What percent of univeristy / scientific research is just totally made up? Dr. Gregg Semenza, Ranga P. Dias & others exposed

In my entire career, I directly saw three instances of misconduct that I wouldn’t be willing to describe as outright fraud. The details would be tedious and boring but it’s usually someone giving in to a bad impulse. None of the people that I worked for or that I supervised ever came off as fundamentally dishonest.

My thoughts on this usually return to the fact that there is a lot about ‘doing’ science that takes fortitude and discipline. It can mean long, lonely hours in the lab, so there’s a bit of a character test in there. Maybe, just maybe, that weeds out a lot that would take shortcuts.

I really appreciate the well thought-out response. I know these things feel like fool’s errands at times, but I do think you will influence some opinions here.

I sympathize with you as an editor. I never did that, but I was a prodigious reviewer for journals and NSF panels. I did some DOE stuff too. I have been out of my field for close to 8 years and I still get requests to review from Elsevier 😂. Somehow they got a hold of my personal email and started sending requests again two years ago. I reached out to the Editor and he told me that he’d still appreciate the review anyway, and now I have full access to their journals and whatever else I need (meh), but I still do a paper per month. Mostly 1-2.5 IF kind of stuff, but if it is sound and doesn’t contain any technical errors I recommend acceptance.

To the young scientists here who want to be PIs - probably one of the best pieces of advice I ever got was to volunteer to review. If NSF is your thing, figure out your program director(s) and volunteer. Don’t be a kiss-a$$, it’s perfectly ok to be transactional about it, but review proposals. Nothing will clarify how to construct an argument well like seeing other people try to do it and mostly fail. I don’t know too much about NIH, but NSF provides a gdamn template for the meat and potatoes called the “Project Description,” and you still find people ignoring it. Go to Arlington and discuss the proposals, or do it virtually. You will instantly be better! Rinse and repeat.

Much of the faked research will come from the field of social sciences. Hard sciences research can be easily replicated and based on experimental design. Social sciences research mostly uses surveys of dubious validity to find correlations and how much factor can be accounted for by certain variables. And like the faked results from studies by that black criminal and society professor, they have certain agenda and narrative they want to shape. You will never find sociology research that will say white people are not racist. That goes against the whole tenets of that discipline. And those are honest will tell you almost any results can be obtained by tweaking the study to get the desired results. Whether those studies are good or bad doesn't matter. They will use the results to push their agenda.

As a practicing scientist and lab-head for more than 20 years I'll say that the only reason you find out about these scandals is because most scientists have an incredibly strong ethic toward honest research. Most working scientists would be sick to find that a collaborator had placed fake data into one of their papers. For example, one of my colleagues learned that a postdoc had included manipulated images in a collaborative paper, just a few days before it was about to appear in Nature (the most prestigious scientific journal). Within hours my colleague had fired the postdoc and pulled the paper out of Nature at great cost to his career.

There's also a huge crowd-sourced effort to find and expose images of research fraud. I don't know of any other area of human activity where there is so much pressure to find and expose fraud (and that certainly includes track and field).

The social sciences are terrible. Read "The Quick Fix" by Jesse Singal. It's eye opening how much garbage science is out there. Exercise science is almost as bad.

Medicine is somewhat more rigorous, but nowhere near as strong as it should be. Medicine by it's nature tends to be a slightly stronger science because it's consequences have more basis in reality. Studies run/funded by drug companies can be corrupted by ulterior motives, but generally there are more checks and balances than the social sciences.

you don’t say

Rojo,
If there’s a large amount of product money involved, there may be fraud or intentional deception involved.

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.”
[ Marcia Angell ]

Some people wonder why more and more people are losing faith in “science.” I think part of the reason is there’s a large amount of old and continuing fraud and deception that scientists are not actively calling out . Even though most researchers are honest, the bad apples can destroy confidence in anything that is reported in my opinion. If athletes can be banned for four years, certainly researchers and especially companies involved in deceptive or fraudulent research should be banned from IRB research approval and government approval of any product based on their own reseach they conduct or fund (directly or indirectly).

