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yaakash · 9 years

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Scientific fraud, sloppy science – yes, they happen

Fraud. It’s an ugly word, an arresting word. As with “cheating” it comes loaded with negative connotations, but can potentially lead to far greater penalties and consequences. And yet fraud in science is not unheard of.

Medicine and the social sciences are particularly prone to bias, because the observer (presumably a white-coated scientist) cannot so easily be completely removed from his or her subject.

Double-blind tests (where neither the tester and the subject know for sure whether the test is real or just a control) are now required for many experiments and trials in both fields.

Deliberate fraud

Why do scientists and other academics cheat?

So why do scientists cheat? And, also, why are scientists sloppy? Of course, scientists are people, fame is fame and money is money, but some other possible answers are listed below

Deliberate or unintended bias in experimental design and cherry-picking of data. Such effects run rife in large studies funded by biotech and pharmaceutical firms.

Academic promotion pressure. Sadly, “publish or perish” has led many scientists to prematurely rush results into print, without careful analysis and double-checking.

Overcommitment. Busy senior scientists can end up as co-authors of flawed papers that they had little to do with details of. One famous case is that of 1975 Nobel Prize winner David Baltimore, regarding a fraudulent 1986 paper in the journal Cell.

Ignorance. Despite American biologist E.O. Wilson’s recent protestations to the contrary, many scientists and most clinical medical researchers and social scientists know too little mathematics and statistics to challenge or even notice inappropriate use of numerical data.

Self-delusion. Clearly many scientists want to believe they have uncovered new truths, or at least notable results on a long-standing problem. One example here is the recently-claimed proof of the famed “P vs NP” conjecture in complexity theory by the mathematician Vinay Deolalikar of HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, which then quickly fell apart.

There appears to be a mathematical version of the Jerusalem syndrome, which can afflict amateurs, cranks and the most serious researchers when they feel they have nearly solved a great open problem

Confirmation bias. It sometimes happens that a result turns out to be true, but the data originally presented to support the result were enhanced by confirmation bias. This is thought to be true in Mendel’s seminal mid-nineteenth century work on the genetics of inheritance; and it may have been true in early experimental confirmation of general relativity by Eddington and others.

Deadline pressure. One likely factor is the pressure to submit a paper before the deadline for an important conference. It is all too easy to rationalise the insertion or manipulation of results, under the guise that “we will fix it later”.

Pressure for dramatic outcomes. Every scientist dreams of striking it rich, publishing some new result that upends conventional wisdom and establishes him/herself in the field. When added to the difficulty in publishing a “negative” result, it is not too surprising that few scientists feel motivated to take a highly critical look at their own results.

Leading journals such as Nature and Science are not without sin. in 1988, Nature‘s great editor John Maddox managed to publish a totally implausible paper on homeopathic memory in water.

In 2010, Science played games with its own embargo policy to get maximum publicity for an arsenic-based life article by a telegenic NASA-based scientist that fell apart pretty quickly.

Quest for research funding. Scientists worldwide complain of the huge amounts of time and effort necessary to secure continuing research funding, both for their student assistants and to cover their own salaries. Is it surprising that this pressure sometimes results in dishonest or “stretched” results?

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