I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

The version that is more difficult to detect is when a cabal of colleagues agree to push each others' papers in this way. So editor A says "you should really quote authors B, C and D." And somewhere else, editor B is saying "you should really quote authors A, C and D."

Machine learning might be a way to tackle this at scale, by teasing out these associations. Of course, this relies on a degree of transparency. Some journals publish all editors' comments and all revisions of a paper. This is a Good Thing, but humans aren't reading all published research, let alone all the meta data.

If someone with relevant ML skills wants to address this, and fancies starting a project, do get in touch :)

A note on the Chinese insinuations that have been mentioned: As always, it's a bit more complex. There may well be reasons that some states might sponsor or 'encourage' gaming of intellectual institutions. If the world is viewed as a zero-sum game, and the currency is power, this unfortunately seems inevitable. Science tends away from this and towards collaboration, but 'politics' often seems to tend toward competition. I've seen university heads explicitly declare to all staff how they intend to game the national rankings, and nobody bats an eyelid, it's business as usual. It's daft and harmful, and frankly I think it requires hard effort from idealistic grassroots activists to address it. Societal improvements are often won through struggle, they're not given away, they don't happen by incremental evolution.

I've only recently dipped by toes into academic life in a lab, but it very much seems that PIs generally know which are the bad apples. E.g. when discussing whether some data is good enough to be publishable the PIs reaction was something along the lines of "If we were FAMOUS_LAB_NAME it would be, but we want to do it in a way that holds up". So it seems like there are at least some barriers to how incompetence would hurt the whole field.

I'm also surprised that there is no mention of the PI in GP's story. As it's a paper published by the lab, it's not just on the grad student "to do the right thing", but even more on the more senior scientist, whose reputation is also at stake.

My favourite was probably this one paper where the author essentially made a reddit-post asking a community about themselves, then cherry-picked (the post is still up, with timestamps and all) a few comments and came to a conclusion that didn't really fit those hand-picked comments.

In conclusion: Wikipedia is a dumpster fire and shouldn't be used for anything other than hard facts like dates and for entertainment.

It's not unbeknownst in other professions. Anecdotally, I haven't had my car serviced in a shop for years because mechanics even with supposedly good reputation would fail to do even trivial maintenance jobs properly, invariably requiring myself to partially redo it myself to ensure the quality of the installation which defeats the point of having a job done by a paid professional in the first place. It's the boring details and following the process carefully that these people skip, in hope for getting results quicker and moving on sooner. I just take it that some people are like that, and the lower barrier of entry to sciences than before means there are more corner-cutters in academia as well.

The question is where in the process of the academic journey from student, master, grad-student to doctor are people qualified for the work as for their psychology and personality, not only knowledge and intelligence?

The danger signs with this sort of personality are undoubtedly visible in early stages. The market pressure to maintain one's reputation doesn't seem to work in the academia as illustrated by the article. Thus, it would be better to start explicitly culling this attitude off the field before these people get to establish themselves despite their bad workmanship.