I think scientific misconduct is a huge issue, much larger than we can predict or forecast. The true extent of academic misconduct is difficult to grasp, given that the illustrative calculations that Thomas kindly provided are based on the admitted cases of misconduct. However, as it occurs with any destructive phenomena at work (workplace incivility, bullying, or employee silence), it is really difficult to grasp the real magnitude of the true problem due to under-reporting.

When considering the causes of misconduct (and without disregarding individual agency and choices), my perspective is that the resarch and P&T policies of many higher education institutions are contributing to exhacerbate academic misconduct, rather than contributing to reduce it. It is now commonplace to see that many (if not most) insitutions and departments embrace and preach the "Publish or Perish" philosophy (a scholarly version of social darwinism) or base their promotion and tenure decisions on counting publications in a limited set of journal(s), instead of examining the merit of a researchers' work. In plain english, that would be literally, "judging a book by its cover".

In this current zeitgeist, academia has lost the art and beauty of doing meaningful research that truly contributes to societal betterment and human progress. It has been replaced by a purely tayloristic mindset, where universities and schools are just "knowledge factories". In such knowledge factories, a paper;s sole merit is to count as a unit of academic production, regardless of its intrinsic value.

Anecdotal accounts show that this state of affairs is a soul-crushing experience for many young (but also for accomplished) scholars, who did not get into academia for joining a publication "rat-race". I wish I could say it is only an issue of my school/university, but I think many will agree with me that scientific misconduct is just the symptom of a larger, systemic, problem that cannot be merely attributed to individual differences in research integrity.

I fully agree with Lucas Monzani and especially with his conclusion that the problem is connected to the "Publish or Perish" philosophy. During the last decade, the h index and similar metrics have gain an importance which is doing harm to science. See Demand No. 3 in this petition: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Petition_Stop_Tracking_Science and the related discussions. There are different kinds of misconduct, fraud and unethical behaviour. Here are only a few examples:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Fraud_by_Numbers_Metrics_and_the_New_Academic_Misconduct

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Are_federal_funding_agencies_insensitive_to_data_fabrication

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_there_any_one_to_defend_Honorary_forced_authorship_if_not_why_we_practice_it

Huge problem, but what is difficult are solutions. As Lucas Monzani points out above, the reward system at universities contributes to the problem, but what should we do instead? Fraud is hard to catch/prove, so only a few cases come to light. If someone doesn't completely fabricate, but just distorts a little (e.g., throw out or adjust a few cases), it would be impossible to catch unless a member of the team noticed and blew the whistle.

Questionable research practices are worse in their impact because of how widespread they are. In the organizational sciences, for example, top journals require supported hypotheses, so there is tremendous pressure on scientists to make sure they have hypotheses that are supported in their papers. I'd like to think that few would fabricate results, but questionable research practices like p-harking and HARKing are almost required by major journals. Editors/reviewers will ask you to try different analyses and to add hypotheses. They tell you that you have inadequate theory in what was exploratory results, and to "pretend" that you were testing theories. People have been writing about the problem for years, but if anything, things have gotten worse.

Lucas and Wolfgang, I agree that the culture of academe is a real problem. The publish or perish philosophy and "publish X articles in this list of journals" has harmed science. And demotivated countless scientists. Dongwon, I was moved by your story: grad students and junior professors probably suffer the most in the current system.

Paul, your point about solutions is painful but true. I think that, first, we’ve got to carefully examine and revise incentives. For instance, many professors are motivated by the love of doing research. They just like it, they find it interesting. We need to make sure that the carrots and sticks related to tenure, promotion, and funding don’t get in the way. This’ll make attitudes toward misconduct less favorable.

We also need to better shape the social context. For instance, who approves of QRPs, who looks the other way? A closer look at the views of editors, reviewers, and managers would be helpful. Getting everyone on the same page about the damage caused by QRPs would weaken norms for misconduct.

Finally, we can remove resources for cheating by increasing accountability. The open science movement may help to some degree. For instance, preregistration of hypotheses might discourage some QRPs. The same’s true of making data readily available. But, as you've suggested before, these steps are unneeded for honest scientists and perhaps ineffective for dishonest ones.

I was talking with a colleague about this recently. His perspective was that open science may best serve to promote good science rather than catch bad apples. That is, open science can be helpful in encouraging robust, transparent research. By itself, it probably cannot eliminate scientific fraud and all QRPs. However, one would expect less of these things if the "research ecosystem" is healthy.

Of course, the university/college/department incentive system is another major part of the ecosystem. As long as a university makes tenure, promotion, and funding decisions based on the number of articles in a certain list, the ecosystem will not be as healthy as it could be. With assertive faculty governance, perhaps incentive systems can be improved, one school at a time. Or maybe that's too optimisitc?

