Giselle Dailey
Scientific research, built on the principles of rationality, evidence, and objectivity, faces an ongoing challenge in maintaining its integrity amidst growing incidents of misconduct. From fabricated data to unethical practices, such as those seen in the infamous case of Hwang Woo-Suk, the pressure to publish and succeed in academia often encourages shortcuts that can have far-reaching consequences. Giselle Dailey tells us more…
Small actions like tweaking a couple of numbers in your experimental results or omitting an inconvenient data point may seem harmless at the time, but they reflect a culture where these shortcuts can easily lead to larger ethical lapses. Scientific practice is underpinned by rationality, evidence and the pursuit of objective truths, yet cases of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism are worryingly recurrent. Scientific research contributes to an array of fields, ranging from medicine and technology to governmental policies and economic strategies. Consequently, misconduct can be detrimental or, in the worst cases, fatal.
An estimated 8% of scientists who participated in a survey of research practices at Dutch universities confessed to falsifying and/or fabricating data between 2017 and 2020.
Hwang Woo-Suk sparked a wave of nationalistic pride in Korea for his claims of successfully cloning human embryos and deriving stem cells from them, using similar techniques that produced Dolly the sheep. Hwang’s studies could have revolutionised stem cell research and medical treatments if it wasn’t riddled with falsifications and malpractice. Hwang had pressured female graduate students in his lab to donate their eggs for the research without informing them of the risks involved and illegally buying human eggs, egregiously violating the principles of scientific ethics. In addition to these ethical violations, Hwang admitted to falsifying the ground-breaking data published in the prestigious Science magazine and in 2009 was sentenced to two years in prison. Hwang’s fraud may be the most notorious example of scientific misconduct, but he is not alone in his pursuits of academic accomplishments through fraudulence. An estimated 8% of scientists who participated in a survey of research practices at Dutch universities confessed to falsifying and/or fabricating data between 2017 and 2020. Despite these alarming statistics the infrastructure of modern science is hypothetically built to detect and prevent such misconduct, through processes like peer review and replication studies.
Peer review is the process that contributes to science’s “self-correcting” nature and, in theory, should stop pseudoscientific research from being published, cited and infiltrating scientific discourse. The modern system of scientific peer review is rooted in one of the Mertonian Norms, Organised Skepticism. The Mertonian Norms refer to a set of values that should be upheld within scientific research, formulated by sociologist Robert K. Merton in the mid-20th century. Organised Skepticism refers to the idea that scientific claims should be subject to scrutiny before being accepted. Unfortunately, many do not act in accordance with the Mertonian Norms and due to this, many flawed or fraudulent studies slip through the cracks of peer review. Naturally, all reviewers have biases, these can be influenced by personal preferences for specific theories, professional rivalries, financial ties and prejudices. Reviewers are often regarded as “experts” in their fields and hence above reproach, lowering the incentive to reflect on their biases or mistakes, and the anonymity they are granted increases the incidence of misconduct without consequence. As seen on the Retraction Watch Database, a site that tracks the retraction of scientific publications, peer review fraud is rampant, one instance in 2017 causing the retraction of 107 papers from Tumour Biology. These biases along with intentional manipulation or neglectful reviews significantly weaken the integrity of the peer review process, and as evidenced, it is not sufficient to preserve the reliability of scientific literature.
Replication can serve as a mechanism that corrects the flaws of peer review. Replication is the process of repeating a scientific study to verify its results, reducing the possibility that the findings are the product of error or chance. Karl Popper, one of the most influential philosophers of science writes in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, “Only when certain events recur in accordance with rules or regularities, as is the case with repeatable experiments, can our observations be tested—in principle—by anyone” underlining the principle that a finding can only be considered scientific if it is reproducible. Many sceptical scientists have successfully used the lack of reproducibility to discredit fraudulent studies, though this process is not without its challenges. These challenges have become known as the “replication crisis”. One cause of the “replication crisis” is the purposeful omission of methodological details in published papers, this forces scientists to unintentionally deviate from the original method hence reducing the likelihood of a successful replication attempt. In other instances, institutions are reluctant to fund replication studies as they are often perceived as unproductive due to the lack of originality and the limited potential to produce novel results, disregarding their important role in identifying pseudoscientific papers.
ironically the scientific community often incentivises and rewards misconduct.
Many scientists pride themselves on their impartiality and empiricism; however, ironically the scientific community often incentivises and rewards misconduct. Many factors contribute to this phenomenon, the primary contributor being the “publish or perish” mentality. “Publish or perish”, a term first coined by geographer William Morris Davis in the 1930s was originally used as a positive phrase to encourage scientists to share their work to immortalise the knowledge, but in the 1940s it began to take on its current meaning. Sociologist Logan Wilson, in his book The Academic Man: A Study in the Sociology of a Profession highlighted the institutional pressure to publish academic work in prestigious journals, by any means. This pressure is amplified by metrics such as impact factor (IF) and H-index. IF reflects how many times articles from a journal have been cited which is thought to be proportional to the importance and prestige of said journal and the H-index uses the number of citations per paper a researcher has accrued to measure their productivity and impact. These metrics are commonly used by institutions to decide the allocation of funds and even justify the dismissal of researchers. “Publish or perish” creates an environment where scientists may be compelled to commit scientific misconduct driven by the fear that failing to publish may jeopardise their livelihoods, it also fosters competitiveness which can lead to practices like withholding methodology and data, thereby contributing to the “replication crisis”. This pressure is so commonly felt by scientists that it has even become a card game in which you race to publish nonsense papers, using underhanded tactics and sabotaging fellow players with the goal of ending the game with the most citations, highlighting how deep-rooted “publish or perish” culture is within science and academia.
To conclude, while the infrastructure of modern science is designed to produce trustworthy discoveries, the pressures of academia and negligent publishing practices contribute to a system where misconduct thrives. Educating scientists on the consequences of misconduct, and a re-evaluation of the systems intended to detect fraudulent science is crucial in preserving trust in science and maintaining its role as a crucial tool for societal progress.
Giselle Dailey
Featured image courtesy of Diana Polekhina via Unsplash. Image license found here. No changes were made to this image.
In article image 1 courtesy of Pawel Czerwinski via Unsplash. Image license found here. No changes were made to this image.
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