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Scientific fraud has become an 'industry,' analysis finds

• questinthrow 1y ago
  Its odd how I viewed academia as a beautiful place where people were judged by merit not by politics. Then I joined it and realized its even more cutthroat than corporate politics, I guess you cant escape human fallibility no matter the system since all systems are reflections of human nature.
  • eurekin 1y ago
    Same here. I think it's one of those fields that feel polar opposite to, what they advertise to be.
  • Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
    Sayre's Law: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
    • coderatlarge 1y ago
      as it turns out an annuity for life in the form of a tenured position is not really low stakes…
      • Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
        The viscous politics is often carried out by those who already have tenure, probably even more so because they have that protection.
        • odyssey7 1y ago
          Well, I’m not sure I’ve seen that pattern quite so much, but if you’re seeing it, I would speculate survivor bias. The people who stay around are the ones who were good enough at the game to stay around.
          • coderatlarge 1y ago
            the way i’ve generally understood the use of the word “vicious” in this context is in judging other academics’ work quality. which is also typically where i think most people from the outside perceive the stakes to be low: as in who cares whether one more journal article that no one will read gets published? but from the inside it can mean the difference between tenure and no tenure (for the young academic vying for it), respect and abject failure, money or no money.
            • odyssey7 1y ago
              There are so many more ways than that to starve and sabotage a burgeoning researcher, ensuring they never take root.
            • philwelch 1y ago
              Well sure but in this case the actual word was “viscous”, not “vicious”. Academic politics is thick, sticky, and insufficiently fluid and insufficiently solid at the same time. Okay it was probably a typo but it kind of works as an analogy.
              • coderatlarge 1y ago
                sure, maybe it was intended as a novel coinage, but i assumed the “vicious” interpretation which is the more common one since the comment explicitly references Sayre's Law.
        • coderatlarge 1y ago
          fair point - though it sometimes turns into a fight about how to remove others’ tenure; which is their most prized and valuable possession.
        • Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
          Tenured people carry it out, but in my experience, the goal tends to be for their students/subordinates/group colleagues/etc. to achieve tenure instead of others.
          • Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
            I've heard of an engineering faculty where there was basically a cold war between a few of the tenured profs. They would do everything they could to undercut or screw each other over. Pure spite-based politics. Toxic as hell and there was very little anyone could do about out.
            • coderatlarge 1y ago
              i know of prestigious departments where after literally decades of political stalemate with colleagues (over things as petty as who gets what office) prestigious faculty finally managed to finagle a high-dollar offer from a lower tier institution and de-camped over the politics.
        • triceratops 1y ago
          You probably mean "vicious" but "viscous" works too, funnily. Username checks out.
          • ryandrake 1y ago
            I was also wondering if it was a spelling mistake, a failure to know the difference between the two words, a legit description of academic politics as molasses-like, or a play on the user's own username. The layers of potential irony here are thick and viscous!
      • aaronbaugher 1y ago
        Especially when the position is filled by someone who couldn't earn half as much (in money, security, and prestige) if forced to compete on merit in the real world.
        • 77pt77 1y ago
          The "real world" is far from meritorious.
          • fuzzfactor 1y ago
            Yes, but it functionally allows a different kind of meritlessness.
      • odyssey7 1y ago
        I think ideally academia needs to evolve to be open to everyone and worshiping of nobody. Pop in to publish your article, return to whatever else you had been doing after. Repeat. University professors are rarely that innovative or good in their teaching methods, so that part could be to be taken up by teaching faculty instead.
        • coderatlarge 1y ago
          in my experience, teaching quality does benefit from repetition (it is also harmed by it!).
          • dagw 1y ago
            The big problem is that universities basically never hire or promote based on a persons teaching ability. One of the best lecturers I had at university was a postdoc who didn't get hired and ended up teaching at a 'third rate' university. One of the worst lecturers I had got head hunted by MIT.
            • NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
              >The big problem is that universities basically never hire or promote based on a persons teaching ability. Because they aren't intended to be educational. Universities (as they are run today) are primarily grant-revenue capture organizations, secondarily research organizations (at least to the degree necessary that grant money doesn't dry up because of fraudulent spending accusations), and finally after that, a begrudged effort is made at education for optics. If they could ditch the education angle entirely, they'd send the students home tomorrow.
              • SJC_Hacker 1y ago
                No, even ignoring tuition and fees a huge chunk of the endowment comes from alumni donations. Mostly former undergrads. There are pure grad institutions, such as UCSF and Baylor College of Medicine
            • 1y ago
      • hnthrow90348765 1y ago
        Tenure should be more widespread.
      • ocschwar 1y ago
        Once you get that annuity you wind up embroiled in the fighting to decide who gets tenure next. Your proteges or other people's.
    • butlike 1y ago
      It's really hard when there's no metrics beyond "perceived intelligence."
      • gus_massa 1y ago
        Citation numbers, weighted by impact factor, h-index, number of Ph.D. students... that are bad proxies for "perceived intelligence".
  • the-mitr 1y ago
    in academia many times it matters whom you know rather than what you know,
  • lo_zamoyski 1y ago
    Academia is a petty place. No "system" can ever overcome such problems. Sure, some political orders are better than others in various respects, but nothing will overcome the basic origin of our problems, which is us! The "system" itself is made from the crooked timber of our humanity, and even if some perfect "system" could be made, its perfection could only be actualized by a perfect people. Hence the need to focus less on systems and more on personal virtue. You want to find your greatest enemy? Look within. To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”
    • potato3732842 1y ago
      >To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.” This gets invoked way too often by bad people defending bad things that they were warned not to do/support at the time but did/supported anyway because there was something in it for them.
      • lo_zamoyski 1y ago
        Perhaps my wording was misleading. I am not claiming that reform is not possible. I am only claiming that the impulse, especially when it is messianic, that drives some reformers and revolutionaries is delusional, a dead end, and worse, usually involves tyrannical measures and produces more bad than it does good. Of course, academia could absolutely benefit from certain changes and reforms - I have argued for this myself; education has been derailed by inferior goals - , but the primary place where the work has to happen isn't policy or institutional structure, but ourselves. Indeed, the counterpart to your criticism is that excessive talk of reform is a way of avoiding the difficult and unpleasant work of having to look in the mirror. This does not exclude the need for certain reforms, but unless you get your own house in order first, you will be in poor shape to know what to reform and how.
    • avoutos 1y ago
      I think it's more beneficial to think in terms of incentive structures. How we structure societies and industries can incentivize virtue, but it can also disincentivize fradulance and incentivize good clean work more directly.
