My friends provided some anecdotal evidence of spreading science fraud when work of several postdocs was impossible to be reproduced. My suspicions were partially vindicated when in recent issue of the PNAS appeared the following analysis: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/42/17028.short?rss=1&%3bssource=mfr. So my question is, whether too much of an economic emphasis put on science, by the governments and associated with it increase in funding, is corrupting the very foundation of it? Or, whether, there is the same "equilibrium" of "dishonesty" established on any level of the funding cycle and we are just simply becoming more alert and able to detect it? After all the competitive nature of any human endeavor is the very foundation of the modern civilization.
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: The main problem academic researchers face is money/funding. The increasing pressure to publish results in high impact factor journals and the dependence of funding on the impact factor "generated" may lead to unprofessional behavior.
Even the journals play a role in this setting. Results are only published when something is different and "sexy". The one cell type shows a different reaction as the other, this treatment works better than the other,.... But sometimes ( or often) a treatment or readout shows no difference - and therefore discarded as not interesting. Such "negative results"are produced a lot in our labs, a lot of money is wasted because of the unpublishable nature of this results.... Even new insights are sometime not published as they are considered as "not novel enough".
I think that the dependence of academic research funding on published results is the main culprit for scientific misconduct. Abolish this dependence, and the cases of misconduct will go down.
Scientific is research is not what it used to be. Today, there appears to be a lot of pressure on the scientists/researchers alike from the government and from financial bodies. It has therefore become more of a business. Only commerically viable products are given importance thereby killing fundamental research. This has also driven researchers to adopt dishonest methods such as plagiarism to become profiteers.
I think for answering to this question we must compare popular view on science output and it's comparison with other outputs especially engineering. In the view of applicability, scientific outputs need long time in average while engineering need short time. Therefore in most countries scientific research doesn't economically efficient while it is a basis for engineering and application in future. If a countries can have a long time plane for evaluation of science, then pressure on researchers for fast and short-time applicable researches removed, e.g. in USA this situation generally happened. Most of other countries prefer to spend their fund on short-time researches.
Interesting information. Yes I agree with Manan, it is a problem of the system. In many groups there is pressure to publish very much. When you see the data from the paper (I can only read the abstract) you can see that the pressure is to much for many researchers. Here is a little bit more information:
http://phys.org/pdf268309303.pdf
Hopefull for science is that most findings are from some labs only...
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: The main problem academic researchers face is money/funding. The increasing pressure to publish results in high impact factor journals and the dependence of funding on the impact factor "generated" may lead to unprofessional behavior.
Even the journals play a role in this setting. Results are only published when something is different and "sexy". The one cell type shows a different reaction as the other, this treatment works better than the other,.... But sometimes ( or often) a treatment or readout shows no difference - and therefore discarded as not interesting. Such "negative results"are produced a lot in our labs, a lot of money is wasted because of the unpublishable nature of this results.... Even new insights are sometime not published as they are considered as "not novel enough".
I think that the dependence of academic research funding on published results is the main culprit for scientific misconduct. Abolish this dependence, and the cases of misconduct will go down.
I have to agree with Matthias as well. There is a tremendous amount of pressure put on scientists, which is mainly fuelled by the need to obtain funding. This funding is often driven by publication success, which is most often measured by 'impact factor'. Therefore, there is a dependence on obtaining high impact factor papers. However, I don't agree that you should abolish this dependence outright - as scientific output still needs to be assessed by ones peers and also, and importantly, by the public.
There is also a trend in science that requires direct translational benefit to humankind, whether that is a new biological treatment or new technological advance. Whether this is good for 'science' is debatable as it diminishes the opportunity to do science in its purest form, i.e. gain an understanding of the world in which we live. To this end, I would agree that science is now driven more by economics rather than discovery, and that this in turn perpetuates dishonestry through greed.
Lastly, I would also argue that papers published in high-end journals often describe a new understanding of a complex mechanism, rather than having a direct translational impact on human health. Funding bodies, journal editors and peers, should reflect on this apparent paradox.You can only obtain funding if you have high impact papers (and translational ideas), but you can only have high impact factor papers if you have a novel mechanism. This maybe one of the reasons many scientists now rely on company money, which futher drives economic led science.
I think that the real frequency of fraud depends on the balance between reward for publication and punishment in the case of recognized fraud. This means that it is very difficult to interpret the PNAS paper findings. Detection of fraud might be instrumental in reducing its real frequency and is more often performed in some countries. In other countries, as France, alert causes more trouble to the whistleblower than to the cheater when the latter is influential. In addition, frauds that are easily detectable may be only a minority.
Reducing funding would not ameliorate things. The best way to prevent fraud would be to select stringently young and brilliant PhDs, not pressure them to publish and reward them only for confirmed "discovery".
I think I need to disagree partially with Matthias, Manan and Andrew. It is very true that researchers are pressed by funding bodies, but it is my impression that most cheaters are usually researchers that are trying to make merits to be competitive when applying for positions. I am not saying these are the only ones, far from me to say that. I just think that misconduct is more often associated with a lack opportunities for long term employment for scientists than with a tenured scientist's need to obtain a certain grant to fund his/her research. Just my two pennies worth.
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