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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

The higher-level problem is that there are tons of scientific papers with falsified data and very few people who care about this. When falsified data is discovered, journals are very reluctant to retract the papers. A small number of poorly-supported people examine papers and have found a shocking number of problems. (For instance, Elisabeth Bik, who you should follow: @elisabethbik.bsky.social) My opinion is that the rate of falsified data is a big deal; there should be an order of magnitude more people checking papers for accuracy and much more action taken. This is kind of like the replication crisis in psychology but with more active fraud.

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This is why funding replication studies and letting people publish null results and reproductions of important results is fundamental.

It will introduce a strong incentive to be honest. Liars will get caught rather quickly. Right now, it often takes decades to uncover fraud.

> Right now, it often takes decades to uncover fraud.

Where? Many in this thread are talking as if there is monoculture in academia.

Unfortunately as you spend more time investigating this problem it becomes clear that replication studies aren't the answer. They're a bandage over the bleeding but don't address the root causes, and would have nearly no impact even if funded at a much larger scale. Because this suggestion comes up in every single HN thread about scientific fraud I eventually wrote an essay on why this is the case:

https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science...

(press escape to dismiss the banner). If you're really interested in the topic please read it but here's a brief summary:

• Replication studies don't solve many of the most common types of scientific fraud. Instead, you just end up replicating the fraud itself. This is usually because the methodology is bad, but if you try to fix the methodology to be scientific the original authors just claim you didn't do a genuine replication.

• Many papers can't be replicated by design because the methodology either isn't actually described at all, or doesn't follow logically from the hypothesis. Any attempt would immediately fail after the first five minutes of reading the paper because you wouldn't know what to do. It's not clear what happens to the money if someone gets funded to replicate such a paper. Today it's not a problem because replicators choose which papers to replicate themselves, it's not a systematic requirement.

• The idea implicitly assumes that very few researchers are corrupt thus the replicators are unlikely to also be. This isn't the case because replication failures are often due to field-wide problems, meaning replications will be done by the same insiders who benefit from the status quo and who signed off on the bad papers in the first place. This isn't an issue today because the only people who do replication studies are genuinely interested in whether the claims are true, it's not just a procedural way to get grant monies.

• Many papers aren't worth replicating because they make trivial claims. If you punish non-replication without fixing the other incentive problems, you'll just pour accelerant on the problem of academics making obvious claims (e.g. the average man would like to be more muscular), and that just replaces one trust destroying problem with another.

Replication failure is a symptom not a cause. The cause is systematically bad incentives.

Incentives are themselves dangerous. We should treat incentives like guns. Instead we apply incentives to all manner of problems and are surprised they backfire and destroy everything.

You have to give people less incentives and more just time to do their basic job.

I think this hits the nail on the head. Academics have been treated like assembly line workers for decades now. So they’ve collectively learned how to consistently place assembled product on the conveyor belt.

The idea that scientific output is a stack of publications is pretty absurd if you think about it for a few minutes. But try telling that to the MBA types who now run universities.

You do need to incentivize something. If you incentivize nothing that's the same thing as an institution not existing and science being done purely as a hobby. You can get some distance that way - it's how science used to work - but the moment you want the structure and funding an institution can provide you must set incentives. Otherwise people could literally just stop turning up for work and still get paid, which is obviously not going to be acceptable to whoever is funding it.

I think it’s an interesting feature of current culture that we take it as axiomatic that people need to be ‘incentivized’. I’m not sure I agree. To me that axiom seems to be at the root of a lot of the problems we’re talking about in this thread. (Yes, everyone is subject to incentives in some broad sense, but acknowledging that doesn’t mean that we have to engineer specific incentives as a means to desired outcomes.)

I think there is some misunderstanding here. Incentives are not some special thing you can opt to not do.

Who do you hire to do science? When do you give them a raise? Under which circumstances do you fire them? Who gets a nicer office? There are a bunch of scientist each clamouring for some expensive equipment (not necessarily the same one) who gets their equipment and who doesn't? Scientist wants to travel to a conference, who can travel and where can they travel? We have a bunch of scientist working together who can tell the other what to do and what not to do?