  • gchamonlive 1y ago
    I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and competitive, it's just capitalism. If we could come up with an economic system centered first on the care we could see it differently. Because what you see in small, specially poor communities is that trust in each other is strong. You could argue that the church tried it and we had the inquisition, but I think it's different. We have way more benefit of hindsight and the population is way more educated than it was in the middle ages. Not advocating for a renaissance of the Christian kingdom, but for embedding care and charity as first class moral values in economics.
    • Aurornis 1y ago
      > I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and competitive, it's just capitalism This is why when we look at animals in nature, which don’t have capitalism, they’re all getting along, right? Never competing for anything, fighting each other, or battling for mates? Being competitive is human nature. People will always compete for things, even if you try to artificially remove or forbid financial incentives. There are always more incentives. There will always be social standing to pursue, a coveted position, or the recognition of having accomplished something. > If we could come up with an economic system centered first on the care we could see it differently. Alternate economic systems that forbid capitalism rely on heavy government enforcement to prevent people from doing capitalistic things: Running unapproved businesses, being entrepreneurial, selling goods and services at market rate. This belief that we just need to come up with an alternate economic system that makes everybody stop trying to do trade and then suddenly everyone’s behaviors will change is also a fantasy. Even within a system where everyone is hypothetically taken care of, you would still see competition over prestige, accomplishments, and coveted positions (even if they paid the same).
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • code_for_monkey 1y ago
        animals do frequently get along and cooperate, ironically what youre doing is a reflection of capitalism, youre projecting the current economic system onto the animal planet. Think of that famously wrong study from the 70s about alpha wolves, its been disproven but people still of it as true because it molds to the economic system they understand. But also, I dont even think it matters. We have to live under an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly: will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?
  • tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago
    Funny, as someone who works in private sector, I always had the opposite view of academia: A zero-sum system based around a fixed pool of grants and positions that everyone competes for, and a terminal job ladder position where, once reached by successfully having competed for aforementioned grant $$, I become un-fireable. I would have to sleep with a gun under my pillow in such a world. There's already plenty of cheating in business, which is full of positive-sum win-win opportunities. I don't even want to imagine how badly I might behave in academia just in order to survive.
    • physicsguy 1y ago
      > I become un-fireable That's not been true in most countries for a long time
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
        Depends what you do. Yes you can get fired, but you have to do some really nasty things (embezzlement, sexual assault, etc) to get fired.
        • storus 1y ago
          Or when your department gets disbanded.
          • aoki 1y ago
            Ah, the “financial exigency” escape hatch
      • labcomputer 1y ago
        You are un-fireable for the usual reasons for which people outside academia worry about being fired. Layoffs aren't a thing in academia. Poor performance in the classroom isn't punishable. Failure to bring in grants isn't punishable. You can't be fired for disagreeing with your boss. You can (in most cases) publicly criticize the administration you work for, and advocate for many (yes, not all) controversial ideas.
  • 77pt77 1y ago
    > Its odd how I viewed academia as a beautiful place where people were judged by merit not by politics. If there's more than one human, you have politics.
  • gonzobonzo 1y ago
    One thing that really needs to be unbundled is assessments for credentials, teaching, and research. As it is now you want to be assessed for credentials at a top institution, you have to pay to take classes and learn at that institution. Which often leaves you in a class being "taught" by a researcher who's uninterested in teaching and unresponsive, and who hands off the actual job of teaching to an inexperienced graduate student making minimum wage. And for this privilege, you're charged a massive amount of money.
    • beezlebroxxxxxx 1y ago
      Part of the problem is many academic institutions, even prestigious ones, simply don't prioritize teaching. They don't even really prioritize challenging education. They prioritize prestige and opportunity hoarding. The hardest part about many of these schools is getting in. Once you're in, then grade inflation and the desire for the institution to retain it's prestige brand means the classes aren't particularly hard --- graduating is particularly easy and most students actually barely put in effort. Getting in is the golden ticket more than graduating. One solution, is for an institution to prioritize accessibility (easier to get in) but also prioritize difficulty (actually hard to graduate). This would reorient incentives around challenging education that pushes students to excel rather than coast after striving just to get in. Unfortunately, the priorities are the exact opposite today.
  • nick486 1y ago
    I had the same view until I went to do a small internship in a research lab. There, I realized that my research group's boss was spending most of his time submitting grant requests, that in my view distilled to 'Give use money and we will find X'. Which was absolutely antithetical to what I thought research was like(wait, aren't we supposed to not know what we will find ?). Then came the publishing part where you get reviews saying your paper isn't good enough because it didn't cite ${completely not relevant to the topic} paper (which sort of narrows down who the "anonymous reviewer" was). Then there's the quasi-feudal approach of putting the lab head in the authors. I mean, come on, I'm not sure the guy even knows the paper exists... It just wasn't my thing.
    • Fomite 1y ago
      Two notes: - Not all labs run this way. Mine doesn't. - Very few successful grants, in my experience, are "Give money and we'll find X". Rather, they tend to be "We're reasonably sure X is over here for $reasons, but we'd need money to actually confirm that."
      • nick486 1y ago
        I'm open to the idea that i somehow caught an outlier. then again, its a lab integrated to the general eu funding schemes, so it can't be that much of an outlier. your summary of a grant request doesn't really sound all that different from mine tbh, just more charitable. Its just that i naively came in with the expectation that it would be something like "we need X$ to explore domain $Y" "sure. here you go", then 2 years later "we found x y and z, see $papers, now we'd like $x2 to explore $y2". and back to square 1/2. a full broadcast over all available and unavailable channels of "please, master grant officer, just a few coins to explore $X a bit further, we'll very certainly find $Y", i was not ready for. Im overdoing the tone a bit to highlight that it had to be tuned to the grant officer, way more than it had to be tuned to reality. to promise to find whatever was popular in the field at the time. regardless of the practical facts of the field. because the people evaluating the proposal didnt know shit about the field. so when you were in the trench every day, it just sounded like absolute parody of what we were actually doing, explained to a kindergartener. i realize this comes off as a knock on my boss way more than I'd like. i absolutely don't mean to. he did what had to be done, so that his team can keep working, within the system he had to work with to move our field forward. and the money we got was well spent, no doubt here. but my view was : if I work my ass off for 10 years, I can be this guy. Do I want this? and the answer was a resounding, definitive "hell no". all the paper publishing shenanigans were just extra irritants that sealed my decision.
  • pixl97 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculus_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculu... Academia/Science has always been quarrelsome.