Thanks you all for these fantastic insights! First of all, sorry to hear about your experience Dongwon, seniors scholars should now better and not abuse their power/authority to engage in such petty revenge.

As corruption in "real-life", scientific misconduct isn't free. The consequences, depending on the field, might vary from loss of life in the medical sector to accidents or catastrophic failures in applied sciences, and loss of legitimacy and twisted narratives in the social sciences.

I think that both the open science movement is a great starting point, and we should be educating our PhD students to upload their datasets, scripts and results to open repositories such as OSF, etc. It takes more time to submit papers, yes, but I believe it signals to editors a sense of openess and transparency from the author(s). Another solution is that journals invest some space in a "replication corner" in each issue, where independent scholars can further support or challenge the findings of influential papers (this practice is more common in the "hard" sciences than in the social sciences). In this way, the scientific community can act as external auditors and reduce the prevalence of published papers with un-replicable results (or at least, start conversation of what changed to explain the non-replication due to other causes than scientific misconduct).

Clearly, as both Paul and Thomas mention, it will unlikely be a silver bullet to academic misconduct, in particular, harder to detect practices, such as HARKIng and p-hacking, but at least would provide the resources for independent auditors to verify published findings.

As you can see, I am quite passionate about this topic so thanks Thomas for creating the space for junior scholars to add to the conversation, and eveyone else for their contributions to this exciting discussion.

Of course, we cannot do a "police investigation" behind every article to look for misconduct or bad practices, but this does not mean that we should give up. The introduction of new evaluation indexes can help to discern good practices from bad ones.

The h (Hirsch) index, which has become the reference index for the evaluation of researchers, is very simple, but this simplicity is its main drawback, as it does not distinguish between

1°) The authors of an article are all the same (they all receive the same number of credits) although in the majority of cases there are decisive contributors in the publication and insignificant contributors.

2°) Articles with 1, 2, 3, 4 or more authors are evaluated in the same way.

3°) All disciplines are evaluated in the same way even though the number of journals and therefore the number of citations is not the same.

The consequence is that many researchers take advantage of the ambiguities due to the simplicity of the h-index to establish their reputation on the exhibition of large numbers (publications, citations) which have been obtained in many cases by abuses that this index cannot "manage".

Misconduct and fraud are different aspects. Misconduct often reflects threat to subordinates to extract papers from them by inserting own name in the publications. Misdeeds include various levels of academic dishonesty.

I believe majority of the authors are good.

There are misconducts that can be classified as fraud. For example, adding the name of an author who has done absolutely nothing in a publication can be considered as fraud. However, because this practice has become commonplace, people do not see it as a serious matter.

Fraud = deception or falsification punishable by law

Dear Thomas E. Becker

You mentioned a very important problem!

I analysed the theoretical and experimental studies of cold energy storage systems published between 2000 and 2016 was organized. Selection of data was based on the following criteria: 1. The presence of a comparison of experimental results with theoretical calculations or computer simulations. 2. The representation of numerical values of the absolute or relative uncertainties of calculation or measuring the value of the main researched variable. 3. The presence of charts or tables with declared measuring ranges or computer simulations. Keywords of the search were ‘‘measurement”, ‘‘uncertainty”, ‘‘mathematical model”, ‘‘experiments” and ‘‘cold energy storage system”. The chosen interval of publications was 2000 –2016. According to these criteria, only twelve publications were selected.

All developers claimed that the achieved results confirm the theoretical models presented. However, in no work there were specific numerical values of the achieved overall measurement uncertainty of the similarity criterion for the main researched function or summary criteria. In fact, none of the studies determines and calculates the generalized absolute uncertainty of the main variable. No one compares the difference between numerical forecasts and experimental results with the calculated absolute uncertainty of the main variable.

The next search was devoted to studying the content of articles presented in the International Journal of Refrigeration from 2014 to 2019. A total of 1569 articles were analyzed. For free reading of articles the SCIHUB tool was used. Articles were screened based on three criteria: a. the presence of a comparison of experimental results with a database obtained in theoretical and / or computer modeling; b. the presence of the calculated achieved value of the measurement absolute or relative uncertainties; c. the availability of information on the intervals of variation of the main studied variable and other variables taken into account in the developed model.

By these criteria, only 317 (20.2%) publications were found. Moreover, in all filtered articles, the authors announced that the discrepancy between theoretical predictions and experimental data is insignificant. When analyzing these articles, the impression was made that scientists, exploring physical phenomena and technological processes and using modern mathematical apparatus and powerful computers in their daily work, perceived their ideas as reality and affirmed the validity of their models, not understanding with what actual accuracy they declared their results. Presenting the chapter “Uncertainty Analysis” or “Instrumental Uncertainties”, the authors, in essence, reported only information on the accuracy of measuring devices or calculated the measurement uncertainty by dividing theoretical data by experimental results. A detailed example of calculating the total uncertainty of the main variables was presented in only one article. In scientific practice, it is accepted that the researcher confirms the formulated idea by comparing theory with experiment. In fact, in most publications there is no information about the calculated values of the general uncertainty of measurement of the studied variable or dimensionless complex.

