[i_love_limes]

For those not in Academia, it's worth noting that when you get to his level, it's more like being a VP or senior leader. Ultimately, yes you are responsible for the quality of output of your team, but you are absolutely not looking in detail at every paper, more the ideation and focus of the department.

He should be grilling his assistant profs / research fellows to get their act together and raise the bar, but this doesn't show malfeasance.

[iancmceachern]

Important point, thank you.

It doesn't mean we shouldn't work to fix the systemic issue though. It may not he his "fault", but how do we improve our system as a soceity so we put ourself on a upward trajectory not the seemingly downward trajectory we've been on lately.

[2cynykyl]

I'm glad the GP pointed this out, because nobody talks about it. The "PI" of a lab is manager, so these issues are like an accountant embezzling money without the manager knowing. Maybe the manage should have put better processes and monitoring in place, but they were trusting their team members to behave properly, which is not unreasonable IMO.

The real issue is that the people who conduct the fraud are usually grad students or postdocs, whose entire future depends on the success of their research project. Fake results are pretty much guaranteed.

Think about it this way: Imagine you have a lab group with 10 PhD students, each with their own hypothesis to investigate (e.g. intervention A will reduce the rates of disease B in mice). What are the odds that all 10 students will prove their hypothesis and generate publishable results? No way it's 10/10 obviously...it's more like 5/10. So what is supposed to happen to those 5 students that were tasked with investigating the bad hypotheses? Our current system implicitly penalizes these students to the extent that their careers in academia are over, and even earning their PhD is not certain. BTW, I know I am being overly general here, and the student will likely have several parallel projects on-going, can pivot to other things, etc, but hopefully my general point is clear.

[borroka]

It is not unusual, and indeed it is what should be expected, for honors to be accompanied by liabilities.

Ambitious PI's want bigger labs that lead to the recruitment of better students, who then produce more impactful papers, which then support the demand for more funding. It is a positive reinforcement cycle that eventually leads to bigger, better, and more popular labs. Those are the honors.

The liability is that if your name is in the article as a senior co-author, you are just as responsible as the first author for errors or fraudulent research. The senior PI's actual contribution should not matter, their name is there, the publication is used to support their career, they recruited the students or postdocs.

[2cynykyl]

> you are just as responsible as the first author for errors or fraudulent research

I know what you're trying to say, but I think you're making it too black-and-white. There are two nuances I'd like to point out: Firstly the senior author did not actually perpetrate the fraud...this has to mean something when assessing blame I think. Secondly, the senior authors do not really have the ability to filter out fraud, assuming it's done cleverly. What can they do aside from reading the drafts and scrutinizing the data/methods/interpretation? Are they expected to have a team of shadow PhDs doing the same experiments to ensure reproducibility?

No doubt some PIs create an environment that encourages fraud, and that's a problem. But the point I'm trying to make is that if we want to solve the problem of scientific fraud we need to be honest about the source of the problem. In my opinion, it's the fact that a student's entire future is wholly dependent on a good result. The senior author already has a job, probably tenure, and plenty of other projects on the go, so one failed project is not a problem. The cost of failure to the student on the other hand is essentially infinite!

[borroka]

> What can they do aside from reading the drafts and scrutinizing the data/methods/interpretation?

You would surprise how few of the big lab's PI's even do that. And since a big lab, say in biology, can send out 40–50 papers a year, there is no time for the PI to think deeply about hypotheses, methods, data collection. But having a big lab is a decision, as I wrote in my previous comment: honors/grants and liabilities.

> In my opinion, it's the fact that a student's entire future is wholly dependent on a good result.

That's very true, but there is also a thing called personal responsibility. Any non-violent "fraud", any "criminal", has some reasonable motivation behind their actions. But committing fraud is not an inevitability, and a lack of strong punishment that has origins from understanding the motivations behind those actions punishes people who behave, loosely speaking, properly.

Years ago, when I was doing academic research, I asked a colleague of mine if they would change some of their research results if the fraud (a) was never discovered and had no general consequences, (b) led to a publication in Science, Nature, Cell, etc. that would semi-guarantee a tenure-track position, and with that, "bread on the table" for the family, the kids, the aging parents. They said they would never do that, but was it true for them? Would it be true for me? Since the question is legitimate, strong punishment is needed to reduce the occurrence of fraud in research.

And since there is a tenure-track position available for dozens of good applicants, it is natural that a good result will make the difference between having a professional life in academia or not. But is it not the same, with the kind of "good result" depending on the field, for all those fields in which there are many more participants than "winners"? An immediate parallel can be made with doping in sports.

[freeopinion]

Your point is clear and extremely important. Edison supposedly once said, "I didn't fail. I just discovered 99 ways not to build a light bulb." Or something like that. Among those 99 failures were 20 super meaningful discoveries. In those failures the world's understanding of material science advanced in ways that affected a million later research projects.

A PhD candidate who can prove a hypothesis wrong should often have their work valued as much as one who proved the opposite.

But consider something like the invention of Paxos. If you leave out one small piece, you fail. All that time and effort seems wasted. You haven't proved anything true or false. You've just failed. But if you've documented your failure sufficiently, somebody might come behind you and fix that one little piece you got wrong.

One of the problems with our current system is that three years or ten years of research never gets published or properly documented for posterity because it didn't succeed. Even failures should be written up and packaged for the next grant to extend the exploration. There needs to be some reward for doing that packaging. Maybe we can call it a PhaD (almost PhD). Do you award a PhD to those who take up their own or somebody else's PhaD and complete it successfully?

[2cynykyl]

I had a bit of a eureka on this subject this afternoon: when looking at scientific fraud and who to blame, we (as a society) tend to focus on who stands to gain if the fraud is successful, but instead we should look at who stands to lose the most if the fraud is caught.

Let me explain via a 2x2 matrix (which I highly doubt will render properly, but here goes):

Actor | Fraud is successful | Fraud is caught

------------| -------------- | ----------------

Professor | Scenario A | Scenario B

Student | Scenario C | Scenario D

Scenario A: If a fraud is successful, the senior author gets a small benefit in the form of a slight raise, incremental increase in success rate of next grant, maybe an award, some endorphins from the praise. Very minor actually.

Scenario B: If the fraud is caught the senior author's career could be in shambles, like resigning from their tenured position, losing investors in spin-offs, humiliation, etc. They have a lot to lose.

Scenario C: In the event of a successful fraud, the student stands to gain a lot in the form of job prospects, future income, and generally accomplishing their life's ambitions. There is a huge payoff for the student in this scenario.

Scenario D: If they don't perpetrate fraud (to salvage a bad result), their career in academia is over, they have wasted 3-4 years of the life, which is the same outcome as if they did perpetrate fraud and got caught. The student has nothing to lose!