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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[@myautobiographyafanfic1413]

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

[@Heyu7her3]

"The emperor has no clothes". That's one huge reason I'm leaving after this year.

[@robxfong00]

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.

[@zray2937]

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

[@profdc9501]

At least self-citation is obviously present, as opposed to frauds such as non-contributing authors, which are more easily hidden or difficult to identify.

[@Nathaniel_Bush_Ph.D.]

Yes! Self-citation is often totally justified, especially when your current paper is building on results/methods/theory from a prior paper you wrote. I understand how it can be abused, but it's just not anywhere in the same league as non-contributing authors or invented data.

[@Areutherehello]

​@@profdc9501I knew a professor Department chair whose name was listed as a co-author on SO MANY papers. Such a fraud.

[@roxannlegg750]

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.

[@Heyu7her3]

Sometimes you have to add your PI to the list... I add mine because I want my paper to be easier to find lol

[@planetary-rendez-vous]

Negative results are extremely important. How do you know something doesn't work? Fucking stupid "scientists", can't even grasp the bare minimum logic, should return to philosophy.

[@yum33333]

I've had the misfortune of working with one of these "twelve papers a year" guys. He had an h-index of over 40 and was completely incompetent. He had worked out a system with a bunch of his buddies - they would all put each other as coauthors regardless of whether they had actually contributed anything. He ended up getting fired by my PI. Amusingly, I was reading a highly-cited paper in my field and discovered some very questionable data in the paper. I pointed it out to him - and later I realized he was one of the coauthors!!! It's a crazy world out there and I no longer trust anything I read, sadly. If I had to guess, I'd say at least 30% of the papers, ESPECIALLY in top tier journals, contain some misleading or outright fraudulent practices.

[@roxannlegg750]

@@yum33333 Wow - but I agree - i think the higher the prestige the journal, the more it needs to be looked at. Largely because of just how much those journals charge to have a paper published by them. And so if you think even a little about the economics here, it makes sense that those with industry agendas or links are the ones that in the funding pool is also the funds required to be able to publishh in the best journals. But even the big ones have their own publishing scandals now and youre right - we just cant trust anything we read anymore. But also, genuine breakthroughs more often are found by accident, and not everyone with serious results worth publishing has the money to get noticed in the right journals.

[@AYVYN]

Apologies if this question is rudimentary, I have not been in Doctorate level academia. Are most hypotheses based on arbitrary guessing, or based on formal logic?

[@ulaat4215]

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 😢

[@surfingbilly9654]

stand up for yourself

[@Xcalator35]

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!

[@Nathaniel_Bush_Ph.D.]

The part no one wants to admit though is that lowering publication pressure requires admitting fewer Ph.D. students. If there are 10 candidates for every job, the pressure to out-perform the competition will remain. You need to bring it down to something like 2-3 candidates per job (with viable industry, government, and public-interest job alternatives for the others). That will still incentivize work, still select for talented candidates, but take the desperation out of the job path. The universities don't want to do that though because the Ph.D. students are the workhorses of the departments - they teach for peanuts, they work 12 hours a day on research (often unpaid), and they allow the profs to publish at respectable rates without burning themselves out.

[@scar6073]

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.

[@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

[@planetary-rendez-vous]

Don't you think publishing a breakthrough paper that actually denies 15 years of research would be... Either controversial or revolutionary? At least if the truth is that we've been doing it wrong, we're moving a little bit forward instead of perpetuating a lie. If course I expect hordes of angry researchers, that's why you need to be very solid on proof. I don't know I'm just a student asking.

[@sirmclovin9184]

From my experience, you may be right. Tread lightly though, it's all political.

[@zray2937]

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.

[@Nathaniel_Bush_Ph.D.]

This needs to change - we need "journals of negative results" which would actually be a service because they would warn other researchers off of trying failed paths.

[@cjohnson3836]

@@Nathaniel_Bush_Ph.D. People been saying this for years. Nothing has changed. And I doubt it ever will.

[@sirbaguette8378]

@@Nathaniel_Bush_Ph.D. While such a goal is noble, there are several problems with such a system that would make it unlikely to come to fruition: #1. When scientists (and perhaps laypeople) want to look at some of the recent findings/developments in a field, they sure as hell are not gonna visit a journal where every single article demonstrated no results/effects. #2. With the same logic as #1, null result articles tend to be cited less than articles with positive results unless it refutes some HUGE big-name theory in the field, which most papers do not. So scientists who have null results on a niche topic will not pay fees (if open science) to get their results published in an article that very few will read. #3. Following on from #2, if it is not open-science, then the journal would be extremely unprofitable due to lack of publications coming in from scientists (#2), and from lack of purchases from readers due to, quite frankly, boring and uninteresting null results (#1). The only way I can see such a model working is if maybe they received constant funding from a scientific body or benefactor to maintain costs.

