Please commit more blatant academic fraud

Re:Please commit more blatant academic fraud by aabaker99 on Sunday May 30, 2021 @09:27AM (#27333073)

I'm really happy to see this article here. I quit my PhD where I was working on AI partly because of the "mundane day-to-day fraud" that the author and I observed in the field. Once you've read enough papers, you can easily see a kind of recipe to an academic paper. Present a new method, compare against a baseline, discuss the differences in the results found. To me, some researchers just follow this recipe and do not think about the steps critically. You see figures that plot two categories of points that are purportedly following different distributions but the error bars (or even more of the distributions) overlap. But a p-value says they are significant. So that's good enough to publish! I felt a lot of anxiety about sharing my research in this environment and felt pressure to make my work seem like it was the best solution for every problem when in reality there are more nuances.

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Re:Please commit more blatant academic fraud by oldnews193 on Sunday May 30, 2021 @09:44AM (#27333187)

> I felt a lot of anxiety about sharing my research in this environment and felt pressure to make my work seem like it was the best solution for every problem when in reality there are more nuances.

I am curious what kind of pressure you are referring to. It's your work and your decision how to present it to the world.

As far as other people's research is concerned, academics can express their opinions by participating in peer review and expressing their opinions vocally at program-committee meetings (for instance, proposing artifact evaluation as a part of the review process).

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Re:Please commit more blatant academic fraud by voakbasda on Sunday May 30, 2021 @10:18AM (#27333417)

I had the same experience as GP. I dropped out of a PhD program after witnessing widespread low-level fraud.

I published a single paper with my advisor. I asked questions that a peer reviewer would have asked, and my concerns were basically ignored. It was more important to publish than be accurate and precise with wording (partly due to length limits imposed by the publication). Pushing back harder likely would have had a deleterious effect on my progress in the program. It would have been career suicide.

Worse, the topic was nothing more than rehashed results from a paper he published years earlier. There was really nothing even worth publishing. This was but one example that showed me that academia is endemic with fraud.

Eventually I killed that career path, because I could never participate in such a fundamentally corrupt system. There will be no reform here without Revolution.

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Re:Please commit more blatant academic fraud by aabaker99 on Sunday May 30, 2021 @02:13PM (#27335205)

It is true that as the author of a research paper it is my decision how to present it. However, if you're too far off the mark, you are just going to be rejected by peer review or they will ask for revisions. The fact is as a PhD student, you are trying to join the research community. You aren't in a position to change that community. You have to tailor your work and statements to fit the mold. Students who are outspoken voicing these concerns, especially if they rise to the level of abuse or research misconduct, must tread carefully. A case I was made aware of in the study of research ethics is of Anil Potti [1], [2]. From [2], the statement from the whistleblower, "In raising these concerns, I have nothing to gain and much to lose" is apt.

For more mild cases, like those mentioned in the article, the stakes are lower but there is also more plausible deniability. If Duke University tried to bury even the blatant abuse, you can imagine how it is also hard to confront the article's so-called "mundane, day-to-day fraud".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil_Potti [2] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/01/duke-university-offi...

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