  • gmd63 1y ago
    Not all humans are practitioners of the terminal gamesmanship that is infecting our economy and government. It's about electing, promoting, and buying from the right people, and having the courage to properly punish those who have betrayed the good faith that powers successful societies.
  • SecretDreams 1y ago
    Academia these days is a lot like industry, but with worse pay, better schedule, and low consequences/verification if the data that is published is "wrong", intentionally or unintentionally.
    • moregrist 1y ago
      The schedule is not better. My quality of life increased dramatically when I left academia and realized that I had time for things like hobbies. Even in startups, there’s a tacit understanding that you’re exchanging your time for money and that this exchange has limits. This is simply not true in academics where the need to publish to keep funding (and often your job) is incredibly intense.
      • SecretDreams 1y ago
        Sorry, you're correct. I specifically meant flexible, which I equate to better. Both academia and in some industries will likely be 50+ hrs weekly, especially in the early days of their careers. But academia offers substantially more flexibility. Especially once you bring kids into the mix where you're more likely to need to shift your day around for children/child care. Posted this same comment elsewhere, but seemed equally appropriate as a response to you.
    • Fomite 1y ago
      My schedule, while more flexible, is not better than any one of my colleagues who went into industry.
      • SecretDreams 1y ago
        Sorry, you're correct. I specifically meant flexible, which I equate to better. Both academia and in some industries will likely be 50+ hrs weekly, especially in the early days of their careers. But academia offers substantially more flexibility. Especially once you bring kids into the mix where you're more likely to need to shift your day around for children/child care.
  • at-fates-hands 1y ago
    I was planning on going into academia in the early aughts and this was also around the time that there was a groundswell to take away tenure from professors. "They" wanted to set out a quota for how many times you needed to have your research published on a yearly basis to show you were still doing your job. I opted out when all three of my advisors during my first year of graduate work told to get out and that the whole field of academia was not the romantic vision I had aspired to be. It was quickly becoming toxic. One of my advisors had stopped taking money from universities, and was leaving to go work for a large pharmaceutical company doing research out in Siberian Russia. Another was quietly working on a degree in statistics to go work for the government. These were people who I admired and fashioned myself after. It's quite a shock when people you respect suddenly warn you academia is not where you want to be. I was lucky, the other two guys I was in grad school with went ahead anyways. Years later, I found out neither lasted more than a few years for exactly what you described and what I was warned of.
  • neilv 1y ago
    I viewed academia as altruistic and relatively enlightened. And I've certainly met many who live up to that. I've also occasionally heard of entire academic departments who should be in jail, for being pieces of crud. Then there's what I'm guessing is the bulk of academia: care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try to do their jobs competently, look out for their students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be. That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.
    • daymanstep 1y ago
      How is it better than the tech industry?
      • BrenBarn 1y ago
        Well, the amount of money being wasted is generally smaller, and often the results are not harming hundreds of millions of people around the world. (But it depends on the field.)
    • timkam 1y ago
      > That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall. I regularly see both worlds. What I find more troubling in academia is that it is difficult to openly talk about how flawed the system is, that people make mistakes, that papers have mistakes (the own ones as well as others'). We know all software has bugs; but the code that a PhD student hacks together over night is assumed to be flawless (the more senior people rarely even glance at it), otherwise the paper is all wrong, and papers are set in stone... So I genuinely struggle with the lack of a proper failure culture in academia, as it is designed as a system that is fundamentally geared against openly discussing failure.
      • neilv 1y ago
        I suspect there's many reasons for the field/department cultures. One of them, which was surprising to me (which I first heard from a friend in a hard STEM field), was what happens when student A's thesis result is found to be wrong due to flawed experiment... but only after student B is well into their own dissertation building upon A's result. Reportedly, everyone involved (A, B, their PI, the department, the university) has incentive to keep quiet about student A's bad result. B has an academic career to move forward, within funding and timeframes, and everyone else cares about reputation and money. And there is only downside for bystanders to complain, especially if it's other students especially vulnerable to retaliation/disfavor. Another one I've seen, which is less surprising, is when there seems to be a culture of alliance or truce among faculty. So, if someone is misbehaving, or makes a mistake, it's understood that no one is going to call them out or interfere, and no one wants to even know about it more than they have to. In general, no selfish benefit can come from that, but a whole lot of negative feedback can. Mind your own business, glass houses, etc.
  • TimTheTinker 1y ago
    It seems to me that the "elephant in the room" no one has mentioned yet w.r.t. academia is the model of modern academic administration, where universities are run like cruise ships (look at the perks kids are paying for these days!) with hedge funds attached, and have no "skin in the game" with regard to the incredibly high financial risks that students take when they pay for tuition. If: (a) students paid 1/10 of what they pay today[0], (b) all the on-campus expensive perks were ended (new buildings sold, etc.) and the administration headcount dropped to 1 per every 50 students, (c) tuition went directly to professors, research, and basic groundskeeping, (d) some kind of financial arrangement were put in place so universities had skin in the game with regard to the success of their graduates[0] then I'm positive the academic system would become far more effective at educating students and preparing them for life, and there would be a positive trickle-down effect to scientific research and the politics there. [0] State-funded secondary education in European countries costs far less than university education in the US. There's a reason for that - unlike students with easy access to debt, the government won't pay such exorbitant fees. [1] A very rough stab at an idea for making universities have skin in the game: make tuition for degrees conferred refundable by some percentage (50%?) if more than a certain fraction (10%?) of graduates with B- or higher GPA in their majors are collectively unable to find a job in their field within 2 years of graduation. If a university needed to withhold that guarantee for some majors, that would be a very helpful signal for prospective students. But the point isn't the specifics, it's that just the presence of such a lever (and its absence at some universities or majors) would be a powerful signal to prospective students, better align the university's incentives, and cause a lot of necessary changes.
    • Fomite 1y ago
      Most universities do not have "hedge fund" class endowments. It should also be noted that there are reasons tuition is the way it is. State allocations for higher ed were slashed in 2008, and didn't really get put back even when the economy was doing well. Similarly, federal research dollars (which fund the vast bulk of research, not tuition) has been pretty flat for decades (the amount of a non-modular NIH R01, for example, hasn't changed since the Clinton administration). Tuition is the only lever left to most institutions.
