Harvard Fake Data SCANDAL: Why Academics Fake Data 

Great summary, but I don’t buy about those few bad apples. From my experience the cheaters stay and good people get pushed out of the system.

1,0000% why I left academia. No jobs, exploitation and abuse by PI’s, and pressure to have a high h-index (i.e., tons of publications), no matter the cost…my goal was to actually help society and to solve problems. This was frowned upon in my PhD program

When i was a postdoc it was always amazed how everyone elses experiments always worked and hypotheses always proved. I was less successful as i was rigorous, meticulous, and reproduced experiments with monastic devotion. I couldn't keep up with my peers' publication output as i was diligent. My views stood me out as ultimately i wouldnt play the game everyone else was and i was in a minority willing to speak out.

I remember a PI in a lab I worked at UPenn shouting his postdocs “where is my F$**=/*&ng P value “?!! Demanding positive results true or false he didn’t cared…He was the worst person I ever worked with … he destroyed several minds …

"They lie, they cheat and if you look..." Why not stealing? You should do a video on scooping! I was shocked when it happened to a friend of mine in the sciences. It astounds me that stealing research data is so common that there is colloquial term for it.

It's going to get to a point where having a super-abundance of publications looks suspicious. Having a few, solid articles with reproducible results is better, if you ask me.

When your entire PhD depends on getting papers published and journals refuse to public negative papers (this is still usually the case) it is really hard for people not to lie. It is not your fault that the research idea did not work out, you still learned a lot from it and added a great deal of valuable knowledge but the system doesn't value it. The more prestigious the university the worse it gets.

When I was in my teens the movie Shattered glass came out, picturing a high profile fraud journalist. Never thought I'd see so much fraud in science, but as I'm finishing my PhD, I'm both unsurprised and disgusted. The system needs a flamethrower. 7:26 According to several in-depth surveys, 40% of everything that gets published is either unintentionally or purposefully faulty. We clearly need a system that fosters higher scrutiny.

This is the main reason why I'm pro " open science,"( goal: making science more accessible and transparent for everyone) which they discussed more heavily lately, but which is unfortunately still not established. They have some good concepts that counter bs like mentioned in the video, for example showing and publishing all data, even from the beginning phase of a study till it's " end"( good or bad data doesn't matter)... but somehow, there are always parties with personal interests slowing innovative and positive stuff down. Reminds me of political bureaucracy, a coincidence?

Colleges in USA focus on publications instead of teaching. Grants is the only way to survive . In other countries, they have junior lecturers, senior lecturers to teach. Research is personal. In USA, it is publish or perish

I'm not nearly as optimistic about fraud impacting only a small percentage of published research. For every paper this is retracted, I wouldn't be surprised if there are 10 others that get missed because the fraud was too good or reviewers were lazy, in addition to the power dynamics at play in academia that force silence for the sake of everyone's career and reputation. PIs in my experience can't even be punished for sexual assault against their students, much less academic fraud.

This isn’t just in academia. I worked in a chemical test lab at a major chemical manufacturing company for three years; and I can’t count how many occasions I saw calibration numbers faked to keep production samples processing at warp speed.

Authoritarian structures are inherently corrupt and corrupting. The higher you go in any such system the more likely it is that you are corrupted. Works the other way as well, if you are corrupt, you are more likely to rise. Which is the point of this video. My initial rendering of this principle is always ignored. Instead the onus falls on the individuals who get caught cheating in a system designed to elevate cheaters.

Now this is the video I have been waiting for. Academia and the academics must be exposed like this.

I love how a channel talking about academia has made me not want to go anywhere near academia.

Soon to be chemistry PhD here. Regarding the vast majority of researchers doing the right thing: I agree that most researchers dont FAKE data per se; but "massaging" data, ignoring conflicting results and omitting things in papers that may cast doubt on results is very common if not the norm...

There is the infamous case of the junior researcher who discovered the second known antibiotic. He was pusuaded to sign away any royalty rights. Little did he know that he department head and university did not do likewise. They made a fortune. The department head claimed the research as his own. The scientist sued and won. But he was never able to get a decent research job. Later on the department head was awarded the Nobel prize for the junior scientist’s work. He did not acknowledge the junior at all. So yes, some scientists are as dishonest as hell. The other famous case is of course Rosalind Franklin. The Nobel prize winner’s work was based on hers. She didn’t even get a mention from them. She could not have won the prize due to her death, but her treatment was nasty.

