In science we only catch the sloppy fakers, we don't catch the 'good' fakers. There was a similar case a while ago in spider biology: https://www.nature.com/ar

In science we only catch the sloppy fakers, we don't catch the 'good' fakers. There was a similar case a while ago in spider biology: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02156-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02156-2 Pruitt had several influential spider biology papers out and when others failed to replicate and dug into the Supplementary Data, they also found lazy patterns. >When Laskowski dug into data sets that Pruitt had provided for the study, she was shocked to find stretches of data that seemed to have been duplicated, to represent findings for multiple spiders. This questionable data helped to bolster a long-unproven theory that repeated social interactions in a group of spiders cause individuals to behave predictably. So yeah, who knows how much scientific fraud there actually is; I haven't seen a case of fraud where the data was convincingly faked, which means that these cases are hard to detect or hard to prove.