  • epolanski 1y ago
    Former solar researcher here, had the same experience. I'll summarize it like this: - join one of the most prestigious laboratories for my master's thesis in the world - be assigned work based on a paper published in the same lab by a previous researcher - can't replicate the results for s*t for months, put in insane overtime hours getting ridiculously good at all the processes, still nothing - randomly talk about my issues with a random phd in the lab (great scientist with tens of thousands of citations) which quickly scans the data and notes that the voltage obtained by the system in the publication is literally impossible, but by raising the voltage you can easily fake out the amount of electricity generated by the system. Nobody really caught it before because you need some very intimate experience with those systems, and it's just one random (albeit important) point. - ask why this happens - she explains that only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid - she explains that only professors that run labs with a huge number of citations can find good funding - only good funding can allow you to get the material, equipment and countless number of bodies (phds) to run as many experiments as possible and thus grow your position in the scientific world Essentially there's way too many incentives to cheat and ignore the cheating for all the people involved. And due to the fact that as soon as you enter a niche (and literally everything is a niche in science) everybody knows each other toxic things happen all around. I wanted to be a researcher, but having wasted ultimately 7 months of my life trying to get numbers that were impossible to get, and having understood it was ALL about money (no funds -> no researchers/equipment -> papers -> citations -> funds) and politics I called it quits. I don't know how to fix it other than several governments and their education ministries making a joined effort to have scientific papers where each result has to be thoroughly reviewed by multiple other labs. It's expensive, but I don't see other ways.
    • TheBigSalad 1y ago
      And this encourages the people with integrity to quit.
      • epolanski 1y ago
        I wouldn't say they all quit, but they ultimately have to settle in less prestigious and less funded labs/universities. I've met countless great scientists in Italy which were ultimately wasted as professors and achieved little as scientists. I'm not saying that teaching isn't important, but it's a skill completely unrelated to being a good scientist, there's no overlap at all.
  • zevon 1y ago
    Another ex-researcher here. Similar experience. I went in with hopes of a lot of rationality and intense cooperation between people who would be there mostly for a shared curiosity. Fast forward years and... Good grief - so, so many people publicly being shouted down, shamed, bullied, insulted. So many serious abuses of power - up to sexual and bodily - essentially without consequences for the abusers (often with way more negative consequences for the victims if they complained). So many tears, so many ends to academic careers of people who were really smart and really cared - in quite a few cases accompanied by burn-outs and other long-term health consequences. So much tax money down the drain with questionable accounting up to outright lies. So, so many utterly absurd intrigues and wars between mini-kingdoms based on nothing but the feelings of the biggest, loudest and most vicious narcissists. So many publications of questionable methodology that are sliced as thinly as they possibly can be and are hyper-targeted towards all-important journals or conferences. And so much more soul-destroying nonsense. I'm still mostly in academia but nowadays, I focus on teaching and infrastructure. Especially with teaching, I feel that I can make more of a long-term impact that I ever could as a researcher - not least because I have way more freedom for discussions and interesting projects with students (I still have to deal with way more hostile, petty and sometimes outright dangerous BS than I feel comfortable with - but it's better than in the even-higher-pressure parts of the system).
• newsclues 1y ago
  Lots of industries these days seem to be rife with fraud and corruption. In Canada the education system was abused as a immigration path, in part because the schools were greedy and corrupt.
  • avoutos 1y ago
    Yeah, it's there in every industry, though it seems more prevalent in those that are heavily reliant on taxpayer money.
    • pixl97 1y ago
      Maybe it seems relevant because those are the ones getting caught? Or maybe the corporate owned news doesn't like to publish corporate corruption?
      • FredPret 1y ago
        This only makes sense if the corruption is in the same corp that's doing the reporting. Corporations have an incentive to undercut one another and compete. They'll only band together when something affects them all at the same time, which is basically only economy-wide events.
    • newsclues 1y ago
      Taxpayers have the most money, and aren't as interested in protecting the money, unlike people that have ownership. If your goal is to extract a percentage, find the biggest cashflow to maximize profits.
    • Fomite 1y ago
      By that logic, the defense industry should have orders of magnitude more problems than the average research university.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • 77pt77 1y ago
• lelanthran 1y ago
  It's gonna get worse as LLMs enable "scientists" to publish with a higher frequency and less work.
• agentultra 1y ago
  How are they generating a profit? The article hints that medical residents are a large source and it could be effects like competition and visas… does that account for the rate of growth? Are these unscrupulous editors making “payola” or something?
  • JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Yeah, all I could gather from the article is that published-paper probably translates into padding out your resume. I don't doubt this could translate to one's likelihood of landing a prestigious job, a better salary, hiring bonus, etc.
    • Fomite 1y ago
      There are countries where academic jobs have very firm "Publish X papers for promotion" thresholds, but where the venue for the paper doesn't really matter. This is one of the major markets for paper mills.
  • fHr 1y ago
    Look what happens in biotech constantly they prop up studies and results in papers and then they hedge with buying puts as they know it's all bs and they have raised enough exit liquidity to make huge profits on the drop.
• fabian2k 1y ago
  This is more concerning than the usual paper mills as the crap papers are published in otherwise legitimate journals. The pure paper mills are less destructive as people are much less likely to read and use those papers. But if you have ever growing numbers of crap papers mixed in regular journals that will be a problem.
  • lo_zamoyski 1y ago
    Careerism and obsession with "status", especially when tied to superficial things like publication count. The loftier aims that academia is supposed to enable are crushed by lesser appetites.
  • terminalbraid 1y ago
    If a journal is publishing "crap" then the term "otherwise legitimate" isn't helpful. The journal becomes illegitimate because you cannot trust what it has published any longer. Unless there's some way to discriminate between the failed and successful review processes it has failed in its purpose.
• aaa_aaa 1y ago
  Nobody cares. State pays the salaries, BS conferences, BS journals, BS patents. Everybody is happy, no one can be fired. As long as stats look good (R&D per capita, publication, science indexes etc. ) gravy train will move on.
  • avoutos 1y ago
    And even minus the BS, researchers seem more comfortable with making minor incremental improvements in established science rather than taking risks.
  • intended 1y ago
    People care. The state isn’t the only source of funds, and researchers are in it to do research. PHDs make little money, and getting into academia is not generally considered a good career path. The only people who can’t get fired are the few people with tenure. Most people struggle to get that. Perhaps we just need institutions set up to do replication of papers?
• quantummagic 1y ago
  This really undermines the "trust the science" narrative. It has become much more about cushy white collar jobs, than the brightest minds being laser focused on understanding and bettering mankind.
  • hardanonymity 1y ago
    It's complicated. There is a whole lot of corruption and fraud in science. But this kind of fraud doesn't end up leading to dominating narratives. The fraud remains part of the 99% of science that is invisible to the general population and that is precisely why the fraud isn't so easily uncovered in the first place.
