[titzer]

I found the article and your third-hand anecdotes troubling. The good news is that it does not match any of the years of experience in my field. Fraud is just not that rampant. At PhD-granting institutions, the level of fraud you describe here is very seriously punished. It's career-ending. The violations that you are serious enough that any institution would expel said students (or harshly punish faculty--probably firing them). She did no one any favors by not reporting them.

Unfortunately I don't think a dialogue around vague anecdotes is going to be particularly enlightening. What matters is culture, but also process--mechanisms and checks--plus consequences. Consequences don't happen if everyone is hush-hush about it and no one wants to be a "rat".

[qsera]

>It's career-ending..

That is where being good at politics come into play. And if you are good at it, instead of being career-ending, fraud will put you in the highest of the positions!

No one wants a "plant" who cannot navigate scrutiny!

[delichon]

> The good news is that it does not match any of the years of experience in my field.

I worked for exactly one academic, and he indulged in impossible-to-detect research fraud. So in my own limited experience research fraud was 100%.

It was a biology lab, and this was an extremely hard working man. 18 hours per day in the lab was the norm. But the data wasn't coming out the way he wanted, and his career was at stake, so he put his thumb on the scale in various ways to get the data he needed. E.g. he didn't like one neural recording, so he repeated it until he got what he wanted and ignored the others. You would have to be right in the middle of the experiment to notice anything, and he just waved me off when I did.

This same professor was the loudest voice in the department when it came to critiquing experimental designs and championing rigor. I knew what he did was wrong, because he taught me that. And he really appeared to mean it, but when push came to shove, he fiddled, and was probably even lying to himself.

So I came away feeling that academic fraud is probably rampant, because the incentives all align that way. Anyone with the extraordinary integrity to resist was generally self-curated out of the job.

[dekhn]

I had a somewhat similar experience- was a postdoc for a pre-tenure professor at berkeley. after writing up a paper based on her methods, with poor results, I handed the draft to her. She rewrote it- basically adding carefully worded/presented results that made it look as good as possible. And then submitted it (to a niche conference where the editor was a buddy of hers). When I read her submission I asked her to remove my name from it and she immediately withdrew the submission. I left her lab shortly after because I am not going to tarnish my publication record with iffy papers like that.

Over time I learned that most papers in my field (computational biology) are embellished to some extent or another (or cherry-picked/curated/structured for success) and often irreproducible- some key step is left out, or no code is provided that replicates the results, etc. I can see this from two perspectives:

1) science should be trivially reproducible; it should not require the smartest/most capable people in the field to read the paper and reproduce the results. This places a burden on the people who are at the state of the art of the field to make it easy for other folks, which slows them down (but presumably makes overall progress go faster).

2) science should be done by geniuses; the leaders in the field don't need to replicate their competitors paper. it's sufficient to read the paper, apply priors, and move on (possibly learning whatever novel method/technique the paper shows so they can apply it in their own hands). It allows the field innovators to move quickly and discover new things, but is prone to all sorts of reliability/reproducibility problems, and ideally science should be egalitarian, not credentials-based.

[renewiltord]

My cousin (with whom I am very close) had a similar experience that I posted about years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32969092

I have repeated it many times on this site but here’s the reality of human experience: if the rate of fraudulent labs is even as high as 10% you should expect that any viewpoint that it’s widespread would be drowned out by views that it’s not real.

Also, the phenomenon you observed where people are champions till the rubber meets the road is more common than one thinks.

[Noumenon72]

> if the rate of fraudulent labs is even as high as 10% you should expect that any viewpoint that it’s widespread would be drowned out by views that it’s not real.

If "it" is fraud here I would expect the viewpoint that it's widespread to be less and less drowned out as it approached 10% since everyone would know that it's real. I think I'm misunderstanding the sentence.

[renewiltord]

No, the guys at fraudulent labs and the guys at honest labs will both claim no fraud. The only ones who will claim fraud are those who cross over. So you’ll get a vast majority telling you it’s not happening and a tiny minority (even when as high as 10% are fraud) telling you the fact. All rare things have this effect. There will be so many people telling you it’s not real “as someone in the field”. They will be adamant about it. You need someone who has seen both.

To be clear, not “as it approaches 10%”. I mean “even as high as 10%”.

[titzer]

Not I didn't say that it isn't real, I just said it's not that rampant, and I was referring to the egregious examples in the article and the anecdote. But it's a sliding scale and being selective in presenting research results is a gray area that requires us to think about reproducibility and make sure we have good processes for discouraging, detecting, and correcting those kinds of dishonesty, too.

In my field (programming languages and compilers), conferences have started to adopt artifact submissions which include source and build instructions that are then independently replicated by volunteers who serve on artifact evaluation committees. It's a good step in the right direction.

And I'll also caution, again, that reasoning based on anecdotes can be distorted both ways. A tiny minority of people can claim the sky is falling and make it sound like Science is threatened by crisis. Those voices get amplified by the media and the attention economy and get blown out of proportion. What Science and institutions need is mechanisms that are fair and well-resourced and taken seriously. Those mechanisms and the people who volunteer time and effort to keep them running are the real heroes of Science, and breathless articles and anonymous anecdotes on the internet do not make up an accountability system.

If you see fraud, then REPORT IT to someone who can actually hold them accountable. Unsubstantiated and undirected accusations just spread distrust and do not increase accountability.

[qsera]

>And I'll also caution, again, that reasoning based on anecdotes can be distorted both ways...

I will go further and say that if you can clearly see how the incentives are aligned, even anecdotes are not necessary.

>If you see fraud, then REPORT IT to someone who can actually hold them accountable. Unsubstantiated and undirected accusations just spread distrust and do not increase accountability.

Mmmm..are you..for real? I mentioned incentives just above, so let us look at it. What is the incentive of this "person who can hold them accountable"? Do they really want to cut down the "output" of the institution by insisting on 100% honest? Do they really want to lose to competition which might allow such practices?

I think not. I think if this is reported, chances that the report will sit in some shelves or end up in some dust bin doing nothing. And the person who report it would suffer one way or the other.

Also: https://gwern.net/doc/sociology/2003-ashforth.pdf

>What Science and institutions need is mechanisms...

Na, "Science" and "Scientists" needs funding. End of story.