Funding Increases To Foster Even More Cheating In Science

I don’t often discuss cheating in science, because the conclusion “It’s bad, don’t do it” doesn’t need explication. Even those cheating are clever enough to swear to the conclusion’s truth. Specific instances of cheating have their interest, of course, but I think these True Crime for Intellectuals stories rather miss the point.

Which is one I’ve made several times, but can’t make stick: there are too many scientists, too much money in science, and too much science.

The belief of all those in power is, of course, the opposite. That is putting it mildly. The enthusiasm for science, even given its recent history, even given, as we’ll see, the increase in cheating, has only grown.

There was, you recall, a short-lived attempt to cut science funding, as a way to punish woke universities. Overhead was to be reduced, grants terminated, some measure of spending sanity restored. This was good news. One had hope.

False hope, alas.

The Senate not only rejected the proposed 40% cuts to NIH, but gave them \$400 more than they asked for. The story is similar at NSF. The Senate also removed the proposed restriction on the number of new grants. The chief propaganda organ Science called the increase “modest”.

With this new flood of money, not only will the tsunami of scientism continue to grow, the DIE remain (though renamed), Consensus science will grow even more calcified and hide bound, the ache for new and greater toys, against knowing the Mind Of God, the true purpose of science, will swell. But there will also be a lot more cheating. So much that a lot of it will never be caught, and will instead create new Consensuses from which it will be even harder to refute.

Money attracts crime. Greater amounts mean larger offenses. Something about the root of all evil.

A year ago we saw this headline: “‘The situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point”.

Tens of thousands of bogus research papers are being published in journals in an international scandal that is worsening every year, scientists have warned. Medical research is being compromised, drug development hindered and promising academic research jeopardised thanks to a global wave of sham science that is sweeping laboratories and universities.

Last year the annual number of papers retracted by research journals topped 10,000 for the first time. Most analysts believe the figure is only the tip of an iceberg of scientific fraud….

The practice has since spread to India, Iran, Russia, former Soviet Union states and eastern Europe, with paper mills supplying ­fabricated studies to more and more journals as increasing numbers of young ­scientists try to boost their careers by claiming false research experience. In some cases, journal editors have been bribed to accept articles, while paper mills have managed to establish their own agents as guest editors who then allow reams of ­falsified work to be published.

This is the price to pay when one is dedicated to the proposition More Science Is Better.

Enter a new paper “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly” from Reese AK Richardson and others in PNAS. From the Abstract:

Recently, however, reports of coordinated scientific fraud activities have increased…Here, we demonstrate through case studies that i) individuals have cooperated to publish papers that were eventually retracted in a number of journals, ii) brokers have enabled publication in targeted journals at scale, and iii), within a field of science, not all subfields are equally targeted for scientific fraud. Our results reveal some of the strategies that enable the entities promoting scientific fraud to evade interventions. Our final analysis suggests that this ability to evade interventions is enabling the number of fraudulent publications to grow at a rate far outpacing that of legitimate science.

Here’s one of the main pictures (some retractions now come in batches!):

They can only count the papers that were officially retracted. Most are never be caught.

Here is their guess for the numbers of kinds of papers. There will be about 10 million papers published per year by 2030.

Notice, again, that this only counts cheating that is caught. Bad papers, those produced with no malice aforethought, papers produced only because scientists must publish and must bring in those sweet research dollars or perish, will outpace cheating. These will overwhelm, in large part, the good and genuine papers, as they must. You cannot produce great works of art in a sewer.

The authors conclude what should have been obvious even to politicians: “Competition for limited funding and jobs pushes scientists and the organizations that employ them to continually strive toward increasing scale, efficiency, impact, and the growth of the metrics by which these are evaluated.”

There are too many scientists, too much money in science, and too much science. Most of it bad.

Late Addition: I noticed this new story after writing today’s post: “MIT Econ PhD Student Kicked Out for Massive Fraud“.

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