How Much Science Is Fake?
1–10 of 82 posts
Re: How Much Science Is Fake?
#2> In this preprint, I try to quantify how much science presently being published is fake (that is, fabricated or falsified). The working estimate is approximately 1 in 7. This should make a lot of people very angry and will be widely regarded as a bad move.
Sounds incredibly legit, really motivates me to read the article https://osf.io/s4gce
Re: How Much Science Is Fake?
#3> In this preprint, I try to quantify how much science presently being published is fake (that is, fabricated or falsified). The working estimate is approximately 1 in 7. This should make a lot of people very angry and will be widely regarded as a bad move. Sounds incredibly legit, really motivates me to read the article https://osf.io/s4gce
It’s a Douglas Adams quote.
Re: How Much Science Is Fake?
#4Using OSF storage as a proxy. The title is a bit clickbait, that alone gives you an idea of the incentives that cause people to publish when they don’t have something. Not to take away from the premise, but people already know there are some fields where faking is rampant.
An interesting paper would take the existing LLMs and see how well they can do flagging problematic work. A solution that works well at scale is needed.
Heck, an AI assistant to aid peer review would be great.
Re: How Much Science Is Fake?
#5Using OSF storage as a proxy. The title is a bit clickbait, that alone gives you an idea of the incentives that cause people to publish when they don’t have something. Not to take away from the premise, but people already know there are some fields where faking is rampant. An interesting paper would take the existing LLMs and see how well they can do flagging problematic work. A solution that works well at scale is n…
An interesting paper would take the existing LLMs and see how well they can do flagging problematic work.
I would like to see this as well. I would be curious if LLM's start to see the same patterns I see having read half of nih.gov going down many rabbit holes of researchers scratching each others backs, pencil whipping reviews and such. Can LLM's pick up on such behavior or might that require something closer to human intelligence? I do not know enough about LLM's to even guess. Could it perhaps at least pick up on entirely fake papers from Youtubers pranking the system to see if they can get their silliest papers published? I report them but by the time they are taken down the Youtubers have had a large number of views and laughs.
Re: How Much Science Is Fake?
#6I don’t think the issue is how much of “science” is fake. It’s how you define “science”.
There have always been lower quality work and journals that are inherently given lower weight in the scientific community. Many of these lower quality papers just aren’t considered by working scientists. It’s a bit like email… once you start seeing a significant amount of spam, you just get used to ignoring it. This is a feature of the system. Scientific consensus can change over time, but it takes a lot of evidence to get there. But some papers get more weight than others.
For me, there are two real issues - first, public trust in science. When the public thinks that 14% or “science” is fake, they are likely to discount all scientific findings, regardless of source. This can be dangerous, especially for a public who is already distrustful of science/academia in general. So, instead of looking at results with a critical eye, the danger is that a large fraction of the public will just ignore all results.
The second issue is in polluting AI training. When you feed extra garbage into a system, you’ll get garbage out of the system. As LLMs get more specialized having high quality inputs for training is critically important. A contributing force here is that lower tier journals (those most susceptible to faked data), are also the most likely to make the full text of papers widely available. So, the easiest data to get for training is also the most likely to have faked data.
Re: How Much Science Is Fake?
#7> In this preprint, I try to quantify how much science presently being published is fake (that is, fabricated or falsified). The working estimate is approximately 1 in 7. This should make a lot of people very angry and will be widely regarded as a bad move. Sounds incredibly legit, really motivates me to read the article https://osf.io/s4gce
As another comment pointed out, it's a Douglas Adams quote.
Also, are we not hackers? If we can't sprinkle jokes into discussions of serious things without thinking that makes the whole discussion unserious, what have we become? Might as well go join HR or become a politician or something…
Re: How Much Science Is Fake?
#8I don’t think the issue is how much of “science” is fake. It’s how you define “science”. There have always been lower quality work and journals that are inherently given lower weight in the scientific community. Many of these lower quality papers just aren’t considered by working scientists. It’s a bit like email… once you start seeing a significant amount of spam, you just get used to ignoring it. This is a feature…
It also how you define "fake", eg in machine learning it can be everything from fabricated results to data leakage, low quality data, bugs, p-hacking, weak baseline design, insufficient handling of randomness, etc etc.
Re: How Much Science Is Fake?
#9I don’t think the issue is how much of “science” is fake. It’s how you define “science”. There have always been lower quality work and journals that are inherently given lower weight in the scientific community. Many of these lower quality papers just aren’t considered by working scientists. It’s a bit like email… once you start seeing a significant amount of spam, you just get used to ignoring it. This is a feature…
14% is a lower bound. I suspect if you include studies that can't be replicated it's well over 50%. And yes with that much garbage the public should dismiss all new published scientific findings. Modern scientific publishing has been gamed it's nearly useless for learning anything directly because you can't trust it. Some fields more than others of course, but it's all bad. Yes this includes tier 1 journals.
Re: How Much Science Is Fake?
#10I would not be surprised by this number given the sheer volume of crap journals that publish anything. However I would expect that the proportion of fakery in papers with >20 citations is much lower than 1 in 7, which should be somewhat reassuring. Remember that a p-value of 0.05 means that 1 in 20 studies cannot be replicated by random chance alone without any malicious intent.
Side note: the “1 in 7” claim from this paper is based on a straw-poll of N=12 existing forensic metascientific papers. I find it somewhat ironic that the author makes some strong conclusions based on this number which to me, though very plausible, is itself lacking scientific rigor.