    • sickofparadox 1y ago
      What percentage of papers even reproduce these days? Is it more than 50%?
      • ktallett 1y ago
        The bigger issue is what percentage of papers contain enough details to even attempt to reproduce.
        • fuzzfactor 1y ago
          In over 80 volumes of ASTM publications, I would estimate they may amount to more kilos than that. Almost all of the actual lab work requires statistical determination of repeatability & reproducibility to be calculated between different labs, and the summary is included with each document. I would say there is way less than a kilo without this. And the amount of supporting raw data on file amounts to kilos which dwarf the pages published. Formally accessible so everything can be thoroughly reviewed at any time in the future, allowing for complete reconsideration if called for. Scietific instrumentation doesn't stand still. So it definitely can be done. Even if it's to the extreme not suitable for everybody else. The less-reproducible documents are there, they did the best they could, but have a smell not shared by the good stuff. You know "exactly" how good or bad the underlying science turned out to be in the real world. Paradoxically, or intuitively, as the case may be, if you're going to utilize the less-reliable techniques (most likely because they're the best there is), you may need to know how bad they are most of all. Maybe other publications should raise the bar on statistics as appropriate, I figure zero statistics is about as far as you can get from ASTM "standards". Some places probably have a lot further to go than others and it would be nice to have a whole lot sweeter smell all around.
• pixxel 1y ago
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• lazystar 1y ago
  ya know... i wonder if this is how a religion is formed. at the start, science was about identifying and explaining the things that were true, observable, and agreed upon by all. anyone who was present at the birth of an event that caused a religion would have had that same mentality. over time, generations pass and the concept that held the group together has shifted - it now attempts to explain new concepts, and the scientists/priests that make up the governing body decide tge truth based on opinion, rather than fact. the point is, we're on a dangerous path. if left unchecked, the term scientist will eventually have the same meaning as the word priest.
  • blackbear_ 1y ago
    Not at all. Research that appears useful is going to be picked up by others, and if it's really a fraud it will be exposed eventually. That is the check you are looking for and indeed how we realized there's some fraud and reproducibility issues, btw. I'll be waiting for the day actual religions gets the same level of scrutiny.
  • aurizon 1y ago
    Religion - cargo cult et al. It is quite clear that religions arose from tribalism to aggregate tribes into pan religious groups. They are de-facto control mechanisms = toe the line = give us your $$ = fight/kill as ordered.
  • arp242 1y ago
    > if left unchecked, the term scientist will eventually have the same meaning as the word priest. Except if you base things like planes, computers, or medicine on science they provably work. Obviously it's not perfect and probably never will be as science is a human endeavour and humans are not perfect. But dismissing all of it as "just a religion" fundamentally misunderstands both science and religion.
• shazbotter 1y ago
  Hasn't scientific fraud always been an industry and we rely on signal to noise ratios to be good enough to get by? Alternatively, in times of high wealth inequality are we putting a higher burden on our academics to survive, and forcing them to do more and more, thereby increasing the likelihood they will turn to cheating to survive?
  • AlexandrB 1y ago
    The whole "publish or perish" paradigm has commodified scientific research. My theory is that the pre-WWI paradigm of academia being mainly for rich kids who could afford to devote their life to science did not scale, but it also had fewer issues with "making stuff up" since scientists were in it for the love of the game rather than making a living. I don't think we should go back to that model, but the MBA-inspired approach of treating "scientist" as a fungible role in a system and trying to apply metrics like citations to measure "impact" is doomed to fail in my opinion.
    • d0odk 1y ago
      I directionally agree with you. But there are plenty of examples of scientists being extremely petty, political or egotistical further back in history. Newton and Leibniz. Gauss withholding publication of non-Euclidean geometry presumably due to fear of Kant. I wonder if there is any empirical analysis of what has historically funded/supported scientific work (private funding vs. academic systems). I also wonder whether a lone genius in it for the "love of the game" could make much progress in cutting edge science nowadays, given the cost of experiments and the specialization of fields. Really interesting food for thought.
      • fuzzfactor 1y ago
        You don't have to be a genius to make way more progress on the latest equipment compared to PhD's in their environment, with their constraints and encumberment, plus their survivor bias based on "dramatically" different things other than progress. You could even do it as a complete gentleman without ruffling any feathers at lower cost than most well-paid corporate workers waste, and get more done if you set your mind to it. Sometimes even in your spare time. So I definitely wouldn't sell the lone genius short. Could very well be an even better bet.
• karmakurtisaani 1y ago
  We live in the age of grifting. Too much winner takes all incentives in the society, I suppose.
• brbcompiling 1y ago
  So academic politics is like Game of Thrones… but with footnotes?
• booleandilemma 1y ago
  It's all about what we measure for, right? Publish or perish is like telling programmers they need to output 1,000 lines of code per week. What do you think will happen?
• gtmitchell 1y ago
  Unsurprising. It's the natural byproduct of overproduction of scientists, brutally competitive job markets, and the shortsighted decisions to use publications as the primary metric for hiring and promotion decisions. Anyone who is alarmed by this hasn't been paying attention to the perverse incentives scientists have been facing for decades.
• mos87 1y ago
  Wonder why's that... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10894160.2025.2473971 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10894160.2025.24...
• nialse 1y ago
  Well, maybe we should not trust authors that make vauge unsubstantiated claims? The ingress: "Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities..." The article: nothing The ingress overreaches, oversimplifies and mixes hypotheses with results. Is this a test? EDIT: Refers to the paper referenced by the article.
• pks016 1y ago
  Another problem: Publishing in good journals is for the rich. Open science is a paradox. They require such huge amount of money to publish. My next manuscript is still going to Plos One ( :(given the reputation) bc it's free to publish. It's such a messed up system that prevents me from even trying to publish in good journals.
  • JohnKemeny 1y ago
    Why would you want your stuff in PLOS? That's a huge red flag on a CV. Why not put it on (bio)arxiv and be done with it? It's not peer reviewed in either case.
    • pks016 1y ago
      I have thought of that. But this study is a registered report so I need to submit to a journal before running the study and go through review. Plos has peer review but it's not as rigorous as others. Not many journals accept registered report in my field. So, first option is Plos Biology, else Plos one
• drak0n1c 1y ago
  Government subsidies enable fraud and largess. Individuals and organizations are inherently less careful and results-oriented with Other People's Money. That is starting to be rectified, for better or worse.
  • thoroughburro 1y ago
    This logic applies equally to non-government investment.
