If you can not do honest work in academia you should leave and go work somewhere else.
Fraud is not the correct reaction to the problems of academia, as it actively hurts it even more. Nobody is forced to do academic research for a living, especially if you have a degree in physics.
Not in the short term. And only for yourself personally if you are found out.
Of course there are perverse incentives which goes against the scientific spirit. It doesn’t even require malicious intent. Neglect and bias can be similarly powerful negative forces.
I did say that fraud is something that is essentially encouraged in academia. Nobody is forced to do it of course, but then again, any system will have its flaws that encourages bad behaviour, and it is also advantageous to restructure the system to minimize that.
Steroid users are few and far between, and we must weed them out of baseball.
Nearly everyone is using steroids, but it was their choice, so it's their own fault.
Classic cases are the Bell labs guy finding organic semiconductors and fermi lab guy finding new elements. They both were just making up stuff which they believed existed but just needed work to be found and published. They would make up experimental data to support existence of theoretical things. The assumption was just publish this first, get the accolades then use it to get money to get someone to eventually do this properly. But they just predicted stuff which weren’t true. Nobody knows the amount of bullshit that was made up that eventually turned out to be true.
All of this because scientists these days are not expected to work on things. They are expected to produce results. Nobody is giving passionate people time and space to explore things. It’s all about results now.
The irony is that the reward for running the rat race is freedom from rat race. Postdocs publish random crap to boost numbers for their tenure which they think will relieve them of this stupidity and let them focus on pure research. but once they catch the tigers tail they gotta keep running.
These jobs do exist[1], and we as a society need to figure out how to stop organizing research around a single manager (professor) with zero meaningful oversight.
It's true, and also entirely unhelpful.
That might have been right and proper. But years later, I read that of the top 30 finalists that year, every single one was taking performance-enhancing drugs. Presumably the same was true in previous years. Armstrong just happened to be the first-place finalist in a year where they finally had the ability to start testing.
In a case like that, it's not enough to say "if you can't bike fast without steroids, then biking isn't for you!" If cheating is pervasive, those who can't or don't cheat will fall behind and quit, and all that's left will be those willing to cheat. From the POV of Science writ large, if the culture is rotten then the incentives must be changed. You can't rely on the independent integrity of every individual not to cheat, or you'll just end up with only cheaters.
Telling people to be good is a waste of time unless they're your kid or loved one and they really don't want to disappoint you. Fixing your system so it doesn't reward people who commit fraud is the only thing that even has a possibility of working.
I would say yes. I think we need to place a lot more value in publishing research that isn't surprising. Research that simply replicates (or fails to replicate) other research should be just as valuable to one's career as finding something unexpected.
I scientist that has replicated a bunch of studies and identified several that they couldn't replicate is doing something very very valuable for the human race and we (universities, grants, etc.) need to recognize that.
The publish-or-perish mentality combined with the grant system introduces a lot of bad incentives into the scientific ecosystem.
Scientists didn't create this environment: you did. We, as a society, demanded that some sector of our economy produce new scientific research at a rate and level that is capable of supporting our national and global economy, and then we allocated a very restricted set of resources for them to do it. And they've done miracles, too! We would literally not be alive today if the scientific community hadn't developed the improvements that allow us to feed, house, and provide energy to 8 billion people. And that's before we get to strictly optional stuff like the computers and networks that power this website.
It's a serious business and obviously that kind of pressure leads to bad results sometimes. But the correct response is to be grateful that we have an engine in our society that produces this basic research (since industry has dramatically lowered spending on basic R&D over the past decades) and try to improve it, not to be pointlessly angry at scientists for living in the system that society's incentives have built for us.
However as they teach the little kids, trust your gut instinct. This person didn't just plagiarize this work, but also his PhD thesis: https://www.science.org/content/article/plagiarism-allegatio...
> If we want to fix it, simply outing these fakes will not be enough.
Yes, but without outing these fakes and harshly and punishing them as the first step, we're immediately communicating that this is "ok". "Just fake the data and throw it over the wall, if you get caught, just blame it on pressure and the general academic culture".
However, what is the societal problem here? It's the problem that in academia, there are such pressures to publish and be first nowadays that many people will do anything to get ahead. It doesn't help that social media and news sites have introduced a sort of gamification into it.
People have their natures, and the current state of academia encourages cheating, plain and simple. Just like the current state of finance encourages market manipulation.
If we want to fix it, simply outing these fakes will not be enough. While I don't have much sympathy for the cheaters, I also don't have much sympathy for the scientific community that has created this environment.