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‘The situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 9 months ago by Ninjazzon@infosec.pub to c/science@lemmy.world

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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.”

The startling rise in the publication of sham science papers has its roots in China, where young doctors and scientists seeking promotion were required to have published scientific papers. Shadow organisations – known as “paper mills” – began to supply fabricated work for publication in journals there.

The practice has since spread to India, Iran, Russia, former Soviet Union states and eastern Europe, with paper mills supplying fabricated studies to more and more journals as increasing numbers of young scientists try to boost their careers by claiming false research experience. In some cases, journal editors have been bribed to accept articles, while paper mills have managed to establish their own agents as guest editors who then allow reams of falsified work to be published.

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[-] ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 30 points 9 months ago

In my experience, people don't pay much attention to anything from those countries unless there's some special reason to take it seriously.

[-] Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world 25 points 9 months ago

I had a near panic like shit, 10,000 retractions is a huge thing. Especially after all the incidents between 2010-2018 where we were hitting 1000 retractions a year

But then I read China and yeah, okay. They're probably going through their own shake up.

[-] Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 14 points 9 months ago

Ya I generally avoid any paper that's from China unless I really need the information it provides and then I need to go down a super tedious rabbit hole to make sure I can actually trust that it's true.

[-] dust_accelerator@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 9 months ago

Yeah, I've come across one or two papers of questionable origin presenting performance metrics nowhere near what I could replicate.

Needless to say, I could only replicate the results when I introduced a very mundane procedure error nobody reputable would make. So yeah, lots of garbage out there

[-] ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 5 points 9 months ago

And that's not even fraudulent, just incompetent...

[-] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 9 months ago

FYI, posted to !science@mander.xyz two days ago: https://mander.xyz/post/9244238

[-] floofloof@lemmy.ca 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Freakonomics has a couple of interesting podcasts on academic fraud, where they discuss what motivates it and some suggestions for mitigating the problem:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-there-so-much-fraud-in-academia/

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/can-academic-fraud-be-stopped/

[-] Anticorp@lemmy.world 11 points 9 months ago

Want to save us 79 minutes and summarize what the motivation is? I'm assuming it's agenda propaganda. Is that right?

[-] floofloof@lemmy.ca 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

What is "agenda propaganda"?

The motivation is mainly just the extreme pressure put on academics to publish relentlessly, combined with a publishing culture that favours "interesting" results. When you set out to test a hypothesis with an experiment, the results could turn out to be more or less remarkable. if the results are unremarkable it's still a valid result and useful data, but it's difficult to report that in a paper and get it published, because the journals favour "interesting" results. So a lot of perfectly valid and useful science can't get published. This creates a big temptation to massage results to create something that looks more striking and will get published. This may start with selectively omitting data or selectively analyzing the data, but it's a bit of a slippery slope towards changing data points that don't support the paper's thesis.

They mention one mitigation scheme in particular that is interesting: in this scheme scientists submit the question their experiment is supposed to answer to the journal before they do the experiment. The journal editors decide whether they want to publish it before they see the experimental results. If they commit to publish, they publish the paper no matter what the experimental results turn out to be. This removes an incentive to massage the data to get published.

There's also the way funding and jobs are allocated: you have to have a real stack of publications to your name and constantly be publishing to keep your job or get your research program funded. This creates an incentive for scientists to pay to be included in the author list of papers they didn't actually work on. And there's the phenomenon of professors putting their name to research by their students where they haven't examined the data in detail, and the fact that there are too many papers for anyone to thoroughly peer review, both of which make it easier to slip manipulated or faked data into publications.

[-] Anticorp@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago

Agenda propaganda refers to the use of media and communication tools to promote a specific set of ideas, values, or a particular agenda, often by presenting selective facts or by manipulating emotions to influence public opinion and behavior.

Thanks for the summary!

[-] ebits21@lemmy.ca 6 points 9 months ago

Prestige, money, career. Plus a dash of something else.

[-] Hadriscus@lemm.ee 1 points 9 months ago

ketchup ? it has to be ketchup

[-] nodimetotie@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

They talk about many things, but the one that stands out is incentives. There is a lot of competition in academia, publish or perish, with big prizes, so some people are taking shortcuts.

[-] nodimetotie@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

These were great, really enjoyed them, especially the coverage of the Data Colada story

[-] LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee 5 points 9 months ago

Isn't this just fraud and should be prosecuted?

[-] Seudo@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

Prosecuting scientists for publishing unheard of ideas in a manner that hasn't been sanctioned by an established scholarly/religious institutions....

The solution to bad science is science.

[-] LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee 1 points 9 months ago

Well if you put it like that :D

I'm not sure you're right now. Fight fire with water, but what if you only have a teacup full of water? Meaning there could be an immense potential of energy on one side, and a small on the other. On one side you have money for careers and whatnot, on the other you have... nerds who believe ~~love~~science conquers all :D

[-] xkforce@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Unfortunately Chinese papers in my field have a reputation for being less trustworthy than historical scientific powerhouses like Europe, the UK, the US and Canada. Countries like Iran aren't even on the map.

[+] Masterblaster@kbin.social -6 points 9 months ago

you know, i tend to blame this kind of shit on capitalism, thinking that the drive for profit creates an imperative to deliver published papers, and then i see that china is doing this shit and i just can't help but to think there is no economic model that produces good results and that the entire idea of an 'economic model' is flawed.

please let AI run this shit. humans are just going to endlessly make the same mistakes over and over.

[-] PaintedSnail@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago

There is no such thing as not having an "economic model." As long as there are people with unmet needs and wants, there will be an economy, and that economy can be modeled and given a label.

[-] Masterblaster@kbin.social -5 points 9 months ago

so hunters and gatherers had an economic model? i think you might be biased by modernity.

[-] jaycifer@kbin.social 12 points 9 months ago

Hunter: I want those berries
Gatherer: I want that meat
They swap their stuff
A trade-based economy ensues

[-] novibe@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 months ago

That is a simplification to make a point, but I think it’s important to know that this never happened.

Barter economies didn’t exist as a historical process. They only existed in very specific situations. Such as when a market based economy collapses (for example after the Roman Empire collapsed, in some more distant places, until a new power could establish a market) and when two groups that had different economic models encountered each other.

What existed before monetary market systems were debt systems, maybe with organised ledgers. And before that what existed were gift (like the Hawaiians) and palatial economies (like the Incas and Mycenaeans).

This is already very well established within anthropology and archeology. David Graeber’s “Debt the first 5,000 years” was a bestseller man…

TL,DR: Hunter gatherers didn’t barter. They did things for each other and then “owed” each other. This bond, of being indebted to your fellow men and them being indebted to you, is what was the basis of most societies.

[-] Hadriscus@lemm.ee 2 points 9 months ago

Fascinating thanks for the tidbit

[-] elbarto777@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

OP threw a ridiculous strawman argument, but you threw it back at him with this great answer.

[-] PaintedSnail@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yes. The hunters would gift their kills to the gatherers, and the gatherers would gift their findings to the hunters. The economic model is known as a "gift economy." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Social_and_economic_structure