My only reason to pursue a PhD is to get out of my country for a better life. Is that a good enough reason?

1st comment! The scandals revolving around academic integrity is indeed a big issue that must be addressed! This undermines ethical/moral standards.

The scandal in academia starts with the PI of the labs and the heads of department at the academic institutes. The students who do bad stuff learn that unethical stuff from the people who influence them and misguide them ( including teachers, mentors, PI's, friends and family.)

The problem with peer review is that it's unscientific censorship. So, naturally, its focus ends up being on whatever corrupt objective the reviewers have. For example, rejecting things that go against their own biases, be those in their discipline, or according to their politics, or what will make them or a crony money.

The frustrating part to me isn't that there's cheating, it's the university response to the cheating when it's exposed. The only response to such intense cheating accusations MUST be immediate suspension at least to perform an investigation followed by termination. Instead the cheaters have been allowed to continue their projects.

When I began a career in health science and pharmaceuticals I learned very quickly that if a study doesn’t produce the desired results, one simply adjusts the study until it will produce the desired results and all the old data is thrown out. So when people talk about “what the data says..” I just don’t have faith as I once did. It doesn’t hold much value to me which is very sad. What’s the solution?

The thing that frustrates me is that there is not a real effort to solve the crises in this field and other scientific fields just pre-registration can solve a lot of problems !

Love the content, very informative and entertaining, thank you!

I discovered 20 years later that I was the lead author on a paper. I had never and have never seen that paper. The work described is, probably, work that I did, but I have no idea if the work is correctly described. The second author, the head of the group I was in, clearly wanted his name on a paper. As far as I know fraud was not committed. However, I did hear that a colleague was told to put the name of a famous professor on her paper, as a birthday gift to that professor. I doubt this group leader was dishonest, but he knew how to play the career game. I didn’t encounter dishonesty during 8 years in research.

In certain labs, foreign students and postdocs get their visas taken away if they don't produce favorable data.

I have personally witnessed how a paper which is desk rejected gets accepted in the same journal with the 'right' authors. In India, the higher education is infested with paper mill operations. The objective of every academic is to gain editorial positions and open a flood gate of publications. Ironically, as the publication industry necessitates more and more useless papers, the 'search' in research has been lost. It's more 'de-search' rather than 'research' now. Till we start monitoring the 'process' of research rather than the outcome (publications) this situation isn't going to improve. However, on the bright side, these discussions are now more vociferous today than at anytime. I also find that emerging business models like Qeioss are great. They host pre-prints now but my gut feeling is they'll become a publisher in the long run and hopefully would disrupt existing academic publishers.

The complementary problem is new and outside-the-box getting rejected during the peer review process.

It is admired and respected to be the kind of academic that will do whatever is required to succeed. It is a culture that worships money, success, and reputation and doesn't give a damn about anything else. At best other considerations are tolerated and at worst despised.

I can tell you from my own observations why there is a lack of quality plaguing academia, one reason is students not taking their low level undergrad courses seriously, instead of realizing this is where you build your foundation, the fundamentals are just as, if not more important than the upper level coursework. Because, at the end of the day, during the critical thinking & problem solving stage of a task, one can ALWAYS revert to the fundamentals when all avenues of research have failed & often times referring to cursory knowledge during research has saved me more than once. But most do what everyone else does, which is party, cheat & brush off their lower level course work without realizing they are missing out on key information that will serve them well as a productive scientist. People can’t be effective scientists or engineers without understanding how thinking works, or without the tools needed to build off of & make use of that thinking. I’ve seen it too many times in industry, research/academia where we get young PhD’s & Masters grads, when questioned can’t fully explain various methodologies they used when coming to a hypothesis or even why they came to it, I wish the “5 why’s” were taught to students in primary schools, as by the time they are adults, many have no clue why they do the things they do, let alone explain it. No one wants to start at A, people always want to jump to Z, to the “sexy topics” thus hurting their ability to research & investigate to produce viable findings. I feel modern science is in mortal danger in this age as laziness, dishonesty & anti-intellectualism is on the rise & gaining a foothold every moment of every day.