When a publication contains numerical data resulting from complicated calculations or delicate experiments nobody is able to verify these data. So why deprive yourself of dishonest behavior that will inflate your Hirsch h index.

On the other hand, it is more difficult to establish a physical or mathematical formula because it requires rigorous reasoning or mathematical demonstrations (which the reviewer often does not bother to check) that can be confirmed or refuted. This second type of research has more merit because it offers less scope for fraud.

The basic rule of misconduct is to misuse the efforts of others for your own benefit (plagiarism, fake authors, Exploitation of young researchers, ...).

Taking advantage of the efforts of others is always bad behavior no matter what form it takes. Scientists are no exception to this rule.

Here is a discussion about another form of scientific misconduct: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Do_you_know_what_a_paper_mill_is

These are just reported findings. The real misconduct outweighs these statistics.

Wolfgang and Sitara, thanks for your comments. The forms of misconduct seem numerous, and I suspect that Sitara's point is right: our estimates of the extent of misconduct are likely underestimates. Per my original remark, even if they are not, there have probably been hundreds of thousands of scientists who have committed fraud (e.g., fabricating data, stealing others' work) and QRPS (e.g., harking, p-hacking). I don't know about you, but I would call that a crisis.

"The heredity of intelligence":

"Cyril Burt, the counterfeit ideologist

Cyril Burt was once presented as the greatest British psychologist. He devoted part of his career to proving the heredity of intelligence by comparing the scores of identical twins on IQ tests. He claimed, among other things, to have established a strong correlation between the IQs of identical twins, even when they had been separated at birth. These results, combined with Burt's academic reputation and ideological activism, strongly influenced public policy on education in both the United Kingdom and the United States. However, upon his death in 1971, an investigation revealed that Burt's correlation rates were far too stable across studies to be statistically credible. It was then discovered that some of the twins had never actually existed and that their IQ scores, and the correlations between them, had therefore been completely fabricated."

From:

https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/articles/sept-cas-celebres-de-scientifiques-accuses-de-fraude

See also:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_Burt

Certain types of fraudulent or false publications:

In the following 4 points, it is assumed that the article was published

1) Fabrication of false results or fabrication of false data or selection and use of only certain data.

2) Almost complete plagiarism (more or less disguised)

3) Use of misleading arguments or ambiguities intended to "tire" the reader and the reviewer avoiding voluntarily clarity.

4) Serious errors that could have been avoided with more serious work and more rigor.

Conclusions:

Case 1) is a fake study

Case 2) is a fake author

Case 3) is a fake study deliberately hidden by an ambiguous style.

Case 4) is gross negligence.

In all these cases the reviewer is a bit guilty of "letting the article pass".

I think the number must be much higher. In the study, only those who admitted fraud were counted and did not contain those who committed and did not admit it.

Scientific misconduct is really a huge, huge iceberg that doesn't melt down but grows bigger and bigger as it quietly drifts into warmer waters, with sobering consequences on knowledge production and use akin to climate change. We daily catch its towering peak on various channels such as https://retractionwatch.com/.

Thanks to all for your comments. I've enjoyed reading the examples, references, and comments. Last week I gave a TEDx talk on scientific misconduct. It should be online (YouTube) in a few weeks. I'm attaching the script in case you are interested in the content. It provides a theoretical analysis of the causes of misconduct and offers several related solutions.

In a very serious way, poor methods/procedures/measures (misconduct, gross misconduct, and almost nothing but misconduct) are characteristic of ENTIRE FIELDS. A big and important example is Psychology : In Psychology, in a real and most serious sense, they do nothing correctly: starting with inadequate and artificially constrained "observation". WAY too early they jump to "models" (essentially of their OWN thinking, AND with NO clear real bases). Nothing is clearly and for-sure grounded/founded/clearly-beginning in that which is directly observable (which is essential for ANY real empiricism and SCIENCE) AND they cannot show, nor can come to show, truly important behavior patterns which are true proximate causes (nor can they indicate good nominees to be identified as such). There is extreme early hypothetico-deductive thinking, producing UNCLEAR hypotheses, not clearly testable (or falsifiable) (thus very variably "testible"). Psychology is mock science and a mockery. Here is more perspective:

In psychology, the obviousness of the mis-conceptualization and misconduct is quickly seen by almost NO REFERENCE TO BEHAVIOR ___PATTERNS___ (which is inexcusable -- because really that is all there is in Psychology, PATTERNS of behavior);

there is also nothing organismic or clearly biologically related IN THE WAY THEY SEE BEHAVIOR (EVEN THOUGH behavior even unto itself is, and must be seen as, Biological (and, here I am referring to behavior [ patterns ] (aka "behavior" aka "just behavior") ___PER SE___).

