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It's worth noting: In most of these cases, even when caught, the guilty parties and the bad papers remain unnamed. There are known-to-the-editors fraudulent pap
by blagie 5y ago
It's worth noting: In most of these cases, even when caught, the guilty parties and the bad papers remain unnamed. There are known-to-the-editors fraudulent papers in major journals still being cited.
The consequences of committing academic fraud are minor, and the consequences of not doing so generally mean no academic jobs or tenure.
There isn't a 99.99% innocent claim here (as at the end of the article). This stuff is widespread. This is much more accurate:
"because everybody is complicit in this subtle fraud, nobody is willing to acknowledge its existence"
Littman is at Brown, where the majority of the CS department engages in this !@#$%. I'm not trying to single out Brown. Parts of MIT, Stanford, etc. are even worse.
- MattGaiser 5y agoWith laws, there are full time police officers, investigators, and prosecutors working to catch people. And even then, most crimes go unsolved and unpunished. Even without the complicity, stopping fraud and bad behavior is a difficult problem. Part time reviewers and reputation seem woefully insufficient counters.
- qPM9l3XJrF 5y agoYes, I'm very skeptical of Buckman's claim that more fraud will help. Seems similar to a claim around 2015-2016 that voting for Donald Trump will inspire America to clean up its act politically. Institutions aren't biological systems that operate according to mysterious hormetic processes. Institutions are created by humans and thrive or decay based on whether they effectively channel human effort. Be the change you want to see in the world. And if you wreck something, and others apply blood sweat and tears to recreate it in a way that's better than the original, you don't get to take any credit as the wrecker.
- MattGaiser 5y agoI suspect that we see terrible events as changing things for the better because when something major happens, we notice a strong reaction. We forget all the not quite as awful things that were just let slide and normalized.
- blagie 5y agoI think the overwhelming problem is the amount of trust people have an academia, and especially, in elite academia. A Harvard research paper is trusted. The harm of people trusting fake science is high. I see it every day in my field. 1) If people realize it's more like a Facebook post, that will be better. People will be able to push back. 2) Alternatively, if we clean up this mess, that will be even better. Academia ought to be trustworthy. I don't see a path to #2 without a lot of dishonest people with tenure being laid off. At elite institutions, most people hired in the past decade or two cheated at least a little bit. I don't see a path to get there without a high-profile scandal.
- FabHK 5y agoThat would be interesting, if universities had full time academic integrity officers whose job was to detect academic fraud.
- MattGaiser 5y agoOr just have some academic equivalent to SDETs. Have a replication and analysis team that checks that statistical quality, code, basic science, etc.
- immmmmm 5y agoafter having spent a third of my life in academia i don't see this happening: everyone want as many as possible articles, if possible in the most high impact journals. detecting fraudulent or irrelevant pieces is against that goal.
- matthewdgreen 5y agoI don't think people understand how hard this would be, or how much it would impede science. To give an analogy to coding: imagine a company with thousands of programmers, all using different languages and writing different types of code (mobile apps, back-end server apps, mainframe code, device firmware). Now assign one or two poorly-paid employees whose job is to review all of their code and find issues with it. Can you imagine how annoying this would be? How much time you would spend simply explaining to these people what your code does, so they could understand the basics of what your program is even doing? How ineffective they would be at detecting actual fraud, and how quickly their processes would turn into yet another annoying layer of bureaucracy and checklist compliance? There are a lot of things Universities could do to assist scientists in producing better output. This is not one of them.