The way to fix this issue is to separate data collection from data analysis. A scientist may collect data and publish his methodology and results, but he can not say anything in the abstract or conclusion. Only other scientists can write papers with abstract and conclusions using the initial scientist's data. These scientists must disclose any conflict/friendship/association to the initial scientist. The first scientist will always get lead authorship.

Further to my comment below: Under the 'culture chapter - "You can fake some data here and there - just to keep the boss happy." Well, if a student came to me with some fake data and I found out, that student is gone immediately. No second chances. Is is worth the risk?

In palaeontology there are several professors and independent researchers who constantly invent newly discovered species. They have positioned themselves into such niche research areas that almost no one can or is willing to contest their constant newly described species and never-ending publication outpour

Politicians and Scientists... are so closely related in their daily behaviors

I look for different labs to repeat the results of the originating research for validation. Peer review no longer seems like an effective check on junk research.

Faking data is ok in the academic world, but not in the industrial world. In the latter, if it does not work, it does not. It is not a question of pleasing your boss. Otherwise your company may go down the drain. I did my Phd 30 years ago, and it was exactly like that. No negative results accepted in a journal, papers are very specific, so they will be reviewed by a "friendly" reviewer that are the only one to do that type of research. They will never be hard on you because, they know that our group will be the one that will review their publication. It is really an inbreed system.

The main problem is that research is funded, therefore controlled, by the state, or controlled by the state regulators colluding with corporations owned by the political class.

You mention that they are a few bad apples at the end. But one of these bad apples rose to the top, rather than someone more ethical.

The peer review process isnt filtering any of this out. If anything it makes the issue worse. Because peer reviewers rarely know anythingabout your research and will reject you work for the data not looking like what they think it should look like. So you have an addition source of pressure demanding you fudge number to get result someone else not running the experiments expect.

Well spoken

This varies by field. In Engineering, the guys are allowed to publish updates as they acquire new data. I have colleagues that get ten papers from one experiment. All we need is money. In business, they need to acquire new data for every paper and the are expected to publish several times per year. Either they publish qualitative research (don't ever believe it is reliable or valid) or you have to fake the data. Look at Harvard, Christensen died and has been sainted but he faked the results. Only four of seventy-seven cases met his stated criteria yet he published. One good article per year is solid output as is one great article per decade.

Hey there all, am struggling with my masters thesis about reliability anaysis. I was trying to use a different algorithm to solve a specific task as my contribution in the research but the codes seems too complicated and am getting unending errors, plus my Prof. has completely forgot abt me. can any one give me some advice or direction please. am using Matlab. I would be very glad if some one give me direction.

Agree. Fundamental knowledge of our field must come from our sweat.

This one of the reasons I decided not to continue with my PhD, academia is spoiled to almost no return.

It's not a big surprise considering the huge incentives and a system that relies mosly on trust.

The big problem I see with science is this: if you can't or don't reproduce the study yourself, you have to trust those who have done so. For most of us, we haven't got the skills, money or time to do so. When academics lie, they do a great disservice to the entire industry, because they erode trust in these studies. Which studies can I trust? Which have real data? Which considered all the variables? Which are politically unbiased? It's a real concern.

This is just the current version of this. They have been trying to replicate social and psychological experiments from the 1950's forward and they just cannot. So some of the foundations of some of our current social an psychology theories are just wrong.

If the data is manipulated, then it's highly unlikely anyone reviewing the work based on that data will be able to do anything but come to the same conclusions. I remember back when there was the leak of information from the IPCC that all the data available had already adjusted for various factors. They weren't making the raw data available. That all but guarantees further work that incorporates that data will come to similar conclusions. The more work built in this foundation continues to reinforce any bias already in the adjusted data.

If people remove observations that don't fit a model, or where you use some sketchy means to synthesize missing values, you are ignoring issues in your data collection methodology, or worse still, faulty hypotheses.

