Perhaps we need a new/updated law to cover this kind of thing. This sort of academic fraud should absolutely be criminalized, but I'm not sure I'm the biggest fan of the "everything is wire fraud" approach to achieving that.
If it gets so bad that a society/academic system needs to criminalize such fraud, they have already lost that race. The only thing that really works is a culture where this rarely if ever happens, because of the peer respect and self-respect of academics.
Science is self-correcting, but sometimes, the correction mechanism it is very slow and inconsequential enough that people are incentivized to just publish anything. Peer review is merely a quality check—and not a very good one. Just the other day, I ran into a paper in my field that claims to have solved a central problem that scientists have been working on for 50 years, single-authored, using some fancy mathematics. I was excited to read it, but it didn't take long for me to find out that it's complete BS-derivations that don't follow, made-up equation terms, and conflation of basic terms in the field. I was really surprised that this passed the editor and at least two peer reviewers. I dug deeper and found that the same author has published 11 research articles in top journals in 2026 alone — mostly physics and chemistry, and adjacent fields— and I'm talking about really top journals like Scientific Reports and Physics Letters B. Most of these have serious mathematical flaws that are unfixable. I wrote to a couple of editors, but only one took it seriously enough to initiate an investigation. I made a promise to myself that if no real action is taken, I will seriously consider changing careers.
I don't know the details here but I am a psychologist. The "electric shock" normally used in psych studies is tiny, it's like the equivalent of one of those little toy prank buzzers. You couldn't possibly hurt someone with it, this is really a non-issue. Related side note: Electroconvulsive therapy uses much larger electric shocks but, administered safely by a clinic, is extremely safe, has relatively minor side effe…
ECT can be very, very unsafe. 70% of patients experience some form of memory loss and at least 30% of patients experience self-reported permanent memory loss. The rate of major adverse cardiac events found in a 2019 meta-analysis was 1 in 39 patients. For the people that it helps, I'm happy they've found relief, but it's a tool with significant costs and I know a fair amount of people who underwent it as children or…
ECT is a very specific subset of electrical shocks. Just because ECT can have adverse effects doesn't mean all electric shocks will.
No paper should ever be referenced until it has been replicated by an independent group. The replication crisis in science is real, and it won't take long for no one to believe anything anymore.
Not all science has this issue.
But to reference Thiel, a lot of the sciences with "science" in the name, seem to.
That rule would make it difficult to report on a failure to replicate a published paper.
Does some sort of batched style of research already exist? By batched, I mean a study where n number of teams all agree on a single methodology, and then conduct the same experiment simultaneously. Each team could then publish their results independently and the teams could publish one aggregate. I know meta studies attempt to do this in a way, but they can sometimes have their own problems too. I cannot recall comin…
Not quite what you're asking, but pre-registration does alleviate e.g. p-hacking and such without the need for multiple teams. It doesn't do much for outright fraud, but still...
That rule would make it difficult to report on a failure to replicate a published paper.
Does some sort of batched style of research already exist? By batched, I mean a study where n number of teams all agree on a single methodology, and then conduct the same experiment simultaneously. Each team could then publish their results independently and the teams could publish one aggregate. I know meta studies attempt to do this in a way, but they can sometimes have their own problems too. I cannot recall comin…
It doesn’t seem very popular but that exact thing does seem to exist, here called a ‘Registered Replication Report’:
Science is self-correcting, but sometimes, the correction mechanism it is very slow and inconsequential enough that people are incentivized to just publish anything. Peer review is merely a quality check—and not a very good one. Just the other day, I ran into a paper in my field that claims to have solved a central problem that scientists have been working on for 50 years, single-authored, using some fancy mathematic…
Even as imperfect as it is, it's infinitely better than the alternatives like belief in religion/religious texts/pastors or anybody else who is just making shit up based on whatever they think sounds good. None of that is falsifiable or makes any attempt to iteratively arrive at anything true or real.
There is literally nothing better that we have other than the scientific method. Yes, science is self-correcting, even if it is slow or whatever else. Nothing else that we have can approach even that bar.
Dan Ariely has a long history of controversies and studies with falsified data. He wrote 3 popular books and gained a lot of fame before others started uncovering the problems in his studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely It’s amazing that problems with his studies are still being uncovered. Equally amazing that Duke still maintains a relationship with him after so many problems have been identified with hi…
> In 2006, when he was a professor at the MIT Media Lab, Ariely conducted experiments including administering electric shocks with a research assistant who had no human–subject training. […] Ariely confirmed this and said that he wasn't aware that the research assistant did not have the needed one-hour online human–subject training. A one-hour online training is all that’s needed to be considered ready to conduct exp…
> Ariely conducted experiments including administering electric shocks