That's contradictory. For low impact studies you can fake whatever you want, because nobody really cares. That probably wouldn't promote your career either tho. Publishing bunch of organic semiconductor papers in Nature and Science will promote your career, but won't hold. That's the point.
> Have you taken a look at the biosciences, social sciences, and medicine? Basic research hasn't been reliable for decades.
Not deeply, but I surely can come up with bio/med research with real life applications that appeared in last 2-3 decades. Say mRNA vaccines?
What is contradictory in a claim that most research is low impact thus easier to fake while the incentives for publishing high impact research skews to publishing bad/fake papers since publishing is far more important then having a paper retracted?
> Not deeply, but I surely can come up with bio/med research with real life applications that appeared in last 2-3 decades. Say mRNA vaccines?
Nobody said that all research is faked.
Fake is a spectrum. Soft faking is easy and widespread--"p-hacking" is the polite term.
The stakes for faking it are low because most research is low impact, most research is seldom reproduced, and even bad research is rarely retracted. For that which is reproduced there is plausible deniability--"researcher degrees of freedom". Getting a high impact study published is more important than having one retracted, so researchers follow that incentive structure.
> But that'd be evident from the outside, since science will stop producing real life results. We're definitely not there yet.
Have you taken a look at the biosciences, social sciences, and medicine? Basic research hasn't been reliable for decades.