Fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point

‘The situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point

Robin McKie

Tens of thousands of bogus research papers are being published in journals in an international scandal that is worsening every year, scientists have warned. Medical research is being compromised, drug development hindered and promising academic research jeopardised thanks to a global wave of sham science that is sweeping laboratories and universities.

Last year the annual number of papers retracted by research journals topped 10,000 for the first time. Most analysts believe the figure is only the tip of an iceberg of scientific fraud.

“The situation has become appalling,” said Professor Dorothy Bishop of Oxford University. “The level of publishing of fraudulent papers is creating serious problems for science. In many fields it is becoming difficult to build up a cumulative approach to a subject, because we lack a solid foundation of trustworthy findings. And it’s getting worse and worse.”

There’s far more scientific fraud than anyone wants to admit

Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus

The president of Stanford, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, resigned last month after a series of investigations exposed serious problems in his research; an independent review of Tessier-Lavigne’s work found no evidence that he falsified data himself but concluded that his research failed standards “of scientific rigor and process” and that he failed to correct the record on multiple occasions.

And in June it was revealed that a scholar at Harvard Business School, Francesca Gino, was accused of having falsified research about – wait for it – honesty.

A specialist in critical care medicine, Boldt studied a blood substitute that was used in hospitals across Europe. His results, which were published between around 1990 and 2009 and widely cited, suggested that the product – used to help keep blood pressure and the delivery of oxygen to cells adequate – was saving lives. After his fraud came to light and researchers reanalyzed all of the available data while leaving Boldt’s results out, it turned out the opposite was true: the substitute was “associated with a significant increased risk of mortality and acute kidney injury”.

Terrifying.

Is There a Solution to Low Quality Research in Science?

Denyse O'Leary

Recently, molecular biologist Henry Miller and statistician Stanley Young published a thoughtful essay at Genetic Literacy Project, asking why trust in scientific research is “at an all time low.” Instead of merely blaming the public, their work honestly assesses the reasons for loss of trust.

They’ve now followed it up with a second essay, this time at American Council on Science and Health, “The Validity Of Much Of Published Scientific Research Is Questionable (Part 2),” delving further into the issue.

There are a lot of sides to this. At first thought it at least seems that an age of moral corruption and decadence of our society has arrived and thoroughly invaded the halls of science. I think this "crisis in science" is real and not some sort of artifact of new technology like large language and image processing generative AI for instance (this new technology makes it much easier to produce fake papers). Or just an artifact of the growing phenomenon of progressively fewer and fewer significant discoveries coming about because all the relatively easily discovered "low hanging fruit" have already been harvested, leading to more and more fake papers being submitted in order to meet the publish or perish pressure in Academia.

And the ramifications of the scientific paper quality collapse are likely to be even worse than the predictable considerable decline in the rate of new scientific knowledge accumulation. The public at large is likely to be driven even more into fallaceous beliefs because of no longer trusting science to point the way to the truth about how the world works. As witness the great expansion of fallaceous pseudoscientific conspiracy theories about things like vaccines which have a large public health impact. Related to this, at least one good thing may come of it - scientism as a de facto religion may be further discredited, but only at the great cost of an increasing expansion of ignorance.