[@PoleAmourous]

This is why metascience is so important. Simine Vazire, a psychology meta scientist, is about to become editor in chief of Psychological Science, I’m excited to see what changes she ushers in there. Basically, policies at journals and institutions need to stop incentivising bad practices.

[@Heyu7her3]

I'd love to become that if I had better research methods training

[@planetary-rendez-vous]

The problem keeps perpetuating itself when journals ask for bad practices like pvalues of my ass.

[@rivervalleytv]

Agree. Simine Vazire is great I have had exchanges with her. We do need a fresh look at the incentive system.

[@andremartinez5127]

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 KZbin 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.

[@absentmindedintellectual8465]

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

[@robxfong00]

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!

[@maiaautumne]

ha ha I noticed that!😁

[@ltwinters30]

Andy, I'd love to know if this same issue is happening in the liberal arts field as well. I'm interested in doing a history PhD like my father did. I know it's not your area, but I'd still love to hear your take.

[@Nathaniel_Bush_Ph.D.]

@@Dorkatron567 I bet ChatGPT is absolutely crushing it in liberal arts dissertation writing thought. 😂

[@tribalypredisposed]

I cannot speak to history as a discipline, but broadly the social sciences are a compendium of fraud, dishonesty, and gross incompetence. Some examples: I participated in a Yahoo group on Evolutionary Psychology, and a professor demanded I be removed as I lack anything beyond a high school diploma. I read his papers and pointed out that not only was he almost exclusively citing only himself, eleven out of thirteen citations on his most recent paper being his own work, he also was citing his own papers as saying things they did not say! He left the group and I stayed. Also in Evolutionary Psychology, a certain highly recognized professor whose department has hosted the annual HBES international conference, regularly cites papers in his work as saying things they do not, often could not, say, and even the opposite of what they say. Then there is a certain former editor of the top Anthropology journal who, for example, not only makes the absence of evidence fallacy, but does so having defined it so evidence cannot exist. He claims to prove our ancestors were peaceful because there is no evidence of our nomadic ancestors making permanent defensive structures. Any permanent defensive structures found would, of course, be evidence that the builders were not nomadic... But top prize has to go to "philosophy of science." The book "Beyond Biofatalism," for example, by Gillian Baker, is a sweeping attack on Evolutionary Psychology that cites ZERO papers published in an Evolutionary Psychology journal, cites central founders of Evolutionary Psychology as having "corrected" Evolutionary Psychology and doing what EP would never do, cites ZERO books written by an Evolutionary Psychology scholar after the discipline was founded... If you want to find literally the academic book version of the book report by the grade school kid who read not one word of the book, philosophy of science is where to go.

[@FestinaFirefly]

Liberal Arts & History used to be noble fields of study. Now they are simply variants of Grievance Studies.

[@Batosai11489]

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?

[@densonsmith2]

I believe that AI constitutes a portion of the solution. For the remaining part, as you pointed out, there needs to be more repercussions.

[@DrAndyStapleton]

Absolutely, there never seems to be any significant punishment

[@Nathaniel_Bush_Ph.D.]

@@DrAndyStapleton Punishment alone won't do it though - if people know they're out of a job if they fail to publish at some unrealistic level, some/many will roll the dice with fraud. If they don't do it they're out of a job, if they do it and get caught they're still out of a job, but if their fraud is missed or trivial enough to get ignored they win. Harsher sanctions don't alter that calculation much. We need much lower pressure to publish - don't incentivize the behavior in the first place - and quality metrics that have less to do with quantity.

[@sdjohnston67]

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.

[@James-uh1is]

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

[@evas4455]

I would really appreciate a video explaining the H index and journal rankings

[@Mnogojazyk]

Despite all the claims to the contrary that I heard when I was studying for my doctorate, the academy turns out to be a normal human grouping after all.

