The Academic Fraud Epidemic - The Alarming Reality

From doctored data to manipulated results, learn about the alarming consequences and potential solutions to preserve the integrity of scientific research.

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▼ ▽ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Intro
00:46 What is causing the fraud?
2:37 Academic Task Force??
03:36 The Highly Cited Researchers List is amazing
04:21 Gaming the System
05:46 PhD's from the dead!
07:57 Weird Situation
08:34 Where does this leave us?
10:18 Conclusion

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[eliesbik]

Thank you, Andy, for talking about this important topic - and nominating me as the leader. I am not sure if I would be good at leading an army, but I sure hope to inspire many others to be on the lookout for fraudulent science.

[Heyuher]

"The emperor has no clothes".

That's one huge reason I'm leaving after this year.

[myautobiographyafanfic]

The damn journals should be actually gatekeeping this. Like, as the definition of their job

[roxannlegg]

I must admit - when doing literature reviews, I did sometimes see lead authors, that appeared agin and again, that when i digged a little deeper, appeared to have published dozens of papers in one year. Made me feel a right lazy cow, and made me terrified of post grad work! Now i know why. So I usually did my best to find authors from different countries, and years, and institutions, and obviously with completley differing lead authors and associated authors, but it wasnt always as straight forward as that if the assignment required the papers to be within a narrow time frame of publication. And as for negative results, in first year they drilled us in the scientific method, and our professor asked "is then a negative result relevant, is that a result". My reply was yes, and I heard audible groans from our group - of course it was, but that was not their thinking. Sometimes good research involves a process of elimination, and that imho simply shows you were thorough.

[robxfong]

When the English government wanted to solve the problem of finding Longitude, it did not dump huge amounts of money into Oxford and Cambridge, it passed the Longitude Act of 1714 that promised direct monetary award to ANYONE who could solve the problem, regardless of his/her station in life. The problem was eventually solved by a humble watchmaker named John Harrison. Modern governments need to think of something equally out of the box to solve the big problems of mankind. Any institution such a university that has existed in an unchanged form for so long is ripe for disruption.

[ulaat]

My supervisor wants me to add everyone she wants to thank in my paper as authors and the problem is that two of them caused me a really hard time throughout my lab work and they took my results with my supervisor's permission and I had to change the whole project at that time and as for now I have to include their names as well 😢

[zray]

Self-citation is nowhere near a problem as being listed as an author without having contributed to the paper.

[scar]

Basically journals should require raw data, publish null result, and there should be random auditing of highly cited papers. Also, immediate expulsion should happen if acadamic misconduct is proven, and even if universities play favorites they should be "cancelled" in academia. Nobody reads their paper or takes them serously and journals black list them.

[johannes]

Einstein, in his day, argued that the system of academia was not built to benefit knowledge. He argued that he would never have produced the theory of relativity in academia because he would be forced to work so hard on publishing because quantity was king. He was happy that he worked as a patent clerk because that gave him time to think and work on his theories before publishing.

[loodwich]

As a researcher, I have a reviewer paper... it is a fascinating paper, and I found what I expected... the problem with all the papers that I read:
1°) I found fraud data in more than 20% of them.
2°) Around 30% of them have loose data. I asked the corresponding author if they could provide me the original data, and the answer was one of those (...silence...; all the data is in the paper; I don't have the original data)
3°) I found consistent data on only 30% of them, but I know half of the authors personally, and they didn't commit fraud.
4°) 20% was rubbish, and I asked several times how that paper was published
The problems with the review paper are:
5°) We couldn't publish the real result because we will throw away 15 years of research of more than 80 groups around the globe. My professor showed me how to use words to say that the people wanted to read but were telling the truth.
6°) It is my paper with more references

[zray]

For people that work in the lab, I guess it's hard to teach and learn that a negative result is a valid result when that can't be published.

[andremartinez]

Embarking on a new career at 43 as a student, I'm struck by the lack of integrity in academic journals. In my previous QC/QA role, where signing off on documentation carries the weight of legal responsibility, I can't help being concerned that this is not a bigger concern. I'll elaborate.

The paradox of discouraging students from using AI for creativity while instructors use AI to detect its influence doesn't quite add up. It brings to mind the question of how educators previously dealt with suspicions of plagiarism, it couldn't have just been simply reading the paper, would it?

Remarkably, this issue is confined to a YouTube video. Institutions boasting high standards and charging substantial fees should be addressing this more seriously. It's ironic that well-educated individuals, having gone through ethics and sociology courses, are now grappling with issues that suggest a lack of thorough analysis.

Moreover, the rush to meet deadlines, preventing proper scrutiny of data by both students and lead researchers, adds another layer of concern. Amidst this, academia expresses heightened worries about AI-assisted essay writing, while the more pressing issue may well be the rush to publish flawed data.

[robxfong]

Love your stuff! Keep holding their feet to the fire. Love that a paper making a point about sloppiness and rushing to publish can't be bothered to spell check 'competator' (2:24). The irony!

[DavidHaavik]

Amazing to think that it's "smart" people that end up in this kind of system

[sdjohnston]

Excellent. It's so important to bring this to light. Thank you. Please keep doing so! There is way too much willingness now in our society to treat "the science" as a sort of religious cult that demands obeisance. It is entirely unwarranted and it's time the general public knows this.

[full_ArmourOfGod]

Madness, USC is where I did my undergrad exchange program over 10 yrs ago.

[Xcalator]

As long as no-one puts the finger on the wound (i.e., the 'publish or perish' mentality sustaining Publishing capitalism) nothing will ever change!

[SRYF]

Some real examples of hyper-authorship. Two well-known researchers in the field of dementia and related disorders have each at present 2000 articles to their names, and they publish 300+ papers per year. I.e., one paper per day. It is probably some sort of world record. The university in question applauds and celebrates them for publishing so much and for being on the most cited researchers list. Make of that what you will.

[absentmindedintellectual]

Watching your videos makes me feel better for not getting into a PhD project.

[Batosai]

The publishing entities should be punished for publishing poor or fraudulent data. That is the only real solution. Of course, I'm not sure how this would be done. It would probably require some form of independent oversight committee who periodically audits the publishers. I don't really think this would work that well, but it might be the best option.

You can't remove the incentive to cheat from the researchers because doing so would necessarily make the field non-competitive. This tract is a non-starter. Consequently, you need to increase the likelihood of being exposed and the consequences of exposure.

The only people who could expose the fraudulent papers are the people who review them. But this suffers from the same problem as the first. You would need someone to review the reviewer since there is no incentive otherwise for them to review the papers accurately (and they are susceptible to bribes for that same reason as well).

The only people who have an appropriate incentive to make sure research is right are the people who actually have to use the results for a purpose other than advancing a political agenda. So this brings up the true issue. If no one is using the research and no one cares if it is accurate, why is any of this being done in the first place?