In specific answer to your questions:

1. Percentage of fraud would depend on the scientific field and, of course, your exact definition of fraud. Is it “fraud” to deliberately design an experiment in a way to avoid showing adverse effects? Is it fraud to put an active substance in a drink mix given to a placebo group and not report on it? Is it fraud for the subjects to be on a drug preventing adverse reactions being tested for? Is a company ghost-writing a paper for a researcher considered fraud? is it fraud for a govt scientist to write a draft review that plagiarizes an industry-written review and then when discovered, adjust the wording and say everything is okay now. I guess what I’m saying from these real-world examples is the wider your definition, the higher the percentage of fraud.

2. Fraud and deception are not discovered and publicized in many cases, so there is an incentive to continue at this point.

I’ll paraphrase your question, and you’ll recognize the answer immediately.
“It got me to thinking a thought … if so many of the very top police officers are corrupt, are they all corrupt?”

“It got me to thinking a thought … if so many of the very top doctors are corrupt, are they all corrupt?”

“It got me to thinking a thought … if so many of the very top firefighters are corrupt, are they all corrupt?”

“It got me to thinking a thought … if so many of the very top welders are corrupt, are they all corrupt?”

Yeah? is that f-ing right mate?

Ha, ha, good advice, but you have been out of it for a while. Our new building is in Alexandria...

The last panel I served on was 2018!

We appreciate you.

Actually, we're still mostly fully virtual unless you get on a site visit.

"Junk science" was a mantra for conservatives who were pushing tort reform 20-30 years ago. It was a protest against the expert witnesses who plaintiff's lawyers were using in products liability cases. The general complaint was that these experts were coming up with stuff that conflicted with the scientific establishment and government experts. Ironically, Texas and other states enacted tort reform that allowed for a presumption that there was no liability if a drug or medical devise had FDA approval. How things have now changed in such a relatively short amount of time.

I've met Marcia Angell (along with George Lundborg and Drummond Rennie) at the first Conference on Peer Review in Biomedical Publication. Her worry was that the pharmaceutical industry exhibited too much control over drug research. As time went on, mechanisms to address this have been created, such as trial registries (such as clinicaltrials.gov) and requirements for data submission and code submission. COI has also begin to play a big role. And Cochrane has sued European industries for failure to publish negative drug results.

Listen, if you ever have a paper retracted, your career is over. Period. If you are accused of fraud, no university will want you, and no grant agency will give you one. In general, you do not get a second chance here.

You ask 2 provocative questions, including one that has many questions embedded. Some of the issues you raise are not fraud, but they are certainly scientific misconduct, and depending on what your ICD says could put you and your university or organization at significant risk (i.e. putting active product in placebo mix- since the ICD would need to tell you about the potential risks and the manner in which you are randomized). Ghost-writing is a difficult topic- authorship in scientific publication is well defined- see the definition from the International Committee of Medical Journal; Editors, but with a contract, you are paying someone to write for you and they give you their rights- so while the ethics are questionable- and I don't like this- there is nothing illegal there.

As to your second point, you cannot prove the unprovable. We have never found bigfoot, so he or she or it has never been discovered, but people are still out there looking. The fact that some fraud is not discovered- and this has to be true, of course- is not any incentive to try on your own to commit it. The risk is far too high and honestly, it is never seen with younger novice researchers.

All these issues are not new in scientific publication. We editors grapple with this entire constellation of challenges all the time- and now we have ChatGPT,new forms of literature reviews (living, scoping, narrative, systematic, meta-analysis, and more), publication bias in situ, selective reporting of data (data mining), predatory journals, etc.

Not true at all. Reviewers for papers submitted for publication are usually very familiar with the literature. Plagiarism would be identified pretty easily. Anyone who submits a plagiarized paper is an idiot, willing to throw their career away.

