I have a hunch that the not everything you do as a researcher is novel. A part of it is, like you mention, new by definition. But there's also the old and esta

I have a hunch that the not everything you do as a researcher is novel. A part of it is, like you mention, new by definition. But there's also the old and established parts, like statistics, parts of the experimental setup, methodology, reporting data accurately (or at all). This is plenty enough to have objective standards for. A lot of fraud is not in making up experimental results, but instead misreporting the data and drawing unsupported conclusions.