>My gut feel from what I saw is that outright fraud is rare, but bias seeping into the study is common. I have a similar experience and opinion (started a PhD,

>My gut feel from what I saw is that outright fraud is rare, but bias seeping into the study is common. I have a similar experience and opinion (started a PhD, quit when I lost faith in the institution). In our field in particular, it seemed to be an open secret that our current paradigm was a dead end, and this had been apparent for almost a decade by the time I joined the university. Yet, in spite of this fact that we were going nowhere, there was extreme pressure to continue to toe the line. You couldn't just try something new based on a hunch, but instead had to perform fruitless experiments that were "guided by the literature" and therefore easier to justify to the people funding your endeavour. The whole institution of academia is rotten, and going on a witch hunt like the article suggests ignores several massive elephants in the room.