[@_salvax_]

@Andy - Thanks for the great vid. Please can you share the links to the articles you discuss. Many thanks

[@DrAndyStapleton]

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/09/scientific-misconduct-retraction-watch archive.is/Y6v56 www.timeshighereducation.com/news/over-1000-excluded-highly-cited-researcher-list-fraud daniellakens.blogspot.com/2023/08/how-i-tried-to-get-paper-that-i-own.html

[@keerthanrrao579]

Sometimes I wonder if we’re even making any impact at all. People just doing random things without much thought. There’s also almost 0 effort to answer if something is worth doing or not. “So what?” Should be a default question to all proposals.

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

All those great pieces of robust advice about how to do science the right way! And those who are going to follow this great advice will find themselves out of a job, while those gaming metrics, whether by adopting questionable practices or through outright fraud, get promoted... I mean, it's important for us all to stick to the values embodied in the scientific method, but so long as academia as an institution shows no commitment to these values, it won't really help.

[@lucabonaccio]

Theoretically, if you have only 1 fraud article your scientific carreer does not exist... we should also consider the penalties, since we have so few new places for young and brillant researchers our there

[@shawnb4745]

As a doctoral candidate finally moving to the defense phase, I would say that researchers probably take too much latitude with the possible shortcomings or limitations of their papers. Think of it. If the researcher acknowledged that there may be issues with their methodology or data collection instrumentation, that might be the first clue that there might be a flaw beyond the good p-values and Cronbach values, etc. But does any editorial board challenge it? The problem to me is that as long as the referees all like the formatting, hypotheses, and conceptual model, and the results align to the original research questions, then they aren't likely to bother checking the data. Depends on the journal, in my opinion. One journal rejected my very first article but it was accepted elsewhere with some mods. I trust that the editor and referees did their part. But maybe some journals have terrible editors that let fraudulent papers in? Not sure. I have seen terrible papers during my lit review that had full on grammatical errors. I blame editors.

[@frost8077]

This is like watching the academia machine take on a life of its own. The collective is about to give birth to something out of a Lovecraft novel.

[@rtnjo6936]

Any comments on the Harvard president's plagiarism?

[@ulaat4215]

I think it's because of Israel - hammas conflict and antisemitism issue

[@joseferreirapinto9523]

On another note, if you use connected paper or any bibliometric software like Vos viewer and litmaps the same recurrent patterns appear around these wonderful academics…

[@zhanzo]

Not the problem. Just a symptom. The real problem is that modern academia is akin to feudal kingdoms. It all boils down to how academia is funded.

[@shamusosullivan5650]

No-One wants to do replication studies.

[@elawchess]

no one wants to pay for that

[@LG-uv3lh]

Because most results cannot be replicated and noone publishes negative findings. And in the rare case that you can replicate something it's "an old story", so why should they publish it again? It's frustrating.

[@robxfong00]

This could perhaps be a major role played by AI. Getting AI to do the dull, mind-numbing stuff that human researchers are reluctant to do due to boredom or fear of reprisal is a perfect role for AI.

[@elawchess]

@@robxfong00 This could work better in some fields where it's mainly computational. If it needs a biology or chemistry lab to deal with real world materials then it becomes more difficult and also expensive.

[@brAI7558]

The challenge is where to sit any oversight group. Research fraud per institution is still very infrequent. For some facilities, such as hospitals, where research is often performed as a passion rather than job requirement, missteps are rare, and mostly are inexperience rather than intentional deception. Ethics and Governance resources are applied to the front end (the National Statement on Ethical conduct runs to over 100 pages) as all research must step through this, and to financial accounting, with little cognitive space nor financial resources left for active trial oversight (the 'Australian Code for the responsible conduct of research is 10 pages, only 4 of value). The current hurdles are already considered in hospitals a barrier to entry for junior researchers, at a time when we need to encourage more research (and have increasing access to data). Therefore, getting the balance right, particularly in places where research is more a passion than a job requirement, will require careful consideration.

[@johnsmith1953x]

*WORD ORGY* You said it.

[@DanWAd]

There is pressure too from the universities to write summary papers to get your uni up the list. SNU in SG is one example

[@GilesMcRiker]

No need for an army to safeguard against fraud -- that should be (one of) the job (s) of peer review!

[@robxfong00]

... not if peer review becomes a Mutual Admiration Society. The key problem is that there is absolutely no accountability - none on the part of the publication, none on the part of the reviewers (if there was any in the first place), none on the part of free riding co-authors and very little if any on the part of the actual main author. Maybe the problem has always been this bad and maybe KZbin and other channels of communication are just exposing what has always been the case.