Behavior (properly viewed) itself could be a whole field, more clear than any Psychology (of today) which comes imaginatively and piecemeal, and is often from interdisciplinary "stuff". And NOTE: EVEN IF the findings seen (such as they are) ARE BRAIN-RELATED (neurological), there is NO clarity: because there is really NO WAY to show clear correspondences : clear specific neuronal activity and corresponding clear specific behavior patterns (this would require identification of clear behavior patterns FIRST (as noted above) for any clarity ).

NOTE: My way points the way for real behavioral science; read my extensive writings, all here on RG. (My work is, at worst (assuming I am wrong), excellent science fiction for it displays all the aspects needed for the most-real and clear empiricism and science, and a science that progresses reliably and with validity, and which is self-correcting (another characteristic of real science).)

Also see :

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Analytic_Philosophers_A_Myth_that_needs_to_be_debunked_more_findings_naturally_mean_better_understanding .

Here's a link to the TEDx talk, now online. I invite any comments, positive or negative. In pursuit of false truths | Thomas Becker | TEDxUSFSM - YouTube

Here is a new, special case: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Corruption_and_abuse_in_research_and_academia

You are discussing hard misconduct (like plagiarizing, fake results etc) but there is also soft misconduct (knowing that their research wrong/violate physics fundamental laws but trying to suppress

the information about it in the name of ``science''). I have experienced misconducts but I believe that soft is more common. In my writing I try to exposs this misconduct if possible (check my publication the latest https://zenodo.org/record/6712409#.YrUP6zXMI-0 check the abstract). I think that exposing this fraud is the only way to minimize it.

Thanks for your recent replies, Wolgang and Genick, and the related links. I believe much of scientific misconduct is driven by dysfunctional incentives and tenure and promotion policies. They not only encourage misconduct but undermine the intrinsic motivation most scientists have for doing research.

Wow, thanks for sharing this story Dongwon.

This seems to be a new form of scientific misconduct: https://www.researchgate.net/post/New_scam_Do_you_want_to_be_paid_to_cite_others_research

This is a new one to me, Wolfgang - outrageous, really. Thanks for sharing.

Lucas Monzani made  a very strong point about the rat race and academic production unit known as a paper. On one hand, it is very hard to find a mechanism that allows judging even to suggest who can judge the quality of a paper. In my personal experience, sometimes the entire field is wrong. Since these people control the publication they not only claim that you are wrong but will block you at every turn.  Let's present two cases that happen these days.  In the past it happened more often the people realized for example see the case of Ohm (Ohm laws) etc. Currently, there are at least several cases where establishment holds erroneous beliefs  for example  the ship stability, the added properties (mass) die, fish locomotion casting to name a few.    While it looks like it is an honest mistake and the establishment can possibly defend their position with some kind of arguments. The fact is that they actually admit it is wrong and cannot provide any explanation. When asked about their theories, they simply ignore the challenging evidence or point to a possible unknown fix.  A list of people in @alexandra techet  from MIT,  @George Lauder . from Harvard, University of Michigan are part of the establishment  and you will be surprised if you think otherwise.   You might think that the world wide web gives you the opportunity to speak out.  The background noise is so large that very little can be heard from dissenting voices.   Now what is more outrageous,  plagiarism by  Sandip Ghosal from Northwestern university who even copied nomenclature or blocking the dissenting voices.  Sandip Ghosal plagiarized because he wanted to look smart but Alexandra Techet . and George Lauder really hamper the progress of science.  So  ethically what is more troubling: the popularization or hampering progress.   Because of these individuals from the establishment, I believe that people will continue to produce papers full of mistakes.    The strange thing is that when you ask the authors of the new papers if they can explain something in the paper they just wrote they appear very eager to explain the paper.  However, when you present them the challenging points they melt away.  Not to make this discussion virtual but to make it more practical, ship stability involves the rotation of the ship.  Any body rotation has to evaluate the moment of inertia which depends on the rotation point.  About 99.9% percent of the papers dealing with ships stability simply ignore this point and thus render them as erroneous.  Check all the introductory books in fluid mechanics and all the books on ship stability.

In evaluating the ethics of research, the consequences of the actions have to be accounted for in the analysis.

Here is a new discussion about being payed for including an unrelated person as co-author: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Did_Someone_Actually_Try_to_Bribe_Me_for_an_Authorship