant on their own. The fact that some people are still working indicates that the process in those cases has not been finalized. The Stanford president is guilty of not paying attention (improper oversight) , not of fraud on his own. That's bad, to be sure. But I can point to more cases where the firing was swift- you just don't hear about it because the players are not people you would know or care about. You have 3 here that you use as indicative of all. And as another poster has stated, Ivan Orlasky is making a point that is based on feeling, not data. Retraction Watch is a valuable service, but that is all it is.
And quoting Ioannidas, as one person did, does tell the real story of his article. What Ioannidas is claiming is that replication in science if often hard- and often when something is repeated it ends not being published, because that conclusion is already out there (or conversely could not be replicated). This is a form of publication bias, a long recognized problem in science publication. I wrote a paper on that issue in my own profession, and found it present to a small degree. Knowing that, how is it fixed?
People conflate academic dishonesty with research fraud- lots of people are actually discussing academic malfeasance in this thread, not research fraud.
I've helped by now more than 2000 people publish papers across the 6 journals I've edited. Not once in 44 years were any ever retracted.
The big problem in science publication right now is not fraud- it is peer review. There are so many journals now that editors are finding it hard to obtain peer reviewers for papers. I review for other journals something like 100 papers per year- 2 per week, on average. As an editor, I have lots of people turn down my request to review- even for those on my editorial board. Life is getting busier, and I understand. But I am choosing the best people to review those papers. And often they cannot do it. This is a known problem. One answer now is to require authors to provide their datasets as well as the code they used to analyze it. See the work of Ben Goldberg. Anyway, you have it wrong. I am not going to comment on the internal workings of letsrun,, since I lack knowledge. I think you, in your desire to enhance clicks and play devil's advocate, have not thought through the issue. You will no doubt disagree. And people will continue to riff on this issue, though without any real knowledge of how it all works. Sigh.
1) Academics have plenty of incentive to doctor data. If you don't publish something of note, you don't get tenure, you don't get funding and you don't get rich.
2) You say integrity is taken seriously yet the academics who have been caught that I cited all still have jobs. Stanford president and Hopkins guy still are employed and Rochester guy has companies that have raised tens of millions on the idea. He also hasn't been fired despite plagiarizing his thesis.
To everyone who says this is uncommon, check this quote out:
Retractions have been rising in recent years, according to Retraction Watch. In 2022, there were more than 4,600 retractions — a big jump from 119 in 2002.
But there should be even more each year, said Ivan Oransky, the co-founder of the site, which has led coverage of Semenza’s retractions.
“I have long said that there probably should be not 5,000 retractions per year, but probably at least 100,000,” he said.
Rojo, sincerely, you have no idea what you are talking about. My credentials- 44 years as a biomedical journal editor. I have 145 publications, and have been an investigator on 12 NIH or HRSA funded grants. Some of these are clinical trials, some are basic science. Fraud is incredibly rare- of course it happens, just as crap happens in every field where humans exist. But it is news when it does, because it is so rare. Academics do not doctor data in order to get rich, because, friend, academia is not the place where you will ever get rich. That's inane. Yes, you need to publish if you are on a research or tenure track- but the key is publish, not just make things up, because you can publish all kinds of papers- book chapters, pieces of your doctoral thesis, reviews, whatever. Young researchers need to work with mentors since the system makes it hard for a novice to get an independent grant on their own. The fact that some people are still working indicates that the process in those cases has not been finalized. The Stanford president is guilty of not paying attention (improper oversight) , not of fraud on his own. That's bad, to be sure. But I can point to more cases where the firing was swift- you just don't hear about it because the players are not people you would know or care about. You have 3 here that you use as indicative of all. And as another poster has stated, Ivan Orlasky is making a point that is based on feeling, not data. Retraction Watch is a valuable service, but that is all it is.
And quoting Ioannidas, as one person did, does tell the real story of his article. What Ioannidas is claiming is that replication in science if often hard- and often when something is repeated it ends not being published, because that conclusion is already out there (or conversely could not be replicated). This is a form of publication bias, a long recognized problem in science publication. I wrote a paper on that issue in my own profession, and found it present to a small degree. Knowing that, how is it fixed?
People conflate academic dishonesty with research fraud- lots of people are actually discussing academic malfeasance in this thread, not research fraud.
I've helped by now more than 2000 people publish papers across the 6 journals I've edited. Not once in 44 years were any ever retracted.
The big problem in science publication right now is not fraud- it is peer review. There are so many journals now that editors are finding it hard to obtain peer reviewers for papers. I review for other journals something like 100 papers per year- 2 per week, on average. As an editor, I have lots of people turn down my request to review- even for those on my editorial board. Life is getting busier, and I understand. But I am choosing the best people to review those papers. And often they cannot do it. This is a known problem. One answer now is to require authors to provide their datasets as well as the code they used to analyze it. See the work of Ben Goldberg. Anyway, you have it wrong. I am not going to comment on the internal workings of letsrun,, since I lack knowledge. I think you, in your desire to enhance clicks and play devil's advocate, have not thought through the issue. You will no doubt disagree. And people will continue to riff on this issue, though without any real knowledge of how it all works. Sigh.
You know what? You’re right, I deserve some ridicule for being obtuse.
I agree 💯 about the foundational ethics and it was always something I looked for in selecting students and postdocs.
Hey dmb, I REALLY respect your humility and ability to understand my uber-aggressively LR-styled point, even though you clearly know what's what in your field and about this topic. That is extremely impressive, and doesn't happen too often. Please accept my apology for breaking #7 of the ethics principles. lol
Overall, this thread has been somewhat heartening and persuasive that it would be more difficult to be blatantly corrupt in the science field. That said, culturally, it feels like there is a much greater emphasis placed on money, power, etc over doing what's right in virtually all fields. I am completely confident that good science prevails most of the time, but I am sure there is cronyism sometimes, too. The scientific field feels relatively anonymous (from the outside), there is significant money involved, and it seems ripe to me for a shady practitioner to silo various parts to manipulate results to get the desired ends.
Maybe I am getting more old and crotchety instead of older and wiser. I have a hard time distinguishing if the overall culture (regarding ethics) is changing (for the worse), or if it is me.
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