Re:Scientific fraud has become an 'industry,' alarming analy...
by bananalychee on Tuesday August 05, 2025 @05:00PM
(#44804217)
The incentive structure in academia exacerbates that by encouraging authors to hype up their findings and obfuscate any deficiency in their models. Withholding information and making results difficult to reproduce is a symptom of that, as are academic jargon disconnected from terminology used in the private sector, and obtuse presentation. Those practices make it easier for bad data, bad methodologies, and misrepresentations of findings to slip past reviewers and readers and harder for other researchers to dispute, and undermine the scientific process itself as we get flooded with junk.
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Re:Scientific fraud has become an 'industry,' alarming analy...
by exprofmaddy on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @08:57AM
(#44811349)
Agree on all points. It's worth asking: who maintains the academic incentive structures? If the social structures are harming science (e.g., promoting fraud), why do the social structures persist? Who or what stymies reform? As I've asked these questions, I am led to blame (i) scientists who gain power broker status by playing the game and (ii) university administrators who benefit from larger production numbers (dollars, papers, enrollment, awards).