[blagie]

My experience is that for elite schools -- Stanford and MIT -- the remaining factor is how much one is willing to cheat. There is a random component, a merit-based component, but most (and I have large n here) successful affiliated faculty candidates did so by cheating in some way.

That can be data baking, credit theft, or a whole slew of other techniques, but at least in my department, most new faculty at least at these two schools are in some way crooked.

Also, for nuance on random:

http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html

[kleiba]

And one more: https://medium.com/@tnvijayk/potential-organized-fraud-in-ac...

[blagie]

From the article:

"99.99% of us are honest but the dishonest 0.01% can cause serious, repeated damage."

My experience is that this is much more like a 50/50 split at elite schools, at least when you look at people who succeed at making it to faculty positions. BMJ estimates 20% of publications are based on fabricated data:

https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-hea...

That sounds about right for what I've seen at MIT. Note that 20% of publications being based on fabricated data is in-line with my 50/50 split figure. Researchers who cheat only do it part of the time, and often in ways which don't involve direct data fabrication. Critically, the numbers go up significantly for high-impact publications -- they types that make the news and make scientific careers. By the time MIT's PR machine picks up a publication, and the press picks up from there, the odds of it being fraudulent are much higher than 50/50.