Academic Research Fraud

Related. Others?Crowdfunding a defense for scientific research - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37393502 - Sept 2023 (47 comments)Is it defamation to point out scientific research fraud? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37152030 - Aug 2023 (13 comments)Harvard professor Francesca G

Plenty of Theranos level academia fraud in physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal

Yes it is a systemic issue. A cursory search for academic research fraud will reveal this. Some fraudsters are very high profile. There are all kinds of perverse incentives; prestige, grant money, not wanting to waste time with ‘useless’ negative results.

> Most research is flawed or useless, but published anyway because it's expedient for the authors to do so.For the record I now know a professor at one of the premier institutions in the world, who is a total fraud. Their research was fraudulent in grad school. Their lab mates tried to raise concerns and nothing happened. That person graduated, with everyone on the committee knowing the issues. Then they got a premier post-doc position. People in their lab (who I caught up with at a c

my wife spent a year trying to reproduce some data that her research depended on only to eventually find out that it was fraudulent. the original researcher even admitted this to their lab, and he retired and his lab was shut down. no retraction was ever published. my wifes lab tried to publish a paper showing that the original research was fraudulent and the journal was not willing to publish it. she has since left the field, and i have been pretty jaded on science and academia since then

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184289296/harvard-professor-...Seems to be a season for uncovering flaws in scientific publications :)

Here's a paper rejected for plagiarism. Why don't you click on the authors' names and look at their Google scholar pages... you can also look at their DBLP page and see who they publish with.Also look how frequently they publish. Do you really think it's reasonable to produce a paper every week or two? Even if you have a team of grad students? I'll put it this way, I had a paper have difficulty getting through reviewer for "not enough experiments" when sever

Related. Others?Harvard Probe Finds Honesty Researcher Engaged in Scientific Misconduct - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39712021 - March 2024 (15 comments)They studied dishonesty – Was their work a lie? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37714898 - Sept 2023 (153 comments)Crowdfundi

Unfortunately it's probably not serious crime. It would have been in the private sector, see Theranos, but not in academia. The USA is rather unusual in having the ORI, but it's toothless and does only a handful of announced sanctions per year. There aren't the laws on the books, nor prosecutors and investigative forces in governments dedicated to pursuing scientific fraud.So I'm afraid to say that assuming the allegations are true, they will probably get away with it. It&

To be honest I'm surprised it's not higher. Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789308The bottom line is that there's not much incentive for doing the boring statistical validations (I can tell you that no one likes doing statistics apart from statisticians, and not even all of them) and verifying that everything is reproductible, and a huge