Studies Suggest Massive Increase In Scientific Fraud

Titus Andronicus writes "Scientific fraud has always been with us. But as stated or suggested by some scientists, journal editors, and a few studies, the amount of scientific 'cheating' has far outpaced the expansion of science itself. According to some, the financial incentives to 'cut corners' have never been greater, resulting in record numbers of retractions from prestigious journals. From the article: 'For example, the journal Nature reported that published retractions had increased tenfold over the past decade, while the number of published papers had increased by just 44 percent.'"

Re:Surpised?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not sure about how much money is in it now compared to previous times. I work at a place that does scientific research and I know that the people around me regularly put a lot of work into proposals for which they have no guarantee of funding. These are good researchers with good projects. But they have to compete for most funding opportunities. Then you add in the issue of the politicization of funding. No, I am not going to make this about global warming. What I mean is that some who hold the purse strings have a pet subject and will put large amounts of funding into it while starving other, equally worthy subjects. So you have an excess in one area while another is not getting proper attention.

Re:Numbers are blown out of proportion

[ilguido]

So there's 196 papers retracted since 2001?

What? They put a nice graph [nytimes.com] to make it clear even to condensed matter physicists. There are 742 retracted papers in ten years (2000-2009), in the PubMed database and they increased from 3 in 2000 to 180 in 2009. 196 were fraudulent papers, 235 included some mistakes (they can't tell if those were intentional or not) and 311 were retracted for other reasons (including: those poor guys that based their work on prior forged papers).

Re:what planet are you living on?

[sandytaru]

They also have to fight and squabble for that money in ways they never had to do before, and they're under severe pressure to produce results, any results, within a certain length of time. Not that any scientist at a research institute should automatically get full funding, but they should be funded on a per project basis, instead of for a specific amount or a specific length of time. A hundred thousand dollar grant sounds great, but that's money the scientist doesn't see - it goes to pay the graduate assistants (who are eking out a living at near minimum wage while they finish their own degrees), the materials, the lab fees to the university, etc. A hundred thousand dollar grant will cover perhaps a year of research. The researcher is thus pressured to publish the results of the experiment within that one year, even if the experiment isn't actually done.

Re:Plausible...a trend that is self amplifying

[jd]

Agreed. However, it's all about "survival of the fittest". The current system favours the least work (since doing less means you can write more, and writing more means a higher citation score, which in turn means more funding), the work least likely to fail (negative results don't get published) and the work least likely to contradict prior work (repeat studies also don't get published).

In order for quality science to survive, it HAS to be the fittest for purpose, which means we've got to change the purpose so that the above three flaws are selected against and not for.

Re:This Week's Conservative Nonsense on Slashdot,

[damn_registrars]

I can say that you're wrong. Do you even know what "conservative" means?

In this country the conservatives are often looking for excuses to further decimate the already very lean scientific research budget. This article provides another one of those excuses.