Why Science Fraud Goes Deeper Than the Stanford Scandal...

Learn about high-profile cases of scientific fraud, its prevalence, and its impact on academia. Discover situational pressures and solutions while exploring the quest for research integrity. It includes coverage of Diederik Stapel in the Netherlands, Woo Suk Hwang in Korea, and Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the president of Stanford University who stepped down in 2023. A must-watch for scientists and curious minds! 🧪🔍 #ScienceFraud #ResearchIntegrity #AcademicEthics

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✨TIMELINE:

0:00 Case 1: Diederik Stapel
1:48 Case 2: Woo Suk Hwang
4:05 Case 3: Marc Tessier-Lavigne
6:07 An Old Problem
7:44 Prevalence of Science Fraud
12:10 What to do About it

✨ABOUT ME:
I received my Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. I joined the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland in Australia in 2007, where my research and teaching are focused on social neuroscience.

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Subscriber count: 1863

[veramae]

Had a boyfriend in th 1970's, in college. He was working in chemistry. He told me about a summer job he had one year testing for pharma companies; he was only allowed to report positive findings.

[SedonaPerioCO]

I watched a prominent dental researcher delete information right in front of me that failed to support our hypothesis. Not even an attempt to hide it. I became very skeptical of research that day. I haven’t changed my mind. That was 20 years ago.

[layne]

I have a masters degree in data analytics and out of all of the coding and software and AI I learned, I have to say the most valuable thing I learned was how to actually read and understand published studies and data sets. The amount of crap data in these scientific journals is baffling. I just laugh whenever I hear someone say "trust the science". They have no idea how to read and decipher data to come to a statistically significant scientific conclusion.

[dieterhoffmann]

the much bigger problem is institutionalized corruption

[CH-Wisdom]

Even allowing professors to insist you purchase their books for university courses opens the door to fraudulent teaching and conflict of interest.

[ggwpBC]

It's important to note that even if the fraud rate is between 2 and 14%, considering fraudulent papers are more likely to have more impactful findings, thus being cited often, and that they can go decades without being found, we might have entire fields built on top of decades of fraudulent data. The actual cost of this fraud is much larger than it appears on the surface.

[j_h_o]

Now imagine an AI using their "research" as training data and then offering decision-making scenarios that are possibly life-altering based on complete lies.

[ordinarylady]

There are a few trends that I noticed as a graduate student in science that I think can create the conditions for fraud. The first is obviously "publish or perish, " which most scientists are well aware of. The second is the feudal relationship between postdocs, tenured professors, and grad students. As a grad student, you rely on your advisor to graduate, and more likely than not their word determines a lot of what your career prospects after graduation will be. Truthfully, there is a lot of pressure even in the best of circumstances to just nod your head and do exactly what your advisor says, regardless of if you think it's dodgy or incorrect. The third is that, to be honest, academia is rife with egotism, and the trend only gets worse as you climb higher up the ladder. I can think of multiple faculty members off of the top of my head who were textbook narcissists, and even those who weren't still engaged in destructive and abusive social behavior on a shockingly regular basis. We have this perception that academics are harmless, shy nerds, but in fact many of the ones I have met have god complexes that would rival the most paranoid of European kings, and the problem tends to get worse the more obscure or "difficult" (an extremely subjective judgment, all things considered) their chosen field happens to be.

[stuartreynolds]

Elizabeth Bik deserves enormous credit for unearthing many many science fraud cases, including the stanford one.

[SusanStorm]

Fraud occurs in science because
1. Its easy to do.
2. Academics is a power hierarchy
3.Peer review is not designed to catch fraud or bad science
4. Peer review is method to navigate the power hierarchy.
5. Political pressure
6. University pressure
7. Follow the money

[willymakeit]

I teach geology at a small college, and this is what I warn my students about every semester. Thanks for posting.

[layne]

Also I think it's worth noting how easy it is to categorize a study as "peer reviewed". You can't trust a study just because it's labeled peer reviewed. You have to actually understand who is reviewing and how they are connected because the fraud is all connected.

[Welank]

Not only fraud, but something that shocked me when I attempted (and left) a PhD program was the amount of absolutely useless papers. I had read a lot of papers before the program, but I had only been reading the best ones.
There are mountains of papers that are virtually useless and the authors know it (at some level) as well. They are just useful enough to get an off-hand citation by some of the lab's friends, but not much else. But if you don't keep the paper factory going, you lose funding.
I think incentives in academia need to be drastically changed, but that isn't my fight. (Incentives for teaching professors are also really messed up, but that is a different topic).

[waynesworldofsci-tech]

Beautifully done. I’m an anthropologist, faking fossil finds is harder, but people do fake measurements.

[Oscabellai-pdoh]

I applaud the students brave enough to speak out. That must have been daunting.

[julessantana]

Imagine all of the fraud that could possibly be happening in pharmaceutical science.

[squib]

Excellent presentation on this topic. As a fellow scientist I am tired of the nonsense about how fraud is this super rare event. It’s not. Way more of what’s published is made up than most want to admit. It’s pretty depressing for those of us who are honest scientists and often end up publishing in less flashy journals.

[jwenting]

I graduated physics (specialising in nuclear physics) in 1996.
While doing my graduate research the team in the next office over was trying to get a paper published, the exact topic is irrelevant but it obviously also involved nuclear physics.
They found it impossible to publish, no publication would accept their paper, which was reviewed and reviewed again many times and found accurate by all reviewers.
The problem? The conclusions from the research didn't match the political and ideological agenda of the publications' sponsors, groups like Greenpeace and various countries' green parties and anti-nuclear lobby groups.
They were told this quite bluntly by major publishing houses like Reed-Elsevier (name just an example), and told that unless they 'adjusted' their data and conclusions to match "properly acceptable conclusions" they would never be published.
This team took the moral high ground and refused to budge, many others would do as told and choose fraud over being turned into obscure unknowns.

[jccusell]

A dear friend of mine was a colleague briefly with Diderick Stapel. His scandal almost destroyed her entire scientific career. Luckily it was found her work was not affected. These cheaters are destroying careers of innocent people. Disgusting and so selfish.

[daveb]

I can totally believe this. In aerospace it’s extremely common to come across projects using blatantly misleading data. For instance, comparing aircraft at different altitudes or altitudes where one aircraft suffers power loss. Or by comparing different payloads or different test route profiles that are significantly more demanding on the other aircraft. In fact, I got banned from HBA for pointing out that someone had used intentionally misleading data to make their own project look superior.