Depending on your answers to these questions you set one incentive structure or an other. If you hire and promote scientist based on how nicely they do interpretive dance you will get scientist who dances very well. If you hire and promote scientist based on how articulate they are about their subject matters you will get very well spoken scientist. If you don't hire anybody then you will get approximately nobody doing science (or only independently wealthy dabbling here and there out of boredom.)

If you pay a lot to the scientist who do computer stuff, but approximately no money to people who do cell stuff you will get a lot of computer scientist and no cell scientist. Maybe that is what you want, maybe not. These don't happen from one day to an other. You are not going to get more "cancer research" tomorrow out of the existing cancer researchers if you hike their salary 100 fold today. But on the order of decades you will definitely see much much more (or much less) people working on the problem.

I meant to cover that in the last (parenthesized) sentence or my post. There will always be incentives in a broad sense, but it is not necessary to “incentivize” people via official productivity metrics. Academics used to figure out who to promote without creating a rush for everyone to publish as much as possible, or to maximize other gameable metrics. I don’t kid myself that there was ever a golden era of true academic meritocracy, but there really did used to be less of an obsession with silly metrics, and a greater exercise of individual judgment.

Einstein, Darwin, Linneaus. All science as a hobby. I don't think we should discount that people will in fact do it as a hobby if they can and make huge contributions that way.

Einstein spent almost all of his life in academia living off research grants. His miracle year took place at the end of his PhD and he was recruited as a full time professor just a few years later. Yes, he did science as a hobby until that point, but he very much wanted to do it full time and jumped at the chance when he got it.

Still, if you want scientific research to be done either as a hobby or a corporate job, that's A-OK. The incentives would be much better aligned. There would certainly be much less of it though, as many fields aren't amenable to hobbyist work at all (anything involving far away travel, full time work or that requires expensive equipment).

> There would certainly be much less of it though

I doubt that very much. And making such a statement without any evidence seems... unscientific :P

> You have to give people less incentives and more just time to do their basic job.

That was the idea behind tenure, but then tenure became the incentive. Job security at a socially prestigious job with solid benefits is a huge incentive to fraud even to people who don't care about science, and then for people who do care about doing science and have been directing their entire adult lives towards that end, they face a cataclysmic career bifurcation: either they get a tenured academic research position and spend their lives doing science, or they leave science behind altogether and at best end up doing science-adjacent product development which at best best, if they join a pharmaceutical company or something like that, might sometimes closely resemble scientific research despite being fundamentally different in its goals.

Given the dramatic consequences on people's lives, fraud should be expected. Academic research should acknowledge the situation and accept that it needs safeguards against fraud as surely as banks need audits and jewelry stores need burglar alarms.

OP here. Perhaps I didn't explain it well, but I think the key is to de-incentivize bad behavior, and to make sure people publishing have some skin in the game.

Right now, it's the opposite. The system rewards flashy findings with no rigor. And that's a slippery slope towards result misrepresentation and downright fraud.

>>>• Replication studies don't solve many of the most common types of scientific fraud. Instead, you just end up replicating the fraud itself. This is usually because the methodology is bad, but if you try to fix the methodology to be scientific the original authors just claim you didn't do a genuine replication.

>>>• Many papers can't be replicated by design because the methodology either isn't actually described at all, or doesn't follow logically from the hypothesis. Any attempt would immediately fail after the first five minutes of reading the paper because you wouldn't know what to do. It's not clear what happens to the money if someone gets funded to replicate such a paper. Today it's not a problem because replicators choose which papers to replicate themselves, it's not a systematic requirement.

Isn't this what peer review is for?

Yes but it only works if the field has consistently high standards and the team violating them is an outlier. In a surprisingly large number of cases replications are hard/impossible because the entire field has adopted non-replicable techniques.

> • Many papers can't be replicated by design because the methodology either isn't actually described at all, or doesn't follow logically from the hypothesis. Any attempt would immediately fail after the first five minutes of reading the paper because you wouldn't know what to do.

This is indeed a problem. But it can be solved by journals not accepting any paper that is not 1) described in such a way that it can be fully replicated, and 2) include the code and the data used to generate the published results

Just that would go a long way.