Some commentary along the lines of the video: 0:58 ("Culture"): The fact that senior researchers ("principal investigators", they're called; what a misnomer!) don't actually do any of the research is fundamentally screwed up. The fact that this is considered totally normal is even more screwed up. Commenting on the same story elsewhere I noted that a scholar putting his name on an article (as principal author, no less) and then claiming total ignorance of what's actually in that article should be considered a plagiarist. That comment, which merely states the obvious, received bewildered, even angry, responses. That shows you how terminally ill academia is in our age. 1:50 or so (still "Culture"): So, to spell the implications out: you can no longer trust the results of any published research. I'm sure some fields of science are not as badly affected by this culture as others. I sort of hope nobody fudges data, say, at CERN, but I fear I'm being too naive even about that. 3:05: "All of your career success relies on you gaming the system". Yes. Note that this implies the following statement: "Every successful academic achieved their success by gaming the system". Let that sink in for a moment. 7:05: "...this is the sort of reasons why they [senior researchers] may end up in these positions...": Well, yes, as you said, they got their senior job in the first place by gaming the system, and they keep on doing that. Honest people rarely make it that far up the ladder. 8:45: Yeah, only 4 out of 10,000 papers are retracted, but how many *should* be retracted? Journal publishers, mind you, have their own incentives for avoiding retractions, not to mention universities. A better statistic to cite is the average rate of reproduction success in a field. Unfortunately, wide-ranging reproduction efforts have only been initiated in a few fields to date, but those that have been have shown that close to half of the published studies they attempted to replicate could not be replicated. You shouldn't expect 100% replication rates, to be sure, but 50% to 60% means a very deep and systemic problem. Interestingly, there was a lot of variance by sub-field: in some areas of study replication rates were 90% or higher, which is what you should normally expect if the research culture is healthy. In others, though, reproduction rates fell to the 20% to 30% range, which basically means the whole sub-field is so much BS. One last point I would add as motivation for faking and fudging data is the desire to be proved right in an academic debate. In many fields there is competition between rival groups, or a dominant school of thought seeking to avoid challenges to their methods and assumptions. Individual scholars often become identified with a particular theoretical thesis they feel obliged to defend at all costs. I'm totally convinced that, given today's general academic culture, many "results" lending support to widespread theoretical claims are in fact highly dubious, and sometimes even entirely fake. So, in summary, the "only few bad apples" point in the end stretches credulity. The corruption is widespread. You yourself accept some corrupt practices as totally normal (see my first point). I'm sure most PhD students, and even Postdocs, have the best of intentions. More than 90% of them never make it into academia. Among the few who do, good intentions are much less prevalent, and even among those with the best intentions, even for those who don't cave in to the pressure to cheat one way or another, the understanding of what "doing the right thing" means in practice is quickly eroding. There's no reason to be sanguine about the situation.

I don't know that it is so rare as you suggest. Just because papers are not being retracted does not necessarily mean the science within them is good, it could simply be the case that nobody bothered to verify the results, either because it is costly to do so, and/or because interested parties are happy with the results as they are. I would think this is very common. In medical sciences, why bother replicating a study that already perfectly supports sales of your commercial product? Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ is of the opinion that fraudulent research is much more common in medical sciences than the 4 in 10000 you propose. In psychology, there was an embarrasing "replication crisis" recently, whether due mostly to fraud or incompetence the result is the same: bad, untrustworthy science. The high profile cases may be a tiny number, but they are the ones getting caught precisely because they are high profile. I don't see why there wouldn't be many more undiscovered cases beneath those, especially given what you yourself suggest about scientists faking data, namely that they probably start out small and so it is logical to assume there are many more examples of fraud that are just too small for anyone to be sufficiently provoked by.

1.18 the principal author is responsible for all data pending an audit. Once raw data is collected, the dataset needs to be sealed ans sequested at the University.

What I have seen in my own career, is that a failure to produce publishable results, that are consistent with previous results within your group can get you fired. Not only that but when you do produce these results, your supervisor is very likely to accept them at face value, and not look very carefully at them to see how correct, and how reproducible they are, or what type of lab protocols were used to produce them. For a graduate student this can be a stressful situation, but, I would imagine much more so for a post doc. Getting fired from a post doc position is pretty much going to end your academic career, and at that point you can have well over ten years of hard work, much of it unpaid, all of it marginally paid, invested in your career. Not only that but sometimes, if you do the science right, the results you get will not be consistent with previous research within your group, so in that case not fudging your data, to meet your supervisor's demands, can end your career. It's a tough choice.

