A Lot Of Science Is Fake

How much? No one is sure.

Pictured: Science. Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash

Fraud is a big problem in science. People fake academic work. In some cases, this is silly and fairly amusing, the retracted paper that claimed that men who carry guitar cases are more attractive. In other cases, like the story of Yoshitaka Fujii who admitted to fabricating results in trials of drugs used to treat serious surgical complications, it’s less funny and more terrifying.

And a new paper has just come out estimating that this problem is way bigger than most people believe. It’s possible that one in seven scientific papers are the result of people fabricating their results.

Scientific Misconduct

For most bad practices, you’ll see a huge grey area where different professors argue one way or another about what constitutes an issue. Some people think self-plagiarism — copying paragraphs or even large segments from one of your papers to a new one — is terrible, while some senior professors defend it. Everyone agrees that p-hacking, where scientists cherry-pick results or analyses to find statistically important results even though their data does not show anything, is bad, but there are degrees of bad.

Fraud is no different. There’s a wide range of things that you can do which could potentially be considered fraudulent in the right context. Deleting certain observations from a dataset and calling them “outliers”, for example. In some circumstances, that could be fraudulent practice — in others it’s totally fine. There are grey areas all the way up until people start fabricating data out of thin air or truly torturing the data until it confesses, say, throwing out half a sample.

In the past, everyone’s agreed that fraud — real, serious fabrication of the Fujii kind — is rare. In part, this is because academia works entirely on a system of trust. Everyone from journal editors to readers assumes that no one fabricates data on a regular basis, and even if they do it can’t be a real problem because of peer review.

An amazing fact I learned while writing this piece is that Peer, Belgium is the site of a large air force base, and thus when you search for “peer review” on stock photo websites you get a ton of images of fighter planes. Much cooler than actual peer review, which is very boring. Photo by Guy Croisiaux on Unsplash

It’s also because the most popular estimate we’ve had until now of scientific misconduct put…