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How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research?
Is science misconduct an aberration or a common practice? Unintentional corruption of the factual record is commonplace, not so much as a deliberate attempt to engage in fraud but simply because that is accepted practice and procedure in a discipline.
In geology it is common practice to present the best or clearest example of a particular rock type, beddding characteristics, expression of faults and folds, etc. You don't present the average photographs or "the train wrecks" you present the best examples of your field work. Is this fraud? Not if you are a geologist, but some other scientists working in other disciplines not familiar with practice and procedure in your discipline.might brand that as fraud.
Here is some sobering data when it comes to what we expect in the coming years in science:
How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data
Daniele Fanelli
"To standardize outcomes, the number of respondents who recalled at least one incident of misconduct was calculated for each question, and the analysis was limited to behaviours that distort scientific knowledge: fabrication, falsification, “cooking” of data, etc.
A pooled weighted average of 1.97% (N = 7, 95%CI: 0.86–4.45) of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once –a serious form of misconduct by any standard– and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% (N = 12, 95% CI: 9.91–19.72) for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices. Meta-regression showed that self reports surveys, surveys using the words “falsification” or “fabrication” “fabrication”, and mailed surveys yielded lower percentages of misconduct. When these factors were controlled for, misconduct was reported more frequently by medical/pharmacological researchers than others.
Dan Geurin 10+
Salim Solaiman 50+
It's a matter of morality.
Good thing about science is , being evidence based to great extent science itself has it's instinct ability to prove psudoscience or falsification to be false
Gordon Barker 10+
I have personally seen examples of "cherry picking" evidence with under or non-reporting of outliers (I see this a lot in medical research)
Any any result that shows the data supports the stated position or premise "too" well should be questioned.
That is how science works is by peer review of results, re-done by a different group attempting to disprove the intiial paper. That is how scientists become famous is by proving something wrong.
If a paper is not presented to a peer review journal for repudiation by other groups that it is not worth reading. period.
Feyisayo Anjorin 50+
Because so many people would believe anything as long as it is from a scientist, many in the field have been used to strengthen arguements in support of questionable positions of politicians and economic interests.
But it is not just about the fact that they are scientists, as they saw, "The devil makes the greatest gains by masquerading as an angel of light".
Bill Courtney
But fraud damages an institute’s reputation. So there is a strong temptation to bury fraud instead of exposing it.
Detecting this institutional or “meta-fraud” is particularly difficult because of our wishful thinking that research institutes as collective bodies are honest. We must break out of this mindset in order to defend the integrity of science.
An example of meta-fraud and the mindset that prevents its exposure is presented at
www.cheshire-innovation.com/sali/pedsali.htm
Fritzie Reisner 100+
Lejan . 30+
William Chatfield
Case in point - I enrolled in an honours physics course at university. What was attractive to this program was that it has been completely revamped - since enrolment in Physics had dwindled to zero the previous year.
In one Physics lab, the assignment was to do the classical measurement of e/m. It was standard lab equipment. People worked in teams. The first team could not come up with the "correct answer" using that apparatus. The prof assigned a second team and they couldn't get the "right answer" either -although they did get the same measurement as the first team.
The prof then assigned both teams the problem of "why were they getting the wrong answer?". The first team couldn't explain it, but cam up with an amusing rewrite of all of physics to explain the answer they got. The second team noticed the filament was held taut in the apparatus by a spring at both ends. The current would pass through these springs (coils actuallY) and create an electromagnetic field that would affext the answers. Estimating the size of the coils and calulating and subtracting the effect of the coils from the answer gave you a pretty good number - close to the right answer at least.
Now the $100 question. Decades of students used this apparatus and ALWAYS were able to generate "the correct answer" - but the apparatus was incapable of doing so. Whats going on? Decades of student learned to get the mark, they had to present the "right answer", even if they had to fudge the results.
So methinks this is a learned behaviour.
edward long 100+
Xavier Belvemont 30+
Fraudulent information by a small margin of scientists (for reasons I'm not entirely sure of) isn't too significant of a factor due to the falsification model that science is bound by.
