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How Common Is Scientific Misconduct?
Hugh Pickens writes "The image of scientists as objective seekers of truth is periodically jeopardized by the discovery of a major scientific fraud. Recent scandals like Hwang Woo-Suk's fake stem-cell lines or Jan Hendrik Schön's duplicated graphs showed how easy it can be for a scientist to publish fabricated data in the most prestigious journals. Daniele Fanelli has an interesting paper on PLoS ONE where she performs a meta-analysis synthesizing previous surveys to determine the frequency with which scientists fabricate and falsify data, or commit other forms of scientific misconduct. A pooled, weighted average of 1.97% of scientists admitted to having fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once — a serious form of misconduct by any standard — and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behavior of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices. Misconduct was reported more frequently by medical/pharmacological researchers than others. 'Considering that these surveys ask sensitive questions and have other limitations, it appears likely that this is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct,' writes Fanelli. 'It is likely that, if on average 2% of scientists admit to have falsified research at least once and up to 34% admit other questionable research practices, the actual frequencies of misconduct could be higher than this.'"
It is often cited that crappy, broken or incomplete code is often shoved out the door by business in order to meet deadlines. Quality or even truth are sacrificed for business reasons.
Why would R&D be any different? Big business often exhibit quota and other incentives for patent filing and the like. Outside funding sources pressure even pure research activities so that they can get their hands on new technology or even for silly things like a name being recorded as "first to" do something.
I am actually a bit surprised that the numbers aren't a bit higher.
If we accept that scientists are human like anyone else, we accept that scientists, like others, will make mistakes that get bigger and go more wrong than they anticipated. Some may intentionally commit fraud.
How common is scientific misconduct relative to other types of misconduct seems a more relevant question.
Also: What can we do to decrease it and how can we lessen its impact.
And how exactly are we supposed to believe her study?
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True, giving a certain "spin" to you interpretation of correctly presented data is common - but not necessarily a terrible thing. As you said, it it will be scrutinizied and filed in the big "misinterpretation" folder. As for active misconduct - it probably happens more often than reported, but thankfully gets caught internally most of the time before it is published. I can only offer anecdotal evidence, but while doing my PhD work, one of my colleagues tried to get away with made-up results. Head of department smelled a rat, checked the data and promptly fired the guy without hesitation. PhD student one day, unemployed with revoked visum the next day....
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Disclaimer: I'm a scientist.
Scientist will behave much better as soon as society (or perhaps the government at least) understands that if you want reliable information, you actually have to treat your scientist well.
Now, do not got me wrong, some countries, especially the US, invest quite a lot in science. But the problem is that the whole system is rotten to the core. It makes almost no sense at all for a young graduate to stay in a University/Institute. Pay will be low, and you have (in most countries) no job security. In Europe you either get a nice job at a company, or you go around taking post-docs for 5-10 years, hoping to get lucky. Working crazy hours with no holidays. For most, in the end, they go to a company anyway (having lost quite a lot of money in the process).
Often you are expected to go abroad, and unless you are lucky this leaves you with no good way to take care of your pension. Then if you want to return, somebody else took your place at university.
There is 2 ways to stay in the system: either you are lucky or you lie like hell.
Now, people may say that if your good you do not need luck. But remember that for high impact publications you need a lot more then good ideas and good skills. In research it is perfectly normal to conclude after 2 years that your hypothesis is false. This is great science, it also is hardly publishable in a good journal. People like positive results, and the reviewer system actually encourages you to confirm generally accepted ideas, not to falsify them.
Well, I could go on but I am sure others will.
To be honest, I do not even get angry anymore when I suspect someone may have done something "questionable". It's just sad.
At least in science there is a built-in way of self-correction. Publish all the made up crap you want, but when no one can duplicate the feat don't be surprised when the community calls you out on it. Tell me where you go to find the guy double checking the work of the corrupt police officer or judge when they perjure themselves to ruin your life and your ability to defend yourself. Find me the people replicating every aspect of your grafty mayor's work to make sure he's not full of shit...
