The Incentives All Point That Way

This article in Science by Jeffrey Brainard is a week old but I thought it was worth mentioning. It may not be surprising but it’s scandalous nonetheless. Nearly a third of papers published in neuroscience journals are fraudulent or plagiarized:

When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010—and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers’ group report.

“It is just too hard to believe” at first, says Sabel of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and editor-in-chief of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience. It’s as if “somebody tells you 30% of what you eat is toxic.”

His findings underscore what was widely suspected: Journals are awash in a rising tide of scientific manuscripts from paper mills—secretive businesses that allow researchers to pad their publication records by paying for fake papers or undeserved authorship. “Paper mills have made a fortune by basically attacking a system that has had no idea how to cope with this stuff,” says Dorothy Bishop, a University of Oxford psychologist who studies fraudulent publishing practices. A 2 May announcement from the publisher Hindawi underlined the threat: It shut down four of its journals it found were “heavily compromised” by articles from paper mills.

This seems to be emerging as a common theme today. When publishing such frauds is rewarded and there are practically no punishments when the fraud is detected:

The microbiologist Elisabeth Bik has an extraordinary ability to spot duplicated or faked images in scientific journals: She has spotted hundreds over the years. But she told Nature that even five years after she’d reported the fakes to the journals, most of them had not been dealt with.

The Oxford psychologist Dorothy Bishop says this matches her own experience: “If one points out academic malpractice to publishers or institutions, there is often no reply.”

There are plenty of other issues with scientific research and publishing. Journals take scientists’ work for free or even charge to publish it, then charge them again for access.

Editors at one journal walked out recently over “unethical” publishing fees. And the demand for “positive” results incentivizes scientists to hack the data up until they find something. Those are deep systemic problems within science.

But outright fraud, you’d think, should be easy to fix if detected. And yet the scientific community often ignores it, undermining the entirety of science: If a large percentage of studies are fake, how can we trust the progress science does make?

Greater transparency, including full publication of data and code as standard for all papers, would be a start, but ultimately the incentive structure of science has to change.

I agree with that conclusion: the incentives need to change.

Note, too, that the results reported are from before the great explosion in the use of large language model tools. Some will claim that such tools will aid in detecting frauds. Contrariwise, I suspect that the use of the tools in perpetrating frauds will outstrip their use in detecting them by far.