I am huge fun of Open Science. Way back I've spend about 2 weeks to implement promising looking vision algorithm just to find out, results were so fricking cherry-picked that I couldn't find another working example. Hard work was spend on cherry-picking those. It took me lot of time to fill the gaps, there were a lot of them. Novadays I call most peer-reviewed or not, published or not papers BS, unless author takes effort to make this work reproducible and accessible. This I consider value. Anything else seems like waste of my time. Please notice how much it costs - me spending just two weeks and what if it was something that would need equipment for and lets say few moths for team of 5...

Let's not forget you don't need to provide the data most of the time too You can say " I can provide data if doesn't have conflict of interest" and voila you don't need to show to anyone.

One more reason: ideological bias. I see it very very plausible that a scholar would outright lie or present the facts in such a way just to see what they want to see and believe. I guess social sciences are more susceptible to this.

Good video. You made some very good points. To me, the issue all ways comes down to money. There is only so much money available and who gets it?

great video

Final comment on the Culture chapters. If a student came to me with some fake data, I don't find out, and then later it is found that the data was faked, then, it is my career that is over - not the students (I am the one responsible). I'm the one who won't be able to get another job owing to my professional dishonesty. So, where is my incentive to push student's to fake it?

What we need is some heat being applied on the reviewers and editors that let this obvious fakery pass peer review. They should be at least made public. Way way to many people phone in reviews.

I hope this gives enough momentum to getting climate data reviewed. No matter what you believe, it would be better to have a investigation and review of climate data so we can either: really reinforce that climate change is real, or find out if it's being manipulated for nefarious purposes

At least at the Dept. I'm working on, the Higher ups are still in the labs. The Chairholder won't be in the lab, as this person won't have time for it. But a Chair has multiple projects with one leader, who is indefinitely employed. And they are all pretty often in the lab.

You missed the most obvious cause of bullying, cheating and misrepresentation and it's the Dark Side of Academia: Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Academia attract and retain a large number of Narcissists whose primary purpose is to glorify themselves and they do so by creating a paper or two with stunning results and spend the rest of their time feathering their nests and making others bend to their will and gatekeeping their own results from criticism or refutation when others attempt to replicate their results.

Nice summary of the economics of academic science. All the incentives, and I mean ALL, push the poor drones to publish, bring in 💰 and dumb down curricula 💩

My dean at Illinois State got busted for plagerizing his PhD dissertation from Cornell. He also chaired the search committee that hired the most corrupt president in history of Illinois public higher education, Flanagan. This criminal criminal justice scholar enjoyed likening our university to the prison system. He Didn’t even even last a year before the board of trustees led by a corrupt federal district court judge (who was also deposed) gave him a golden parachute to leave town after being convicted of assault for spitting in the face a decorated US Army Ranger on staff by the name of Patrick Murphy. Instead of paying for this crime imagine getting rewarded to the tune of a half million dollars for disgracing the American flag and everyone whoever fought for it. Together these Roman Catholics forced out our best faculty and hired DEI faculty as their replacements.

good video...

Is there something better than Peer Review? Of the years, I'm seeing a lot of flaws with the Peer Review system starting to crop up more and more.

Greed is the main problem...😢

How are we, as people who care about science, supposed to convince politicians that research indicates something or other when we don't have any integrity in our fields?

I’m glad I had a successful career BEFORE I decided to do my PhD. I’m at a Research 1 tier university now but I feel zero pressure to fudge anything. This sounds like laziness & lack of talent masquerading as expertise.

My background is from physics. I don't really see manipulation of data in my experiment, and I am not saying that to "protect" it. I am saying that because even THINKING about it you are being laughed at by almost everyone. However, in other poorly contacted experiments, where the outcome can be relatively low quality, I've seen friends trying to manipulate their data or even hide some suspicious techniques in order to have a publication or a PhD defence. I tell them that this is ridiculous, and the result is what comes out from their experiment but they won't hear me. Now coming from physics, all the published results from social or other "new" sciences, seem ridiculous to me and I wonder how they even get published. The p-hacking is so obvious in many publications that I think that the reviewer quality is low, and they NEED to take undergrad statistics and probability classes to learn what a p-value is and what it represents. I think the problem is that many people end up in academia without knowing basic statistics, they were probably good in other things, and their lack of knowledge later on shines in not seeing the obvious.

Faking data in pharmacology is a long-known problem. Incentives are clear....You should discuss that incentive too.