Claims must be substantiated, repeatable, correlative with other facts associated with it (if applicable) and must have detailed analysis of the step-by-step procedure done to reach the conclusion.
This is why when select scientists do attempt to fabricate results, its eventually found to be so when the test/claim is repeated.
Not to say that we should accept this type of behavior in any way/degree.
Anyone found doing so should be fired and have their credentials revoked immediately.
But still, the point is that it isn't as problematic as it may seem.
richard moody jr 10+
John Smith 30+
It depends on the field: it's common in the social and medical fields (because of the uncertain nature of the research it's just easier to cheat or for things to go wrong), but less so in the natural sciences, though it does occur. You will most often find something erroneous in a journal, not so much in text books. Do note that in the social and medical sciences many "fabrications" are actually math errors that the authors themselves are not aware of and often there are also practical restrictions (small test groups for example) that the researchers are forced to work with.
pat gilbert 50+
Random Chance 30+
more than you would like to know.
Even though you would like to know.
george lockwood 20+
george lockwood 20+
richard moody jr 10+
Misconduct is the main cause of life-sciences retractions
"Conventional wisdom says that most retractions of papers in scientific journals are triggered by unintentional errors. Not so, according to one of the largest-ever studies of retractions. A survey1 published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found that two-thirds of retracted life-sciences papers were stricken from the scientific record because of misconduct such as fraud or suspected fraud — and that journals sometimes soft-pedal the reason.The analysis revealed that fraud or suspected fraud was responsible for 43% of the retractions. Other types of misconduct — duplicate publication and plagiarism — accounted for 14% and 10% of retractions, respectively. Only 21% of the papers were retracted because of error"
For some reason the life sciences are rife with fraud. Does this have anything to do with the fact that living systems are the most complicated in the physical world so causality for disease or other aspects of living systems is too complicated to map or measure accurately? What does this say about all the inevitable bad science, as indicated here, that will impede the progress in cancer, heart disease, diabetes research when so much bad science is published? Obviously, the retracted papers are only part of the problem; think of all the bad data that gets included in the published articles.
Perhaps the edict should be, "Publish, perish, plagiarize, engage in fraud or engage in polemics or else you will fail as a scientist."
Fritzie Reisner 100+
I think people for some reason love to believe that science is much more fraught with fraud than it is. This may be a competitive instinct to bring accomplished people a notch down.
In the study reported, modification of data could refer to omitting an obvious coding error. I am not surprised that the numbers come way down when you ask about falisification or fabrication of data.
richard moody jr 10+
Here is the part of the Nature article most applicable to your question:
"The latest study shows a ten-fold increase (to about 0.01%) in the proportion of papers retracted owing to fraud since 1975. Previous analyses have seen a growing trend in retractions in general5, but the latest report sheds new light on the extent to which fraud is responsible. It also found a correlation between journal impact factor and the number of fraud-induced retractions, says Ferric Fang, a microbiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, who led the study.
Influential journals, including Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Cell, all appear in the top-ten list of publications with retractions because of fraud or suspected fraud (see ‘Top ten retractors’). For some journals, including the two topping the table — The Journal of Biological Chemistry and Anesthesia & Analgesia — the tally was boosted by multiple retractions from the same few individuals, such as anaesthesiologist Joachim Boldt, formerly of the Ludwigshafen Clinical Center in Germany. Indeed, Fang and his colleagues found that 38 research groups with five or more retractions accounted for 44% of articles linked to fraud or suspected fraud."
Fritzie Reisner 100+
This is 1 of 10,416 or .0096%.
If of these 66% are retracted because of suspected fraud, that is 1 in 15,873, or .006%. Actual fraud will be lower.
And, as you write, a large proportion of the potentially fraudulent results are multiple false or potentially false representations by the same people.
That, along with what you cite that almost half the cases come from groups that submitted mutiple false papers, the numbers of scientists submitting fraudulent work are tiny compared to the amount of activity.
richard moody jr 10+