  • derbOac 1y ago
    All money is someone else's money until it's your money. This is as true of private as public sector activities. The problem is what's incentivized to be rewarded with someone else's money. In my opinion, the ultimate problem in academics (aside from pyramid schemes) are administrations applying a profit model to science, where science is a means to a profit end (for the institution) rather than an end in itself. That is, the problem is in expecting a public service to operate as a private profit enterprise. Sometimes you pay someone to do something, not to make a profit for you directly.
• resource_waste 1y ago
  I am so happy I learned about Philosophical Pragmatism. If its useful use it, if its not useful don't use it. Replicated studies can likely be replicated under the same conditions. N=1 means you might be able to believe it, but if the results contradict reality, toss it out. I no longer feel like I need to 'trust science'. No need to trust. Use it if its useful, don't if its not. This has eliminated those grandiose happy papers that propose a pretty popular fair world that contradict what we actually see.
• tornikeo 1y ago
  > First-author paper published at a top conference I now find that requirement in most AI-related high-tech jobs. Starter salary for these jobs is often $150k+. When someone is willing to pay you $150k+ for having published a paper, fraud definitely makes (financial) sense. Basically, the problem is the demand, and the demand corrupts the metrics (h-index). I think that having a paper published would become less and less significant in the future. With time, businesses will also move onto other signals of success.
  • epistasis 1y ago
    The papers published at top conferences are not the papers that is coming from this "industry" as the paper calls it. These fraudulent papers are identified like this: > For instance, of the 79 papers that one editor had handled at PLOS ONE, 49 have been retracted. That's not what's happen at top conferences.
    • timkam 1y ago
      It is well-known that top-conferences had and still have many problems. Some examples: There used to be the problem with authors adding new co-authors after acceptance, aka "selling seats". There is a debate about how many papers one should be allowed to submit, as some people with money and influence are heavily franchising. It is unclear to what extent there is implicit and explicit reviewer collusion. Even double-blind reviews don't really solve the problem. If we don't admit that there are fundamental problems that affect all of us (academics) and instead pretend it is only the lesser people who f things up, we'll all be screwed sooner or later.
      • azan_ 1y ago
        > There used to be the problem with authors adding new co-authors after acceptance, aka "selling seats". Top AI conferences allow that? That's insane.
        • timkam 1y ago
          They do not allow this any more. So _that_ problem has actually been addressed.
• strangeloops85 1y ago
  The particular type of fraud described here (paper mills etc.) is less common in the U.S. (different types of fraud may exist but that's more subtle and complex). There tend to be specific geographic clusters associated with this behavior that have to do with how university expansions have been done in many countries. Oddly enough, pre-LLMs, I would have said most of these crap paper mill papers didn't really affect the actual fields. Yes, they cited each other but outside the citation ring didn't really alter the field in a knowledge sense. But now.. if these get picked up in Deep Research it's a problem.
  • ivanstepanovftw 1y ago
    For U.S. it is common to write a paper about some small change to widely adopted structure and present it like a novelty.
• captainkrtek 1y ago
  This presentation from Defcon in 2018 on “Fake Science Factory” was fantastic and pretty funny as well: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ras_VYgA77Q https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ras_VYgA77Q
• 1970-01-01 1y ago
  Again, at what level of fraud do we consider defunding if not now? When 90% is irreproducible crap? 95%? 98%? Yes, you will lose out on 'healthy tissue'. That damage is necessary when the cancer is spreading.
  • alphazard 1y ago
    Most of the opinions you hear online about the importance of funding science come from science fanatics who don't have any idea how the sausage is made, and are not themselves scientifically minded. It's part of their self constructed identity as a "smart person" who "believes in evidence". Press your face against the glass, and it's much more complicated. The institutions that we have made for funding science don't reliably channel money towards the best ideas. All the experts in the field have figured out how to work the system well enough to build lives for themselves, and this leads to the tautology that "experts" support the status quo. We don't consider someone an expert if they aren't thriving in the current institutions. Anytime someone mentions new institutions e.g. prediction markets that might better allocate funding, or even enrich the best scientists, there is a visceral backlash.
    • Fomite 1y ago
      Every scientist I've talked to about my pie-in-the-sky funding mechanism - getting past a "top 50%" triage and then a lottery has met said idea with "Yeah, that would probably work. better." I'd also suggest that lower scientific funding levels exacerbate the problems with the current system - risky research is less likely to be funded, as are new investigators, etc. Large, established labs are also better able to weather the storm.
  • IronyMan100 1y ago
    i don't think its a good faith argument to compare science with cancer. Do you have numbers? Are you sure 90% is irreproducible? How is cancer similar to whats going on in science?
    • michaelsshaw 1y ago
• bsoles 1y ago
  I remember "fondly" when a professor in China stole my paper from my PhD thesis; equations, pictures, and everything. I only found about it because a Chinese student in another lab came across both papers and was puzzled by the extreme similarities. I tried to contact his/her university to let them know about the fraud and never got a reply. Good times ...
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • firefax 1y ago
    comedy option: visit as a tourist and show up in their office. I did this to someone who ripped off my master's thesis, word for word, as a side trek on holiday and it was like steam came out their ears when they realized if they call the campus authorities to escort me out they'd generate an incident report of why I was there. Edit: This was not in China btw -- ironically despite the stereotypes all the folks I've collaborated with from there have been pretty ethical and hardworking, it's a shame some ruin things for everyone.
    • anigbrowl 1y ago
      So how'd it end?
      • firefax 1y ago
        They ran away.
  • kenjackson 1y ago
    I had a similar experience. I was visiting the UK doing research and a Chinese post-doc was there. Apparently he was taking our methods and results and sending them to someone in China. They published in some journals we’d never heard of, at the same time we realized there was almost nothing we could do about it. Shaming had no impact on them. But their actual impact on us was negligible.
• dimal 1y ago
  With the dynamics of publish or perish being what they are, what’s the way out? As long as there is high demand for papers (not knowledge) then some market will pop up to feed that demand. I hate to say it, but cutting off the money spigot of government funding for papers seems like a good start. It feels like our society has been optimized to game a few metrics like this (government wants to raise GDP, CEOs want to increase shareholder value, university deans want to increase funding to write papers), and all of them have toxic second order effects that make society worse.
  • Fomite 1y ago
    I'd assert it's not really a good start. The problem is largely rooted in scarcity - that there are very grants, and jobs, etc. that need to be competed for, and maybe it's worth it to you to overlook those couple outliers. You are after all pretty sure you're right, and they don't really mess anything up, and if you get this paper out, you'll have that good faculty job, and you'll do good work, etc... Funding collapsing is just going to incentivize that. To be as competitive as possible for increasingly scarce resources. You won't be able to run that replication study, or document that code, or let a grad student spend six months chasing down that odd result, because the funding for all that just got cut.