I sometimes wonder if most quantum science papers are meaningless tosh. The amount of "quantum jargon" in many of these papers feels to me like diarrhea. I also wonder if scientists in this field are stuck in a feedback loop.

This is cheerful.

No longer Beer but Peer Review. That means: Each experiment must be replicated indepently twice.

Children who haven’t come from an abusive family (which thank goodness most us don’t) just don’t recognise this manipulative bullying behaviour for what it is. Without doubt the nastiest people I have had the misfortune in my life to encounter come from the ranks of academia. That’s because they’re often smart enough to cover their tracks for a long time. In the private sector a lot of these types are too dumb to get away with it for very long

What i would suggest in the United States at least for the biomedical sciences, is that the national Institute of health, spot check labs (randomly) which are recipients of the funding. This would be a kin to aviation where the FAA does spot checks on airline facilities including maintenance.

Why then would a person with only a high school diploma and a certificate called, "Women's Building Future's diploma be false accused of being a liar too when they are only being a freshman? Is that because I am not good enough at writing yet or what?

There are also comment ms that can be written on a bad paper. This is also peer reviewed as it the reply from the authors.... To be published together. Can take some time though in my experienxe

Those are horrible people

Thanks!

Much of this abuse is in social science and not physics. Sociology tries to quantify qualitative data. It is opinion based and hardly ever predictive. Only possible use would be marketing

Why should we believe that it's only a few bad apples? Where's the statistic of 4 in 10k from?

They think that since their theories makes sense that it has to be correct. So there's no need to do the science.

it is a cost to the whole of society. Mostly caused by social studies massive terrible influences.

The broad misuse of statistical significance is a persistent annoyance for me. "Statistical significance" must be squeezed out of the data by any means.

Bs like this is so common in academia, that there are terms for it, for example p- hacking or p- harking. That means, btw., that you change your data here and there minimally, to" force" your p value into the range of significance. This can be easily done afterwards by nearly every donkey without getting checked properly, because everyone in the academic world has his own little problems... andy mentioned i think also the publication bias, which goes into this heavily. Reminds me funnily of rl and politics somehow. The people on top aren't for progress, they're here for shutting you down, so they can benefit and get their laughters out of it. It's all on purpose, crazy games. Trust no institutions out there, the shinier they look and sound, the more evil is working behind them. Have a nice day ;)

Cheaters have overwhelming advantages relative to honest.

This is why I don't really want to go into academia, I prefer the industry.

*almost as if publish or perish creates misaligned incentives.* should have just let the drug company ghost writer put it together, & just sign it. thr much betr at generating real fake data. & have more protection, bc they are a company. _JC

Here in a country that constantly accusing other countries of breach human rights or labour rights, the senior scholars are asked to look for money. I attended some of the meetings. It is a dog game. The younger ones are responsible for doing the work. As an older one, I had been pretty good at doing the research. But when I reached a higher level, the university pushed all of us to self-fund our research even if our publication brings all the reputations for the university to boast in their publicity documents. Apart from endless admin barriers for us to get any work done, they provided nothing. As a result, I end up attending endless stupid meetings waiting like a vulture lurking at the corner to capture a rabbit. One day I realise that I am no longer an academic, I am a freaking salesman! I also frequently experiencing other stupid professors approaching me nicely and the moment they realised that there is no money for them, they turned away without even saying excuse me. These emotionally retarded rats are the worst species of human being if they can still be called human. I am very ashamed to be part of these rats. Believe it or not, they even include social scientists who on a daily basis talk about respect, human rights and social justice. If they only have the slightest self awareness, they should advocate to abolish themselves first. They are worse than the authoritarian governments. I do not want to be part of this anymore. I am quitting. I’d rather write as a freelancer and get paid nothing than having to feed into this hypocritical machine. For the young people, escape this modern slavey system as early as possible.

Absolutely correct

Fake it till you make it. But then why do established PIs in secure positions continue to put pressure in their underlings? There really is no need for them to do so. Why for example did Gino continue to fake although she was in a very comfortable and secure position? There's a lot of psychology going on here that cannot solely be explained by academic pressure.

And on top it is the quest for more tax money.

“Academics?!” Grifters is more apropos.

Some do. The way you started gives the impression you think this is common. I don’t think it is. I think it’s rare.

I do not expect

Lying and cheating are what we humans do best.

Save the time: Money.