This is a smart article on an extremely import topic.

Article Scientific Misconduct and Fraud

It is a condensation of the book

Fraud in the Lab: The High Stakes of Scientific Research

Nicolas Chevassus-au-Louis

Harvard University Press 2019

Thank you, Dongwon Kim, for the link to cleanadademia.com (which I do not know).

Unethical behavior cannot simply be fought by an appeal to ethical behavior (or by policing). Unethical — or opportunistic — behavior is deeply embedded in nature, and out culture shows a great ambivalence regarding that phenomenon with positive and negative connotations. In order to help control the negative implications within our cultures, we ought to avoid incentives that seem to foster opportunistic behavior within academia (or society), e.g. the (undue) focus on status, the focus on quantity instead of on quality of work, the substitution of other's judgement instead of one's one, the often clearly false normalizations of bibliometrics data.

Unethical, opportunistic behavior feeds on a system of incentives that our respective societies love, that many people exploit to some extent in their daily lives. In Germany, it is still common to refer to a PI with the title (Prof. Dr. X, or Prof. Dr. Dr. X — almost 100% of all PI's have a PhD), and in Switzerland, a republic, the titles conferred by the Queen of England are used. Titles should play no role in our modern societies, but they do (because of status reasons). False normalizations of bibliometrics data is a big problem (and used even by funding agencies of the EU).

It is difficult to design decent societies, and most critical people arrange themselves somehow. Let us try to enlarge the population of the critical — decent — citizens.