Research fraud gets a lot of attention because it is so black and white. But it is a symptom of larger problems. One issue is that the pace of progress is slowi

Research fraud gets a lot of attention because it is so black and white. But it is a symptom of larger problems. One issue is that the pace of progress is slowing, and as a result incremental gains are more prominent. This is fertile ground for fraudsters, as they can produce results which are plausible enough while seeming to be an important contribution to the field. All fraud fits into this category. Nobody makes a new grand unified theory of everything which they know is bogus. That would be too much work for a start. The other issue is the huge expansion in university size. Most of the fraud I've seen or heard about all happens in university research departments. This shows you the importance of their incentive structure. One can make things up and not only succeed, but do better than your competitors in this research setting, AND get a tenured position with life-long security. All competitive fields where achievement recieves external and highly persistent rewards suffer from this problem, whether it be sport and performance enhancing drugs or Ivy league univesrity admissions or even venture captial funding (Theranos). The natural response is to ask for more regulation and structural change in how research is conducted eg pre-registration, different statistical standards etc. But this has the major disadvantage of making life harder for the honest people. It also requires the creation of some parallel work force to handle all the checking. Research is already so difficult. Paradoxical effects, where such measures increase fraud, are definitely possible. There will never be zero fraud. The aim should be to change how research is done to make the experience more humane, train and mentor young scientists carefully and avoid perverse incentives. As far as I can tell, nobody has any idea how to do this. Instead they want to create investigatory bodies which will siphon off money that could be used for research, and then ruin lives pursuing some key performance indicator like N successful fraud cases per quarter. This experiment was already run in the USA with the Office of Research Integrity, and it failed. Malcolm Gladwell, who I am not a fan of in general, has a good podcast about it [1]. [1] http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/28-the-imaginary-crimes-of-margit-hamosh http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/28-the-imaginary-crim...