Entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, growing (2025)

A crazy world we live in where Robert Maxwell's daughter is more notorious than he is.

perhaps a bit off-topic, but what is coincidental about this and/or what is the relevance of Ghislaine Maxwell here?

More than anything. That might legitimately be enough to save science on its own.

Of course I do! Not all of course, and taking (subjectively measured) impact into account. "We tried to replicate the study published in the same journal 3 years ago using a larger sample size and failed to achieve similar results..." OR "after successfully replicating the study we can confirm the therapeutic mechanism proposed by X actually works" - these are extremely important results that are takin into account in meta studies and e.g. form the base of policies worldwide.

Actually, yes, I do. The marginal cost for publishing a study online at this point is essentially nil.

I'm sure you can more narrowly tune your email alerts FFS.

> Replicating work is far more difficult than a lot of original work.

Only if the original work was BS. And what, just because it's harder, we shouldn't do it?

I believe people will enthusiastically say yes but that they do not routinely read that journal.

This is partly why much of today's science is bs, pure and simple.

the effort to publish a fraudulent study is less (sometimes much less) than the effort to replicate a study.

>>95% of the time, the fraudsters get off scot-free. Look at Dan Ariely: Caught red-handed faking data in Excel using the stupidest approach imaginable, and outed as a sex pest in the Epstein files. Duke is still giving him their full backing.

It’s easy to find fraud, but what’s the point if our institutions have rotten all the way through and don’t care, even when there’s a smoking gun?

Machine Learning papers, for example, used to have a terrible reputation for being inconsistent and impossible to replicate.

That didn't make them (all) fraudulent, because that requires intent to deceive.

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!

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.

The soviets may have rigged a few studies; but the democratized world now faces almost all studies being rigged.

I guess, to convert it into this context, we can say that if you mix the high minded and infantile (which I think is what Internet and social media did), the high minded becomes infantile, instead of the other way around.

in no sense was it corrupted by the desire to include a larger population in journal publications.