I can't think of anywhere else in life that there are as many checks and double checks and accountability as in the field of scientific research. Just because no one catches it immediately means nothing. If it was fake no one will be able to replicate it. A single study proves very little and likewise does very little damage, so if no one cares enough to replicate it chances are slim that it will cause harm.
Moreover, you rarely become a professor at a major university or some other distinguished position only on the basis of being talented; it is much more important that you are skilled at writing and inter-personal politics, manipulative both in terms of being able to sell your research and in terms of luring grad students, junior researchers and funding agencies to work for you or to pay you. Unfortunately, the same manipulative skills you need to acquire to become successful make you potentially more capable of cheating. I don't mean to insult anyone here by implying that it will actually make you more likely to cheat; only that it's easier for you to cheat because you are skilled at manipulating others (this being said, arguably the line between skilled manipulation and outright cheating is not as crisp and well-defined as one might hope). Indeed, sometimes cheating happens unwillingly; I have witnessed it on multiple occasions, when a famous professor would write a pile of an outright bullshit in a paper; not intentionally, but because his bullshitting skills and confidence were orders of magnitude above his raw technical competence.
when I did chemistry at 6th form college (UK term, in US I suppose you'd call it senior high?), I recall doing a practical test in chemistry (titration) where you had some mystery chemicals and a colour change. the experiment was rigged so that it was somewhat like a reaction we'd already seen, but was in fact something quite different. the instructions were to make accurate measurements first, draw the appropriate graphs and *then* speculate on the mystery ingredients.
it turned out that we'd never encountered the particular reagents before, and if you did the test accurately you'd have realised it wasn't the old familiar reaction, but had to be something new - the figures would simply not add up. however, a significant number of people rejigged their results to match the known reaction and failed the test totally for two reasons, first being for failing to make accurate measurements and secondly for faking the results.
There's a big gray area. For instance, the Millikan oil drop experiment, which established quantization of charge, was arguably fraudulent. Millikan threw out all the data he didn't like, and then stated in his paper that he had never thrown out any data. His result was correct, but the way he went about proving it was ethically suspect.
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They do: science. While you can game the system (grants, publications, fame and fortune) you can't game science forever. If it's real, it's repeatable. Somebody can do it (if it's important enough). If it's not important enough and the information gets stuffed in some hard drive somewhere - no big deal.
Sure, money can be wasted. People can be injured. Reputations can be trashed. But in the end if it's real and important someone else will look into it and either confirm or deny it. It may take years or decades, but it will happen.
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There's also the case, common among undergrads, where the results of the experiment are already known. Suppose your experiment is testing the law of conservation of momentum. You have a few hours of lab time and they won't let you have more if you make a mistake. You get home and start analyzing your data only to find that *gasp* the law of conservation of momentum appears to have been suspended at your lab bench for a few hours. Neither claiming that you've cracked physics nor that this is obviously a case of human error makes an acceptable lab report.
In the "real" scientific world, maybe scientists aren't under quite so much pressure to find the "right" results, but often, only just a little bit less. They've incorporated a mindset throughout school that the "right" results are important to their superiours and, like the undergrad, their access to lab time is limited.
So you find an excuse to dismiss an inconvenient outlier, you apply a magical fudge factor which you can't explain, or you guess about what human error could have done to the data and you try to compensate for it. It's intellectual dishonesty, no doubt, but it's inevitable in a system where our method of laboratory education emphasizes confirmation of "known" science and punishes students whose data appears to deviate.
Peer review may not catch the journal article, but it eventually catches the faker.
The problem is, the public seems to think that one paper published in a journal translates into "this is true." It's not. Far more commonly than outright misconduct is studies that are preliminary, contain an honest error or are a statistical fluke.
Journal papers are about sharing information, NOT about laying down Truth on the Record. When all the studies start consistently showing the same thing, THEN you can start thinking about believing it.