And then fund replication studies for consequential papers. Not just because of fraud but because of unintended flaws in studies, which can happen of course.

Journals can't police academia because their customers are university libraries. It's just not going to happen: journals are so far gone that they routinely publish whole editions filled with fake AI generated content and nobody even notices, so expecting them to enforce scientific rigor on the entire grant-funded science space is a non-starter ... and very indirect. Why should journals do this anyway? It's the people paying who should be checking that the work is done to a sufficient standard.

You’re right but it’s what journals are supposed to do - that’s why we pay. Otherwise we don’t need journals and everyone can just self publish to bioRxiv.

They'll only do it if the customers demand it. But the customers are universities, if they cared they could just fix the problem at the source by auditing and validating studies themselves. They don't need to pay third parties to do it. Journals often don't have sufficient lab access to detect fraud anyway.

I do think the journal ecosystem can just disappear and nobody would care. It only exists to provide a pricing mechanism within the Soviet-style planned economy that academia has created. If that's replaced by a different pricing mechanism academic publishing could be rapidly re-based on top of Substack blogs and nothing of value would be lost.

That's a tremendously expensive way to detect fraud. There's funding, but also the people replicating need to have at least near the expertise of the original authors, and the rate of false positives is clearly going to be high. Mistakes on the part of the replicator will look the same as scientific fraud. Maybe most worryingly, the negative impact of human studies would be doubled. More than doubled, probably- look at how many people claimed to successfully replicate LK-99. A paper may need to be replicated many time to identify unknown.

Maybe first we could just try specifically looking for fraud? Like recording data with 3rd parties (ensuring that falsified data will at least be recorded suspiciously), or a body that looks for fabricated data or photoshopped figures?

> My opinion is that the rate of falsified data is a big deal

Have anything that backs that up? Other than what you shared here?

I would be very interested in the rate on a per author level, if you have some evidence. Fraud "impact" vs "impact" of article would be interesting as well.

See, for example, a paper mill that churned out 400 papers with potentially fabricated images: https://www.science.org/content/article/single-paper-mill-ap...

Influential microbiologist Didier Raoult had 7 papers retracted in 2024 due to faking the ethics approvals on the research. https://www.science.org/content/article/failure-every-level-...

Fazlul Sarkar, a cancer researcher at Wayne State University, had 40 articles retracted after evidence of falsified data and manipulated and duplicated images. https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/genbio.2024.29132.ebi

Overall, Elisabeth Bik has found thousands of studies that appear to have doctored images. https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/how-a-sharp-eyed-...

All of those examples have no relative meaning. If there are millions of papers published per year, then 1000 cases over a decade isn't very prevalent (still bad).

Here's some numbers from insiders with relative meaning.

https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-i-7e9764571422

‘It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.’ — Marcia Angell

0.04% of papers are retracted. At least 1.9% of papers have duplicate images “suggestive of deliberate manipulation”. About 2.5% of scientists admit to fraud, and they estimate that 10% of other scientists have committed fraud.

“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.” — Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet

The statcheck program showed that “half of all published psychology papers…contained at least one p-value that was inconsistent with its test”.

The GRIM program showed that of the papers it could verify, around half contained averages that weren’t possible given the sample sizes, and more than 20% contained multiple such inconsistencies.

The fact that half of all papers had incorrect data in them is concerning, especially because it seems to match Richard Horton’s intuitive guess at how much science is simply untrue. And the GRIM paper revealed a deeper problem: more than half of the scientists refused to provide the raw data for further checking, even though they had agreed to share it as a condition for being published.

After some bloggers exposed an industrial research-faking operation that had generated at least 600 papers about experiments that never happened, a Chinese doctor reached out to beg for mercy: “Hello teacher, yesterday you disclosed that there were some doctors having fraudulent pictures in their papers. This has raised attention. As one of these doctors, I kindly ask you to please leave us alone as soon as possible … Without papers, you don’t get promotion; without a promotion, you can hardly feed your family … You expose us but there are thousands of other people doing the same.“

There is no reward for finding falsified data. If there were, we'd find a lot more.

Are you saying publications need a bug bounty?

Yes! Labs should escrow $10k for a year for each paper they publish. If anyone finds fraud, they get to keep it.

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