A Lot Of Science Is Fake
How much? No one is sure.
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…
