Having recently listened to the freakonomics episode on the same thing I'm mystified by something that podcast and this article do. They state that they're is an estimated 2% of bunk papers or there but then also that they are "becoming overwhelmed by the amount of bogus research" or that they "would estimate that there are far more paper mill papers than general papers" when it's like "swimming in garbage".
2% doesn't seem like it should elicit those sentiments.
Researchers taking on fraudulent science
61–70 of 87 posts
Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science
#62One of the many troubling things about recently exposed patterns of fraudulent science: every dishonest scientist or professor is taking up a position and funding that could've instead gone to any of surely numerous people with much more integrity. Permit all the cronyism and gaming around university hiring and admissions, and don't hold universities responsible for unethical behavior of their faculty and graduates,…
> growth pump&exit investment scams I'd go so far as to say that the mere existence of an "exit plan" is an indicator that the purported product may be flawed (the business may not be flawed, from an investor's PoV, but to them, the "product" is actually the business, itself, as opposed to what the business says is their product). IMO: Real businesses are meant to be ongoing enterprises. Being sold to others, is supp…
Agreed. The idea that financial engineering is somehow necessary to "promote liquidity" in facilitating the changing of ownership of a business is completely arbitrary, and not inherently good as far as I'm concerned.
Sure, rules that make it harder to buy companies might slow down the volume of businesses being created due to less investor interest, but I'm not sure that decline would surpass the slowdown in fradulent exit schemes.
Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science
#63One of the many troubling things about recently exposed patterns of fraudulent science: every dishonest scientist or professor is taking up a position and funding that could've instead gone to any of surely numerous people with much more integrity. Permit all the cronyism and gaming around university hiring and admissions, and don't hold universities responsible for unethical behavior of their faculty and graduates,…
> every dishonest scientist or professor is taking up a position and funding that could've instead gone to any of surely numerous people with much more integrity. Maybe, maybe not. It feels possible at this point that the entire top of the competitive curve is actively juicing. Ie, with such fierce competition, there could be a vanishingly small cohort of researchers who both operate with integrity and whose CVs are…
Just as everyone in the Tour de France was doping during the Lance Armstrong era, the concentration of cheaters increases the higher up the "success" metrics you go.
Because cheating without getting caught will always be the "best" strategy within the confines of the game alone.
However, that's likely the worst strategy for society as a whole.
Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Today I "conducted an experiment". Which means that I went to a grocery store, did laundry, and took a walk in a park. Between all that, I checked once in a while that things were proceeding as expected. The outcome of that experiment is probably never going to be reported, except maybe if something unexpected happens. Real science is full of messy exploratory work. It's sometimes done remotely, and often in short st…
"Checked that things were proceeding as expected" meaning that there is some process going on that you could be recording? I don't think it's fair to paint recordings of exploratory work as meaningless. You obviously have some interest in it or else you wouldn't be doing it. If you don't share that experience, wouldn't someone else spend time trying the same thing?
In my case, it was just code running on a single cloud instance. For someone a bit upstream from me, it could have been a commercially made device doing its stuff, with the details being trade secrets of its manufacturer.
Computers have made science boring to watch. Many things are now automated and run 24/7. Even if you happen to be on site, there may not be much to see.
In many situations, automation also makes doing things on your own easier than trying to determine if someone has already done similar experiments. If you are doing exploratory work, there is often no established terminology for the topic. Even if a report of prior experiments exists, it can be difficult to determine if it's discussing the same thing. (AI could plausibly help here.)
Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science
#65I love these people's work. At the same time I don't think any of this really addresses the root causes of the problems, which are career, university administrative, and field (i.e., recognition and attention) incentives. The whole paradigm we use, and the way we treat scientists and fund research, is broken. It feels a little bit like bailing water out of your boat with teacup on one side while ignoring the gaping h…
The solution is unfortunately for everyone, more transparency in research. When you conduct an experiment, why on earth is the report composed months, sometimes years later, instead of being streamed live and recorded? Just the same as in business. We need a new more prestigious stock exchange for companies that are willing to open their books up to continual audit. The government can step in to aid businesses and re…
It is, in biochemistry region, it is typical to write protocol step by step during experiments. video can not ameliorate it more.
Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science
#66I love these people's work. At the same time I don't think any of this really addresses the root causes of the problems, which are career, university administrative, and field (i.e., recognition and attention) incentives. The whole paradigm we use, and the way we treat scientists and fund research, is broken. It feels a little bit like bailing water out of your boat with teacup on one side while ignoring the gaping h…
The solution is unfortunately for everyone, more transparency in research. When you conduct an experiment, why on earth is the report composed months, sometimes years later, instead of being streamed live and recorded? Just the same as in business. We need a new more prestigious stock exchange for companies that are willing to open their books up to continual audit. The government can step in to aid businesses and re…
I disagree.
Scientists need to care about the truth and most do care. The problem is both that as "publish or perish" becomes more and more literal people feel a strong incentive to cheat and moreover we have increasing cynicism as the system treats a given scientist as disposable.
