Trust the Science? Covid, Climate Change? Scientific Fraud and the Fraud of Science By Brian Simpson
As discussed by Adrian Barnett Professor of Statistics, Queensland University of Technology, there is a massive amount of fraud in science, not just the social sciences, but STEM and science as well. The amount of fraud can be gaged by the “paper mill” industry for mass producing articles for academics to secure grants and jobs. The “paper mill” industry is worth an estimated €1 billion a year. There are many proposed “solutions; to this issue, given the clear limits of peer review to detect fraud, such as use of computer-data base checking. Yet, if the original data is cooked up, it will be difficult once more to detect. And, journals do not have a great incentive to devote limited resources to the exhausting task of running fraud to ground, merely giving lip service to it.
Why should we at the blog be concerned with this issue? Well, one of the mantras coming from the Covid plandemic and the climate change hysteria scam, is to “trust the science.” But if the science is full of fraud, that undermines that proposition, which is significant to us since today the technocrats’ basic weapon is science. One of my goals, having a science background, is to demystify what he elites are doing, as well as critiquing it. It keeps me out of trouble, although, with the coming waves of censorship and oppression, that may not be so.
“Fraud in science is alarmingly common. Sometimes researchers lie about results and invent data to win funding and prestige. Other times, researchers might pay to stage and publish entirely bogus studies to win an undeserved pay rise – fuelling a “paper mill” industry worth an estimated €1 billion a year.
Some of this rubbish can be easily spotted by peer reviewers, but the peer review system has become badly stretched by ever-rising paper numbers. And there’s a new threat, as more sophisticated AI is able to generate plausible scientific data.
The latest idea among academic publishers is to use automated tools to screen all papers submitted to scientific journals for telltale signs. However, some of these tools are easy to fool.
I am part of a group of multidisciplinary scientists working to tackle research fraud and poor practice using metascience or the “science of science”. Ours is a new field, but we already have our own society and our members have worked with funders and publishers to investigate improvements to research practice.
The limits of automated screening
The problems with automated screening are highlighted by a new screening tool publicised last month. The tool suggested around one in three neuroscience papers might be fraudulent.
However, this tool detects suspected fraud simply by flagging authors with a non-institutional email (such as gmail.com) and with a hospital affiliation. While this could catch some fraud, it will also flag many honest researchers, and the tool flagged a whopping 44% of genuine papers as potentially fake.
One big problem with simple screening tools is that fraudsters will quickly find workarounds. For instance, telling their clients to use their institutional email address to submit the paper.
Given the amount of money to be made, fraudsters have the time and motivation to find workarounds to automated screening systems.
This is not to say automated tools have no place. They have been used successfully to check papers for faulty experiments, and to hunt for pilfered text reworked to avoid plagiarism checkers.
A project launched by the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers which aims to use screening tools to tackle fraud is also welcome. But automated tools cannot be the only line of defence.
A crowdfunded detective
There are remarkably few people who hunt through published research to detect scientific fraud. Perhaps the best known is the Dutch microbiologist Elisabeth Bik, who is an expert at catching manipulated images in scientific papers.
Bik has single-handedly caught multiple massive fraudsters, with the dodgy papers eventually being retracted from the scientific record.
Bik’s work is a tremendous public service. However, she isn’t paid by a university or a scientific publisher. Her detective work – which has seen her face harassment and court cases – is crowd funded.
With the billions of dollars in the publishing world, can’t a few million be found for quality control? In the meantime, one of our best-known lines of defence relies on good will and passion.
In Australia, spending just 0.1% of the annual scientific research budget on quality control would be A$12 million per year. This would be enough to fund a whole office of detectives and also training for researchers in good scientific practice, increasing the return on investment for the remaining 99.9% of the annual budget.
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