I have a PhD but have spent most of my career outside of academia working for corporations. There is a lot more fraud in research funded by private corporations because there is no accountability. The people consuming the findings are not experts and lack the context or knowledge to question results. Also, there is more pressure to fudge the data to keep the clients happy and paying the bills.

I appreciate your reply.
If you consider the examples I gave as scientific misconduct as opposed to scientific fraud, I think that’s a fair point. Then it is my experience that scientific misconduct is rampant enough that the general public is becoming mistrusting of scientific journal articles. Government agencies and many journal editors look the other way when big money is involved. I had hoped for reform, but I think certain areas are beyond saving and it’s better to just present to the information directly to the public.
In the examples I gave, no papers have been retracted. In fact, the company providing the active “placebo” drink mix did so for years of publications and they knew it caused the same reactions (as the test substance) in mice studies as they published a book about it. The fact that they used this substance came out at a FASEB hearing … and there was no consequences.
Some other examples:
1. A researcher I knew published a study showing that a consumer produce chemicals that are inhaled and caused severe neurological effects in rodents. It was confirmed by a US govt scientist experiment. It turns out that the industry can conduct experiments that show no problems by making sure the humidity is high enough that the chemicals are precipitated out in water droplets and not inhaled. No journal article retractions.
2. How to avoid showing a chemical in the blood from an ingested product? Find a measuring technique from the 1960s and bury the use of the old technique deep within references to references. This was done many times by industry consultants at a Midwest Univ. No journal article retractions.
3. While Cochrane may have had some success in Europe, it takes lawsuits. Govt. agencies will ask stakeholders to submit references for their reviews and then cherry-pick references. Then they will hide who writes the draft review to then be looked at by the full committee. Even my and other appeals to the ombudsman was met a blacked out name. When I caught EFSA plagiarizing an industry review for their draft report, there were no consequences — they just adjusted the words and everything was fine for them.
4. Recently, scientists from the CDC and FDA published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. The numbers in a key table and in the text were clearly made up as they could not be physically possible. After people saw how ridiculous the paper was, they didn’t retract it, but quiety published a revision of the table and a few sentences. But they should have retracted it as the paper now shows basically nothing. There was no apparent consequence for the lead researcher as he continued to lead probably the most important team at the CDC. The CDC published a followup paper with new data, but changed the definition of the categories so comparisons with the first paper were impossible.
5. Recropping a brain image from one amimal experiment and putting the recropped image in a different publication claiming it was from a different primate species — no retraction.
6. Feeding primates a test substance and reporting no reaction and nothing unusual only later in a book letting it slip that the primates were drugged and threw up the test substance. No retraction.
7. If products causes an obvious increase in adverse events, categorize the subjects into smaller and smaller groups until you can say that within each tiny group “there was no *significant* increase in adverse effects.” This will never lead to a retraction by can convince a lot of people of “safety.” Some will say that other researchers will find problems with the product — but only if the researcher happens to get funding and that may take many years. Once a problem is discovered, industry researchers can fund multiple studies coming to a different conclusion.

Happy to talk more about examples 2-7 (but example 1 is second hand) or provide other examples. I don’t think industry-funded researchers do have to rely on fabrication of data as scientific misconduct will get a similar result. I hope that can be cleaned up, but so far I see little being done. Glad you’re more positive and hopeful. I am a bit more hopeful that some scientists are starting to speak out on this issue and I am very grateful for all of the honest researchers doing great work.

To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.

Getting mad and trying to browbeat me only proves you're no intellectual, let alone a physicist.

And very plainly never studied theoretical math, or you'd understand how much of it has no practical use whatsoever - and therefore understand that it is generally not real.

So I'll just restate what I said before, to whomever can grasp this very simple nuance - "space-time," "fields," and "matter" (originally "mass") are not real things. They are just abstract ideas invented to describe real things. And rather than trying to investigate the substance, the nature of those things - what they are - these concepts focus on how the things they describe interact with each other. Position, velocity, momentum, etc. What they do.

Go ahead, claim you don't understand again, if you think it looks clever

you sure wasted a lot of time trying to look smart

leave it all there rojo!