It always amazes me how lazy and amateurish this type of fraud is. Copying and pasting pictures? Can't even add a little fuzz? I'm often trying to teach scienti

It always amazes me how lazy and amateurish this type of fraud is. Copying and pasting pictures? Can't even add a little fuzz? I'm often trying to teach scientists to code, if they actually learned they could fake data much more credibly. Schon[0] was another big one; he didn't copy images but rather numbers which made up graphs. Adding some noise would've been really easy. It makes one wonder how much fraud is never caught simply because the fraudsters are a little smarter. A basic assumption in science is that the raw facts a scientist presents are true. People question the statistical methods, they question which conclusions are appropriate given the data, but raw data itself is assumed to be accurate. We apply a lot more scrutiny to clinical trials (for obvious reasons), but trying to apply that same standard to all research everywhere would be cost prohibitive and slow research by a huge amount. A lot of journals use image-duplication detectors now (the post mentions ImageTwin.ai) so I expect this particular form of fraud will stop. I suspect cherry-picking data ("inappropriate data exclusion") is the most common form, and will remain so. It's very difficult (often impossible) to detect. On the positive side, I suspect the impact of stuff like this is fairly minimal. Everybody in the field knows that experimental biology is difficult and results are untrustworthy. Even excluding outright fraud, it's really easy to just mess something up. Or get a result which is "true" but doesn't generalize, and so it's useless. Good scientists don't trust something just because it's in Nature/Science/Cell, if they really care about the result then they replicate it before building on it. This would remain true even if all deliberate fraud stopped immediately. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal [1] I dunno about the mouse one, it doesn't seem to be a direct copy/paste and a good experimentalist will do a lot to ensure consistent conditions. Everything else is pretty blatant though.