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Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

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Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#51

Post by michaelt »

> And we must ensure that explicit suggestions to modify one’s science in the service of one’s career – “you need to do X to be published”, “you need to publish Y to graduate”, “you need to avoid criticizing Z to get hired” – carry social penalties as severe as a suggestion of plagiarism or fraud.

One of the pernicious things in this area is that, even as we teach young researchers how to avoid making mistakes and engage sceptically with the work of others and that scientific fraud is a nontrivial issue, we also tell them how to commit fraud themselves and that their competition is doing it.

"Watch out for P-hacking, that's where the researcher uses a form of analysis that has a small chance of a false positive, and analyses loads of subsets of your dataset until a false positive arises and just publishes that one"

"Watch out for over-fitting to benchmarks, like a car taking the speed crown by sacrificing the ability to corner"

"Watch out for incomplete descriptions of test setups, like testing on a 'continent-scale map' but not mentioning how detailed a map it was"

"Watch out for citations where the cited paper doesn't say what is claimed, some people will copy-and-paste citations without reading the source paper"

"Watch out for papers using complicated notation, fancy equations and jargon to make you feel this looks like a 'proper' paper"

"Watch out for deceptive choice of accurate numbers, like a study with a 25% completion rate including the drop-outs in the number of participants"

"Watch out for simulations with inaccurate noise models, if the noise is gaussian in the simulation but a random walk in reality, great simulated results won't transfer to reality"

I've made no suggestion at all that you should modify your science or commit fraud - but I've also just trained you in how to do it.

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#52

Post by proto-n »

michaelt wrote: post #51

> And we must ensure that explicit suggestions to modify one’s science in the service of one’s career – “you need to do X to be published”, “you need to publish Y to graduate”, “you need to avoid criticizing Z to get hired” – carry social penalties as severe as a suggestion of plagiarism or fraud. One of the pernicious things in this area is that, even as we teach young researchers how to avoid making mistakes and en…

It's really not that hard to come up with ways to commit fraud if you want to. On the other hand, it's very easy to make such mistakes if you don't know to avoid them. This characterization is very misguided IMO.

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#53

Post by michaelt »

lqet wrote: post #41

> * A group of colluding authors writes and submits papers to the conference. > * The colluders share, amongst themselves, the titles of each other's papers, violating the tenet of blind reviewing and creating a significant undisclosed conflict of interest. > * The colluders hide conflicts of interest, then bid to review these papers, sometimes from duplicate accounts, in an attempt to be assigned to these papers as…

Many bodies that fund academic work will happily pay for you to fly to a conference and stay at a hotel if you're presenting a paper at the conference - but they'll be a lot less willing if you aren't presenting anything. So a decent % of attendees will be presenting papers.

And finding reviewers who know their stuff, who'll work for free, and who'll review thoroughly in a short timescale isn't easy.

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#55

Post by [deleted] »

ploynog wrote: post #45

Double-blind review is a mirage that does not hold up. While I was in academia I reviewed a paper that turned out to be a blatant case of plagiarism. It was a clear Level 1 copy according to the IEEE plagiarism levels (Uncredited Verbatim Copy of more than 50% of a single paper). I submitted all of these findings with the original paper and what parts were copied (essentially all of it) as my review. A few days later…

[deleted]

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#56

Post by michaelt »

proto-n wrote: post #52
michaelt wrote: post #51

> And we must ensure that explicit suggestions to modify one’s science in the service of one’s career – “you need to do X to be published”, “you need to publish Y to graduate”, “you need to avoid criticizing Z to get hired” – carry social penalties as severe as a suggestion of plagiarism or fraud. One of the pernicious things in this area is that, even as we teach young researchers how to avoid making mistakes and en…

It's really not that hard to come up with ways to commit fraud if you want to. On the other hand, it's very easy to make such mistakes if you don't know to avoid them. This characterization is very misguided IMO.

Ah, perhaps I wasn't clear about what I'm trying to say. I don't think we should stop training researchers in common mistakes and fraudulent methods to watch out for.

