Is there any way out?
Probably no, till the researchers are valued by their publication in high-impact journals, or till the research will be depending on the funding, or the researchers will be hired by group of cheaters, or by the time we will be recruiting research workers than the scholars, or by the time research remains fancy on public funding or by the time God doesn’t come to the earth to punish the dishonest and cheaters, or by the time we keep on appreciating and praising the achievements and material progress of the traitors, cheaters, and frauds.
https://azad-azadindia.blogspot.in/
Yours is a fundamental question - thank you for posting.
Toward this, consider issues of "Self Control and Social Control of Misconduct: Roles, Patterns, and Constraints" (article below)
Chapter "Self Regulation and Social Control of Misconduct: Roles, Pa...
"Misconduct and Social Control in Science"
(full text version)
Article Misconduct and Social Control in Science: Issues, Problems, Solutions
Dear Prof. Bhoj R Singh,
Thanks for your question.
Part of the problem is that there are more academics seeking tenure and promotion than there are journals and publishers for their work, whatever its quality.
Another part is that research is hard. Getting funding is hard. Getting time to do the work is hard.
Anecdotally, in some of the social sciences, for example, there are three categories of scientists submitting work.
• Those who are well-versed in mathematics, statistics and data analysis.
• Those who work qualitatively, and don't require these.
• The rest. https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/
The latter case can lead to the practice of outsourcing the data taking, the analysis, the interpretation, or, in some cases, all three, to a sole source shop, generally someone who owns a large proprietary social science data set and will allow you to run samples against it. You say, I have this question, I need to see how it looks for this many Germans, French and Indians, I send a check, and I get camera-ready graphs back, which I paste into my article, and send off to the journal. Unfortunately, this breaks the provenance of the data and the authors abdicate authorship of their own analysis.
The latter case can also lead to misunderstanding of statistical tools, for example, confusing statistical significance for significance of a result. Professors Stephen T. Ziliak and Deirdre N. McCloskey have written a book entitled The Cult of Statistical Significance that has described this problem.
Please excuse my anecdote. I know of no comprehensive survey of cheating and error by discipline. Now that would be a major study.
Unfortunately, there are few controls outside of peer review, and the peer reviewers often fall into the third category too.
There are complete academic presses stood up in the last two decades who publish quite a number of journals and books whose business model includes guaranteed publication, pages charges, surrender of copyright, etc., to meet to limited supply of imperfect, existing outlets.
There is some hope.
http://www.pubpeer.org/
is a web site where, following a certain format, one says "xyz is interesting" rather than, for example, "xyz is fraudulent" and fraud and incompetence can be reported. The choice of wording apparently reduces the likelihood of specious harassing anti-defamation lawsuits and threats of same, both to the reporting entity and PubPeer.
Then, there is a second web site where one can see if the published work has been retracted, by the authors, by their institution, or by the journal/publisher.
http://retractionwatch.com/
Some researchers have quite a record when it comes to retractions. Jawdropping.
The Public Library of Science has a number of online, peer-reviewed journals, that encourage transparency of data and analysis and eliminate paywalls. This forwards reproducibility, which is one of the best overall checks of good science.
http://www.plos.org/
I don't think that they have taken on the social sciences yet, put perhaps another group has, or someday they will.
I wish I had better news. Unfortunately, academics are under a lot of pressure and have little support for their work on the lower rungs of the academic latter. At their fingertips they have the means to fake, p-hack or outright purchase their data and analysis from others, and many other means to cheat and err. All too often, they do.
Be well,
Mark
I've witnessed immense corruption in education over the years. It's filled me with despair. When I work alongside someone, I double check their backgrounds now.
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