4 ms·
I personally know two people who complained about fabrications, and both had to restart their careers, no longer pursuing research. I've heard stories from oth
by neilv 2y ago
I personally know two people who complained about fabrications, and both had to restart their careers, no longer pursuing research.
I've heard stories from others, such as when a fabrication was known to students in a lab, and of some playing along with it anyway.
We routinely hear on HN of fabrications discovered in journal publications.
Exactly how bad is the problem? What's the prevalence, scale, and impact?
What are the causes, and how does society address the problem?
- caddemon 2y agoStraight up fabrication is more common than we'd hope, but probably not systemically threatening. I'm much more concerned about how poorly replication goes even when authors are not malicious/generally following the "status quo" for methodology in their subfield.
- coolhand2120 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis In some fields more than half of the research is somehow not reproducible. Some is attributed to fraud, some incompetence. As a whole it makes science produced by these fields worse than a coin flip. Psychology is by far the worst culprit. We're at an inflection point in history where the scientific method dictates we shouldn't trust many fields that use the title "science".
- izacus 2y agoI don't think there's a single academic research lab out there that doesn't heavily doctor their data to make it publishable to some extent. The best of them "merely" cherrypick data. The pressures of academia make being honest an extremely bad career choice that can end up with your unemployment. Publish or perish. You can't publish if your results aren't good.