[hayd]

It's only a story because he's president, if he were only a researcher/professor this would not even be a story. This is NOT a success story, it shows that this fraudulent behavior is endemic and an effective strategy for climbing the academic ladder.

A success story would be this is exposed at large... we work out some kind of effective peer-reproduced tests... and the hundreds/thousands of cheating professors are fired.

[tptacek]

Endemic means "regularly occurring". How many examples of this kind of misconduct are you aware of? Ok, now, what's the denominator? How much research is actually conducted? I'm personally familiar with 3 fields (CS, bio, and geology) and what I've learned is that the number of labs --- let alone projects --- is mind-boggling. If your examples constitute 1% of all research conducted --- which would represent a cosmic-scale fuckload of research projects --- how much should I care about it?

[bhk]

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

Study claims 1 in 4 cancer research papers contains faked data https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/06/study-claims-1-in-4-...

[cycomanic]

So let's talk about misleading headlines and citations in journal articles. I would argue that arstechnica is one of the better news sources. Despite that, if we go to the article there is a link to that there has been "a real uptick in misconduct". Now if we click through that link, it does claim that there has been an increase in fraud as a lead in (this time without a link) but the article is about something completely different (i.e. that almost half the retracted papers are retracted due to fraud).

As an aside, the article cites that there have been a total of 2000 retracted papers in the NIH database. Considering that there are 9 Million papers in the database overall, that is a tiny percentage.

[bhk]

> ... if we click through ...

So you deflect from the entire content of the article with that distraction? And then an additional misdirection regarding retraction? Why?

[cycomanic]

> > ... if we click through ...

> So you deflect from the entire content of the article with that distraction? And then an additional misdirection regarding retraction? Why?

What do you mean? I take issue with the headlines and reporting. And I believe if one claims lack of evidence, sloppy evidence or fraudulent evidence one should be pretty diligent about ones one evidence.

Regarding the claims in the article. If you look at the 1 in 4 article you find that the reality is actually much more nuanced, which is exactly my point. The reporting does not necessarily reflect the reality.

If you call that deflection...

[bhk]

The ArsTechnica article was about a paper by Morten Oksvold that claimed that 25% of cancer biology papers contain duplicated data.

One nuance is that his approach only focused on one easily identifiable form of fraud: Western blot images that can be shown to be fraudulent because they were copies of images use in different papers. Of all the potential opportunities for fraud, one must think that this must represent just a small portion.

If there are other nuances you care to mention, I'm all ears.

Instead, you refer to an entirely different article, as if the article I cited has no relevant content, which misleads casual readers of this comment stream. To paraphrase your comment in a less misleading way: "Inside this article you can find a link to an entirely different article whose content does not support the headline of the original article."

[zzzeek]

devil's advocate - '1 in 4 studies are fake, says "study"'

[moab]

So just because one person is cheating, it means all academics are cheating?

FWIW, most top-ranked CS conferences have an artifact evaluation track, and it doesn't look good if you submit an experimental paper and don't go through the artifact evaluation process. Things are certainly changing in CS, at least on the experimental side.

It's also possible that theorems are incorrect, but subsequent work that figures this out will comment on it and fix it.

The scientific record is self-correcting, and fraud / bullshit does get caught out.

[hayd]

It's not just "one person", there is wide-spread fraud across many disciplines of academia. The situation, of course, is vastly different across subjects/disciplines, e.g. math and CS are not really much affected and I would agree they're self-correcting.

I might agree they're self-correcting in the (very) long-term, but we're seeing fictitious results fund entire careers. We don't know the damage that having 20+ years of incorrect results being built upon will have... And that's not to speak of those who were overlooked, and left academia, because their opportunities were taken by these cheaters (who knows what cost that has for society).