Constant surveillance wouldn't address that, if anything it would increase the cynicism. Just much, no brilliant scientist is going to work under constant surveillance so you'd drive the most serious thinkers out of any given field.
Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science
#67I love these people's work. At the same time I don't think any of this really addresses the root causes of the problems, which are career, university administrative, and field (i.e., recognition and attention) incentives. The whole paradigm we use, and the way we treat scientists and fund research, is broken. It feels a little bit like bailing water out of your boat with teacup on one side while ignoring the gaping h…
Even if you resolve fraud, you still fail to resolve the driver of the fraud, which is money.
There are basically 3 sources of funding for universities - government, military, corporations. These 3 have aligned interests. Where their interests align (or are not in conflict) you will have funding of one side only. If you fund one side only, you will generate lots of information to support whatever-it-is, but this will fail to be a fair representation of the issue.
I'll just run through a simple, silly example. If I wanted to prove cats cause stormy weather, I could fund say, 10 studies. Perhaps 2 are supportive (cats and storms correlate in some way). I can then fund even more studies in that direction. I would soon have a huge body of supportive data .. but I haven't said anything meaningful, I haven't got to the truth of the matter. I just have a huge body of evidence.
To me, this is chicken feed. It's not that the information is a lie necessarily, it's just that it's isn't important. Nevertheless, the body of data can be referred to, in order to help steer public opinion. Everyone is getting paid, the thing is true .. what's to be upset about?
Anyway, whoever has the money determines the outcome. Truth is a secondary consideration.
Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
The solution is unfortunately for everyone, more transparency in research. When you conduct an experiment, why on earth is the report composed months, sometimes years later, instead of being streamed live and recorded? Just the same as in business. We need a new more prestigious stock exchange for companies that are willing to open their books up to continual audit. The government can step in to aid businesses and re…
I disagree. Scientists need to care about the truth and most do care. The problem is both that as "publish or perish" becomes more and more literal people feel a strong incentive to cheat and moreover we have increasing cynicism as the system treats a given scientist as disposable. Constant surveillance wouldn't address that, if anything it would increase the cynicism. Just much, no brilliant scientist is going to wo…
Working with a labmate is also constant surveillance. I think you're dressing it up to be something far more negative than it actually is.
I think streaming or recording would decrease cynicism. The openness would allow scientists to avoid false idolatry of people who juiced their citations with fraudulent research. And the cost of dealing with the fallout from fraud would be eliminated. I suspect that the fraud itself is a big accelerant of the hypercompetitive publish or perish phenomenon.
Maybe some funding of a transparent program could be allocated toward severance for scientists who honorably choose to "perish". Of course, perishing in this case means still being able to live as a civilian outside of academia. And that person can still speak to those in charge of research projects and benevolently influence the arc of human understanding, which for most good people is enough of an incentive to continue living and contributing.
Folks who wouldn't want to be transparent in their methodology could still do science the old way, they just wouldn't have access to the extra funding.
Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science
#69I really hope these people gain wider support. They seem so anti-establishment, which implies that the establishment is pro fraud. And that sounds about right to me. This is a huge problem. When fraud is rewarded over legitimate research we lose so many times. Once when we reward the fraud, again when the fraudulent research is propagated into the corpus, again when we recognize that this has squelched legitimate sci…
> They seem so anti-establishment, which implies that the establishment is pro fraud. What I'm getting from the article so far is that "the establishment" is actually a bunch of establishments (plural). And thus there are many systems to game, and many incentives to game them.
I agree. Saying that "the establishment is pro fraud" is not helping at all, because conforming with such a simple label will make us blind to the actual reasons why fraud occurs. It is not that all fraudulent scientists are part of some cult or get taught to be fraudulent. The fraud rather results out of a long series of seemingly small decisions that stack up to the point where they hire paper mills, all the while not performing enough self-reflection. If you want to combat this, you will not be successfull labeling the people doing this as fraudulent. Some may take offense to this and not listen to you. Rather, apart from systemic change also more reflection and ethical awareness should be promoted (Please stop thinking and teaching that science has nothing to do with ethics - that just allows scientists to be blind to their own faults).
Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science
#70In my opinion, the solution to all of this is to get rid of the whitepaper system all together. From now on, all scientists who want to publish science, they publish their work in the form of a video. They film themselves doing the science and then put that video on YouTube, or maybe some science specific version of youtube. Other people can then watch the video and determine for themselves if the science is valid or…
It takes of order 6 months to do the work described in a single paper. Even if we imagine someone watching the videos at double speed, it would take 3 months per paper. And that's for an expert who can understand the material. Folks don't have the time to read the literature thoroughly as it is. That's one of the reasons the junk gets published. So this is not practical. Plus, imagine reporting to your funding agency…
My guess is that more than half of the world's scientific resources are spent on projects in bad faith, so I'm actually ok with legitimate scientists spending 100% more to justify their papers, if the extra work can be covered by the surplus resources saved by eliminating frauds. However, there are many reasons the proposed method is impractical.