Why Scientific Fraud Is Suddenly Everywhere

Why Scientific Fraud Is Suddenly Everywhere

Kevin Dugan

Junk science has been forcing a reckoning among scientific and medical researchers for the past year, leading to thousands of retracted papers. Last year, Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned amid reporting that some of his most high-profile work on Alzheimer’s disease was at best inaccurate. (A probe commissioned by the university’s board of trustees later exonerated him of manipulating the data).

But the problems around credible science appear to be getting worse. Last week, scientific publisher Wiley decided to shutter 19 scientific journals after retracting 11,300 sham papers. There is a large-scale industry of so-called “paper mills” that sell fictive research, sometimes written by artificial intelligence, to researchers who then publish it in peer-reviewed journals — which are sometimes edited by people who had been placed by those sham groups. Among the institutions exposing such practices is Retraction Watch, a 14-year-old organization co-founded by journalists Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus. I spoke with Oransky about why there has been a surge in fake research and whether fraud accusations against the presidents of Harvard and Stanford are actually good for academia.

Give me a sense of how big a problem these paper mills are. 

I’ll start by saying that paper mills are not the problem; they are a symptom of the actual problem...

There is a scientific fraud epidemic — and we are ignoring the cure

Anjana Ahuja

The dossier was so unsettling, one neurologist revealed, that he couldn’t sleep after reading it. It contained allegations that an experimental drug meant to curb damage from stroke — and eyed up for regulatory fast-tracking for fulfilling an unmet medical need — might instead have raised the risk of death among patients receiving it.

The dossier, assembled by whistleblowers and obtained by an investigative journalist, was recently submitted to the US National Institutes of Health, which is finalising a $30mn clinical trial into the medicine. The whistleblowers allege that the star neuroscientist driving the research, Berislav Zlokovic from the University of Southern California, pressured colleagues to alter laboratory notebooks and co-authored papers containing doctored data. The university is investigating; Zlokovic is, according to his attorney, co-operating with the inquiry and disputes at least some of the claims.

The facts of this particular case, set out in the journal Science last week, are yet to be established but research is fast becoming a catalogue of mishaps, malfeasance and misconduct. Rooting out mistakes and manipulation should not have to depend on whistleblowers or dedicated amateurs who take personal legal risks for the greater good. Instead, science should apply some of its famed rigour to professionalising the business of fraud detection.

Zlokovic is not the only high-profile scientist to have hit the headlines for the wrong reasons...

[Laird]

There is a scientific fraud epidemic — and we are ignoring the cure

Paywalled, sadly. I was interested in reading it.

[Laird]

Why Scientific Fraud Is Suddenly Everywhere

Kevin Dugan

Curiously, I'd been sitting on an article about this (at least in part, especially re the publisher Wiley) for a few weeks prior to your posting that one:

Wiley's 'fake science' scandal is just the latest chapter in a broader crisis of trust universities must address

By Linton Besser for the ABC on 21 May, 2024.

As the months ticked by, the number of papers being withdrawn mounted by the hundreds.

By November, Wiley had retracted as many as 8,000 papers, telling Science it had "identified hundreds of bad actors present in our portfolio".

A month later, in exquisite corporatese, the company announced: "Wiley to sunset the Hindawi brand."

Shadowy online paper mills are selling authorship credits to those researchers willing to pay for them.

In remarks provided to investigative website Retraction Watch, the UK Research Integrity Office recently described the problem as vast: "These are organised crime rings that are committing large-scale fraud."

The mills, principally operating from China, India, Iran, Russia and other post-Soviet states, have even been planting stooges in editors' chairs at certain journals and paying bribes to others to ensure fake papers are published.

A recent Retraction Watch investigation allegedly identified more than 30 such editors, and kickbacks of as much as US$20,000. Academic publisher Elsevier has confirmed its editors are offered cash to accept manuscripts every single week. The British regulator said in January that one unnamed publisher "had to sack 300 editors for manipulative behaviour".

I think paper mills are a problem, but it would be interesting to dig into how much these biases existed before.

How many papers get scrutinized because they suggest something against the materialist faith?

How many papers are given less scrutiny because they play into reviewer's biases & expectations?

I suppose the only encouraging thing about this is that the science establishment may be forced to do something drastic about the situation.

David