[@anxaxw7546]

I think academia should not avoid to publish experiments that don't give good results; we also need to know what does not work in order to advance science. It's a good way to avoid the same mistakes in research, if we know what does not work, we will know to do things differently next time, instead of pushing for getting good results all the time. Maybe it could lessen the pressure to always publish good data, and end up with a lot wanting to fabricate results.

[@DavidHaavik]

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

[@simonwiltshire7089]

The editor of the NEJM resigned in 2001 because pharma ‘owned’ the jorrnals. This has been a problem for many years.

[@JohnVKaravitis]

2:20 How do YOU spell "competitor"???

[@SR71YF12]

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.

[@aravr_project]

When you said army, I immediately thought of peer reviewers.

[@FoZeusMaximus]

That was very informative and useful. And those who work hard, study hard, push their limits, and do not get "credits".... That is just unfair. I am not naive; I understand how our world and society work, but still, it is so bad to see this. The technology changed the game. The problem is not with the technology and those fantastic tools you can use and have access to nowadays; it's more about how we use this technology. Thank you, Andy.

[@lurker993]

@Andy Stapleton. I have a genuine question for you if you bother to read these comments, but I see an inevitable conclusion from all of this. I'm not sure what the original intent of publishing research was, but I'd think it had less to do with verifying the research (as that's what peer reviews were for) and more to do with the fact that for the longest time, publishing could only be done by a publisher. But now that the internet makes publishing literally everything easy and cheap, the only difference between publishing research through an academic journal vs uploading it online yourself on your own website is to provide validity and a level of trustworthiness to the research. If the results of all of this are an abolishment of trust in academic journals, then why bother pushing it through the journal at all? I might as well just publish it myself on my blog or something.

[@johanlindeberg7304]

It is a system error, so punishment seems a bad idea, or inefficient. Basic income would make it possible for researchers to vote with their feet, and for the formation of new networks of collaboration. The need for expensive equipment, labs etc. are not solved by this. I think that at least some MSc students at Stanford get an education that includes building the necessary equipment they need. Machine Shop knowledge. I have also heard of insulin related research that seemed based on a maker philosophy. I think it was called the Open Insulin Foundation .

[@Random_Tangent]

Yeah, but Universities want lots of papers published to increase their QS rankings, to get more enrolments to feed the academic machine.

[@robxfong00]

Andy, why not do a video on potential prescriptions and solutions to this problem. There have already been so many done on the corrupt nature of the current system. Between yourself and your viewers/comment readers, I am sure you can come up with a good list of workable and practical reforms to the current system. Be the Martin Luther of academic research! Make a video or serious of videos on practical ways to address the exact problems you highlight here.

[@worldpeaceok]

Pick any paper on cancer research from China and Korea.

[@josephcarland]

Word salad. 😂😂😂😂 please keep great vidoes.

[@ch00ched]

western blots are for proteins, but I absolutely loved this video and the bit about our queen Elizabeth. She is saving academia!

[@GeNiouSSTriKer]

This video is hilarious and sad simultaneously. Hope I won't ever get tagged as an author in a word barf essay lol

[@perseoeridano4182]

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

[@darkrulerbob]

Just trust the science

[@profdc9501]

The cause of erudition may be extinguished by extreme and unbridled ambition, only to be replaced by sophistry. Why bother to learn a scientific field when making it up is so much more expeditious and rewarding?

[@GilesMcRiker]

"but science is self correcting!"

[@cristianinventor]

The solution is already invented we only need to check for the state of the art on scientometrics, no one is smart enough to fake a career of bad practice against a proper statistical analysis

[@tothattila8257]

Western blot is much more protein stuff and not DNA

[@sciencefliestothemoon2305]

Westerb blots are primarily serology 😂

[@tuberroot1112]

Shout a little louder and you'll just like Russel Brand.

[@avi4francis]

Ah yes, the good old punishing the intellectuals routine. It's no wonder most people prefer being Tiktok star instead of this nonsense.

[@fredericomolina1692]

So capitalism

[@user-cv9cd4sq2n]

Ha ha ha like anyone thinks this is something new. Have you ever met a professor? OK then. Everything is based around money and ego. Mostly ego. And if you do discover something new or find something has been taught that is incorrect you will never get your voice heard because these people are the gatekeepers of information. It’s literally one huge joke.

[@KOKOPIKOSS]

Academia itself created the problem. But it can be probably solved through the use of AI. It can check the data and the numbers in speeds and volumes no human could. So it can match the ever increasing number of papers...

[@raymorphis5714]

(Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern, Notre Dame, the University of Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt just to NAME those at the top See anything that links them HMMMMMM???