• speedylight 1y ago
  Whoever is profiting from this shit needs to be sanctioned by the Treasury, make their money useless.
• currymj 1y ago
  there are many separate problems of scientific fraud. I think these issues sometimes get confused which is unhelpful. 1. apparently-legitimate papers in prestigious journals with fraudulent data. extremely bad. 2. legitimate papers in legitimate journals which, innocently or not, just used bad methods and have wrong conclusions. this is "the replication crisis". 3. totally fake papers in paper mills with no meaningful peer review. it's really easy to spot these, no one is individually getting taken in by the results, but... 3a. sometimes they wind up in a meta-analysis, which is really bad because people might trust the meta analysis. Problem 1 is morally worst and much more common than one would hope. Outright fabricated data in a Nature or NEJM publication (as has happened) is a disaster. Problem 2 is amenable to reform for the most part (fields are already doing this). Problem 3 isn't a problem at all for scientific knowledge per se, although universities and funding bodies might not be pleased their scientists are buying fake papers. You can just ignore the paper mills. But Problem 3a can actually alter policy, which is pretty serious.
  • libraryatnight 1y ago
    Is 3/3a about to be more serious with LLMs in the mix?
    • Fomite 1y ago
      "about to" it is. In a recent conversation with the editor-in-chief of a journal I am on the editorial board of, a substantial bulk of the submissions we get are LLM written papers that essentially randomly look for associations in accessible data, which are then sold to faculty (primarily in China).
      • mike_hearn 1y ago
        Arguably "randomly look for associations in accessible data" is like 90% of academic publishing even before LLMs though ;)
    • IronyMan100 1y ago
      No, probably Not. Nobody is reading these Journals anyway. It's only good one resumes. i think even 3a is Not a problem because fake papers will follow a specific pattern in Meta Analysis. Should be catched in one of the "filter" stages during Meta Analysis.
• geodel 1y ago
  Finally, fraudsters are waking up to scientific methods and tools. Hoping soon unscientific frauds will be a thing of past.
  • koekoe 1y ago
    I gotta say you made my day. Both the hero that we needed and wanted.
• rob_c 1y ago
  Really the reproducibility crisis might have had a financial motivation... Well I never... </sarcasm>
• higgins 1y ago
  make money, do science
• hughw 1y ago
  Is anyone else receiving crap like this? "Lucky"? Dear Dr. [myname], I hope this email finds you well. My name is lucky,and I am a receiving editor currently handling submissions for multiple SCOPUS-indexed journals. These journals are dedicated to fostering high-quality research and advancing scholarly discourse across various disciplines. At present, they are actively seeking innovative and impactful research contributions, and I would like to extend a sincere invitation for you to submit your valuable work for consideration. We recognize the significance of your expertise and the effort that goes into producing meaningful research. If you have a manuscript ready or are in the process of developing a research project, I would be happy to provide further details on the submission process, journal options, and any other relevant information. Our editorial team is committed to ensuring a smooth and transparent review process, providing constructive feedback, and facilitating the timely dissemination of quality research. If you are interested, please feel free to reach out with any questions or for guidance on submission requirements. I would be delighted to assist you in any way possible. I look forward to your response and the opportunity to collaborate with you in bringing valuable research to a wider audience. Best regards, Lucky Receiving Editor
• Animats 1y ago
  Look what happened to Nature, which used to be good. It was once the definitive journal of the life sciences. They became "Nature Portfolio", and now publish all these titles: Nature Nature Africa Nature Aging Nature Astronomy Nature Biomedical Engineering Nature Biotechnology Nature Cancer Nature Cardiovascular Research Nature Catalysis Nature Cell Biology Nature Chemical Biology Nature Chemical Engineering Nature Chemistry Nature Cities Nature Climate Change Nature Communications Nature Computational Science Nature Digest Nature Ecology & Evolution Nature Electronics Nature Energy Nature Food Nature Genetics Nature Geoscience Nature Health Nature Human Behaviour Nature Immunology Nature India Nature Italy Nature Machine Intelligence Nature Materials Nature Medicine Nature Mental Health Nature Metabolism Nature Methods Nature Microbiology Nature Nanotechnology Nature Neuroscience Nature Photonics Nature Physics Nature Plants Nature Protocols Nature Reviews Biodiversity Nature Reviews Bioengineering Nature Reviews Cancer Nature Reviews Cardiology Nature Reviews Chemistry Nature Reviews Clean Technology Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology Nature Reviews Disease Primers Nature Reviews Drug Discovery Nature Reviews Earth & Environment Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering Nature Reviews Endocrinology Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology Nature Reviews Genetics Nature Reviews Immunology Nature Reviews Materials Nature Reviews Methods Primers Nature Reviews Microbiology Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology Nature Reviews Nephrology Nature Reviews Neurology Nature Reviews Neuroscience Nature Reviews Physics Nature Reviews Psychology Nature Reviews Rheumatology Nature Reviews Urology Nature Sensors Nature Structural & Molecular Biology Nature Sustainability Nature Synthesis Nature Water Nature Energy is notorious for battery hype articles. Nature Materials is notorious for surface chemistry hype ("nanotechnology") articles. I suspect some of the others have similar problems.
  • staunton 1y ago
    Don't forget the "nature partner journals", which people also call (and cite as) "Nature XY"...
• firefax 1y ago
  Not only an industry, it can make you isolated an even drop out of a PhD if you're not part of it. I found myself subject to demonstrably false claims in paper reviews because I stood up for academic integrity. Because I am kind, I have chosen not to out those reviewers, but I was pretty goddamn offended since my work involved vulnerable populations and censorship circumvention, so by silencing my research folks were not simply stymieing my ego, but harming vulnerable populations in the name of... of what? Being a professor/researcher is not lucrative. I get the drive to "get funding" but... my impression was that narcissistic cheaters from undergrad couldn't get industry jobs and doubled down on their unethical behavior at the expense of those of us trying to actually do useful work for civil society. I might not have had a 4.0 GPA or been the guy always getting into top tier venues, but at least my work was my own work, and it was solid.
• WalterBright 1y ago
  Anytime one has a system with lots of money sloshing around, and dependent on altruism with few checks and balances, this is the inevitable result.
• nobodyandproud 1y ago
  It’s absolutely insane to me that medical students need to publish research in order to not be disadvantaged at securing a residency.
• nudgeOrnurture 1y ago
  the biggest problem is the foreseeable timing. there were scientists and engineers everywhere who warned the world. who didn't listen?