I'm just saying: I don't believe anyone actually tells budding researchers that they should commit fraud. Instead I think the process is probably more like this:

Year 1: Statistics/research training. Here are a load of subtle mistakes to watch out for and avoid. Scientific fraud happens sometimes. Don't do it, it's very dishonest.

Year 2: Starting research. Gee a lot of these papers I'm reading are hard to reproduce, or unclear. Maybe fraud is widespread - or maybe they're just smarter or better equipped than me.

Year 3: "You really ought to have published some papers by now, the average student in your position has 3 papers. If you don't want to flunk out you really need to start showing some progress"

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#57

Post by 0_____0 »

ploynog wrote: post #45

Double-blind review is a mirage that does not hold up. While I was in academia I reviewed a paper that turned out to be a blatant case of plagiarism. It was a clear Level 1 copy according to the IEEE plagiarism levels (Uncredited Verbatim Copy of more than 50% of a single paper). I submitted all of these findings with the original paper and what parts were copied (essentially all of it) as my review. A few days later…

This seems like an issue of administration rather than an issue with the idea of a double-blind review. If you conduct a review that isn't properly blinded, and doesn't have an observable effect, can it really be called a double blind review?

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#58

Post by velcrovan »

0_____0 wrote: post #57
ploynog wrote: post #45

Double-blind review is a mirage that does not hold up. While I was in academia I reviewed a paper that turned out to be a blatant case of plagiarism. It was a clear Level 1 copy according to the IEEE plagiarism levels (Uncredited Verbatim Copy of more than 50% of a single paper). I submitted all of these findings with the original paper and what parts were copied (essentially all of it) as my review. A few days later…

This seems like an issue of administration rather than an issue with the idea of a double-blind review. If you conduct a review that isn't properly blinded, and doesn't have an observable effect, can it really be called a double blind review?

Maybe more that a non-idealistic model of the real world, and common direct experience, show that incentives strongly favor an administrative approach that compromises the double blind.

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#59

Post by acuozzo »

anoncow wrote: post #20
cgcrob wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it’s any consolation I split up with an ex partner after she wanted to put me as a co-author on a pseudoscience bullshit paper that she was working on to try and hit her quota. Her entire field, in the social sciences, is inventing a wild idea and using meta analysis to give it credibility. Then flying to conferences and submitting expenses. I contributed nothing other than a statistical framework which was discar…

When research is just means to an end... I think as children if we are taught what earning a living means, people who only want to make ends meet would try to do it using other less damaging methods. For e.g., sales and marketing are not bad places for such people. When it comes to research people should know that perhaps money will not be great. It is because we aren't aware of the full picture as children, we follo…

> so that when they enter such fields they know what they are getting into

I don't think this would help. IMO, it's a money vs. effort thing. Yes, real research is hard, but if someone learns early on that the system can be easily gamed, then the required effort is relatively low.

Plus, there's the friction factor. Moving from undergrad to grad to post-grad to professor keeps you within an institution you know.

The game is this: get hired at a research university and pump out phony papers which look legit enough to not raise any suspicions until you get tenure. Wrap the phoniness of each paper in a shroud of plausible deniability. If anything comes out after you're tenured, then just deny and/or deflect any wrongdoing.

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#60

Post by bluefirebrand »

anjc wrote: post #46

Overly pessimistic, and doesn't acknowledge that heads of steam only build behind promising findings, while the deficient (or 'fraudulent') work die on the vine, published or not. In other words the system tends to work. Secondly, there are many ingredients required to successfully publish, communicate science, foster collaboration, etc., beyond technical brilliance. I'm sure we all know many technically brilliant pe…

> Overly pessimistic, and doesn't acknowledge that heads of steam only build behind promising findings, while the deficient (or 'fraudulent') work die on the vine, published or not.

This might be true in hard sciences where a "head of steam" can only build based on real, replicatable results

But it's very common that public policy is proposed and adopted based on findings from soft sciences like psychology and sociology

If policy is adopted based on a research paper, I would count that as a "head of steam" being built.

And if that paper is fraudulent, then we are adopting well-intentioned policy on false pretenses

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