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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

There are objective standards in other professions. The thing about research is, by definition, whatever you're doing is not part of an established profession yet.

Obviously that doesn't apply in setting like drug development where standards do exist, as defined by the best currently available treatments. But if someone is working on something like psychological studies where replicability is the exception rather than the rule, or on exotic tech where only one experimental facility might exist, or on substances or effects that exist only under weird conditions, it's not always that easy (or that safe) to accuse them of lying. Even when you're pretty sure they are.

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I have a hunch that the not everything you do as a researcher is novel. A part of it is, like you mention, new by definition.

But there's also the old and established parts, like statistics, parts of the experimental setup, methodology, reporting data accurately (or at all). This is plenty enough to have objective standards for.

A lot of fraud is not in making up experimental results, but instead misreporting the data and drawing unsupported conclusions.

Exactly! There are some obvious things too like: don't copy and paste tiny bits of an electrophoresis gel and put it into another image to make it look like it was the same result. Sylvain Lesné comes to mind here. Last I checked, this jackass still has a job, too

Agreed. There are plenty of stories in physics where researchers reported some effect which was found later to be due to an error setting up the experiment. Are they supposed to face fraud charges because of this? Researchers will just quit and go work in the industry or something.

And there are plenty of fields where you have different interpretations of the same data (see the entire field of economics, also plenty in physics and other fields). Should the people who espoused ether theory be sued for fraud? It'll be a huge mess because doing research is by definition doing something unprecedented.

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