• willmadden 1y ago
  I'm still waiting for the investigation into "Surgisphere".
• Atlas667 1y ago
  Anything that you do as a career will lead to this. - Split a paper into three - Waste efforts by running the same research with a slight change - Plagiarism - Inter-peer favors (corruption, dishonesty) Funding/grants, journals, publishers, paper count requirements, are the true source of these behaviors. This is what markets are when left to develop. Academia made itself game-able. You can't have truth and profits sit in the same room. Capitalism has made a very nice chair for careerism to sit in.
• khana 1y ago
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• insane_dreamer 1y ago
  Fabricated data is rare. But cherry-picked data or model parameters which yield the desired result but are not robust or replicable, are not. That’s the biggest problem.
  • ethan_smith 1y ago
    P-hacking and HARKing have become so normalized in many fields that researchers often don't even recognize when they're engaging in questionable research practices.
• aurizon 1y ago
  The process needs 'Darwinising' = plagiarised stuff carries an academic survival burden. Set up an LLM to do a cross-associative search. Latest models should be quite capable of this = A human sieves the sand for gold and find who does not live to procreate!!
• morpheos137 1y ago
  Our economy is largely based on fraud. Forcing people to work hard to keep up with inflation and compete socially and buy things that actually do not improve their quality of life.
• visibleleaf 1y ago
  Hindawi, Frontiers, MDPI are garbage for-profit publishers. The problem is paid-for open-access. Society journal are not immune but much more closely monitored by dedicated teams.
  • Fomite 1y ago
    Frontiers is really interesting to me, because some colleagues in other fields view their "version" of Frontiers In $Field as a meh journal of last resort, and I view Frontiers in Public Health as actively malign.
    • pks016 1y ago
      Some Frontiers journals are good. You have to go look at individual paper on merit.
      • JohnKemeny 1y ago
        This completely undermines the purpose of peer-reviewing, though. If it's necessary to do your own peer-reviewing for a publishing house, it could just as well be arxiv.
        • pks016 1y ago
          I know, but that's the reality. Sometimes the garbage I read from some journals is the reason I want to quit academia. How the hell those get published!! I have stopped taking journals at face value. Many things I read from Science or Nature journals (in my field) are just wrong
  • JohnKemeny 1y ago
    Also PLOS ONE and a whole bunch of IEEE journals.
• mrangle 1y ago
  We need to acknowledge that well-funded science driven by robust mission-focused systems (like pharma companies) is often a different animal than the field of science generally. In the below comments, I'm speaking about the latter. In my experience good science is much rarer than bad. Also, politics and hidden hands (eg: third party funding sources) have been shaping science likely since science's inception. It's an open secret that quite often science is not scientific. And that if you are seeing a published paper like this, then critiques have willfully ignored that fact. I'm sure that this subtly varies from field to field, but I think that one tends to accept and become numb to the dross. Because it is overwhelming. The approach becomes to quietly try to filter for and celebrate better science, and otherwise say nothing. Beyond being overwhelmed, this approach may be necessary for political survival in some fields.
• SCAQTony 1y ago
  If I am not mistaken, losing excess weight, emphaisis on excess, can extend life as well.
• g42gregory 1y ago
  Trust the Science, they said. :-)
  • kangs 1y ago
    Most people, even here, only read headlines anyway. Every time a really weird science claim is made in the news, finding the paper takes a while, if it's at all available. Then reading it correctly. Then usually, you can write a a blog post about how fake and bad the paper is (that 10 people in the world will read, vs the news reaching millions), and wonder how the one and a half peer reviewers approved it. It's actually a fun exercise, IMO. I did it a couple of time for surface temperature claims, which were completely bogus. It took me a couple of days to actually "peer review" the paper though, so it's expensive in time. Beside "science" is not a thing to trust, it's a process. It's never fully correct by definition.
  • pks016 1y ago
    Trust the process of science not bad science
    • g42gregory 1y ago
      Sorry, but they clearly didn't say that.
• cess11 1y ago
  Here's the oldest article I can find on Leonid Schneider's blog, from 2015. https://forbetterscience.com/2015/10/28/is-frontiers-a-potential-predatory-publisher/ https://forbetterscience.com/2015/10/28/is-frontiers-a-poten... It's about a group of journals optimised for sleazy publishing. The author claims he left research due to rampant fraud and went into cartoons and insulting the perpetrators instead. In 2021 the Wikipedia page on paper mills was created. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Research_paper_mill&action=history&offset=&limit=500 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Research_paper_mi... Macchiarini has been at it since, what, 2005? Basically, one might as well go as far back as WWII and Ghislaine Maxwell's dad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnmFTvlrsOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnmFTvlrsOo
• KolibriFly 1y ago
  This is genuinely unsettling, though sadly not surprising. The idea that scientific fraud has industrialized to this extent is a damning indictment of how broken parts of the academic publishing system have become.
• j45 1y ago
  Become? While it's not my industry, my general understanding this has been more than just isolated covert pockets for some time.
• cyanydeez 1y ago
  Scientific, political, capitalist. There's simply only one growth market left and that's our imagination.
• BobbyTables2 1y ago
  Considering that the PHD process is as much about research as it is marketing/spin, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised the latter was formerly commercialized. I became disillusioned when I realized people were publishing the most minute of contributions because they were desperate trying to show something to graduate. Things stay the same when grants and funding are involved too. Even in the respected publications, the reviewers are inexperienced students. Imagine if a Senior Developer had 3 high school Interns as the only reviewers for all merge requests. Not sure what the solution is, just too many disincentives for quality.
• cyrialize 1y ago
  If you are interested in learning more about scientific fraud, I highly recommend you check out the YouTube channel Bobby Broccoli [0]. He makes engaging deep-dive documentaries on scientific fraud and scandals. It is absolutely /fascinating/. Videos are anywhere from 30m to 2h long, or broken up into several 1h episodes. The series he has on cold fusion (not the Adobe programming language, the other cold fusion) is really good! [1]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/user/BobbyBroccoli https://www.youtube.com/user/BobbyBroccoli [1]: https://youtu.be/jn92eWhGG14?si=xvH8ChiSGHsFp2Bw https://youtu.be/jn92eWhGG14?si=xvH8ChiSGHsFp2Bw
• EverydayBalloon 1y ago
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• rcbdev 1y ago
  Academia, at its core, is just not a capitalistic pursuit. Any attempts to turn it into one will inevitably pervert it.
• Ray_Casey 1y ago
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• Ray_Casey 1y ago
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