Fraud in Science—Why It’s on the Increase
“THE competition is savage. Winners reap monumental rewards; losers face oblivion. It’s an atmosphere in which an illicit shortcut is sometimes irresistible—not least because the Establishment is frequently squeamish about confronting wrongdoing.” So opened the article “Publish or Perish—or Fake It” in U.S.News & World Report. To escape perishing, many scientific researchers are faking it.
The pressure on scientists to publish in scientific journals is overwhelming. The longer the list of published papers to the researcher’s name, the better his chances for employment, promotion, tenure in a university, and government grants to finance his research. The federal government “controls the largest source of research funding, $5.6 [thousand million] a year from the National Institutes of Health.”
Because “the scientific community shows little stomach for confronting its ethical dilemma,” “has been strangely reluctant to probe too deeply for hard data about its ethical conduct,” and “isn’t keen about cleaning house or even looking closely for malfeasance,” congressional committees have held hearings and considered legislation to do the job of policing for them. (New Scientist; U.S.News & World Report) This prospect wrings from scientists much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Yet, one science journal asks and answers the question: “Is the house of science clean and in order? The bit of evidence that reaches the public invites serious doubts.”
Some researchers eliminate data that does not support what they want to prove (called cooking); report more tests or trials than were actually run (called trimming); appropriate for their own use data or ideas of other researchers (called plagiarism); and make up experiments or data they never performed or produced (called forging). A cartoon in a science journal poked fun at this last tactic, one scientist talking to another and saying of a third: ‘He’s published a lot since he took up that creative writing course.’
“What’s the major product of scientific research these days? Answer: Paper,” U.S.News & World Report said. “Hundreds of new journals are being founded each year to handle the flood of research papers cranked out by scientists who know that the road to academic success is a long list of articles to their credit.” Quantity, not quality, is the goal. Forty thousand journals published yearly produce a million articles, and part of this flood “is symptomatic of fundamental ills, including a publish-or-perish ethic among researchers that is stronger now than ever and encourages shoddy, repetitive, useless or even fraudulent work.”
A senior editor at The Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Drummond Rennie, commented on the lack of quality: “There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature citation too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print.”
Making Mountains out of Molehills
The publish-or-perish syndrome has made many researchers very resourceful in nursing a modest output of published articles into phenomenal numbers. They write one article, then chop it up into four smaller ones—called salami slicing in the jargon of the profession. In this way, instead of a publication credit for one article, they have four articles added to their publications list. Then they may send the same article to several journals, and each time it is published, it is counted again. More often than not, one article may show several scientists as authors, and each author adds the article to his list of published articles. A two- or three-page article may show 6, 8, 10, 12, or more authors.
On the NOVA program entitled “Do Scientists Cheat?” telecast on October 25, 1988, one scientist commented on this practice: “People are trying to get their names attached to as many publications as they possibly can, so that very commonly now you find huge teams where 16 people all sign their name to a particular publication, which probably wasn’t worth publishing in the first place. But this is part of a kind of rat race, a competitiveness, a vulgar quantitative counting mentality that is absolutely encouraged by the structure of science in the United States today.” Some listed as coauthors may have had very little to do with the article, may not even have read it, yet add the article to their list of publications. Such bloated lists influence the granting of research requests involving hundreds of thousands of dollars of public funds.
Peer Review, a Safeguard Against Fraud?
Editors of science journals often—but not always—submit papers to other scientists for review before publishing them. This practice, called peer review, theoretically weeds out erroneous and fraudulent articles. “Science is self-correcting in a way that no other field of intellectual endeavor can match,” Isaac Asimov says. “Science is self-policing in a way that no other field is.” He marveled that “scandal is so infrequent.”
But many others do not share this view. Peer review is “a lousy way to detect fraud,” said previously quoted Dr. Drummond Rennie. The American Medical News said: “Peer-reviewed journals, once regarded as almost infallible, have had to admit that they are incapable of eradicating fraud.” “Peer review has been oversold,” said a medical writer and columnist for The New York Times.
The journal Science reports that one researcher assigned to review another researcher’s paper was charged with plagiarism. He “took data from paper he peer-reviewed and used it for his own work,” according to the NIH (National Institutes of Health). Such conduct is a “violation of trust that is supposed to lie at the heart of the peer-review system,” and in this particular case, the reviewer has been declared “ineligible for future federal funding.”
“For high-octane gall in proclaiming its ethical purity, the scientific community has long been the runaway winner,” said New Scientist magazine. The highly vaunted peer-review system that theoretically screens out all the cheats is felt by many to be a farce. “The reality,” New Scientist said, “is that few scientific scoundrels are caught, but, when they are, they frequently turn out to have been running wild for years, publishing faked data in respectable journals, with no questions asked.”
Previously, an official of the NIH said, as reported in The New York Times: “I think an age of innocence has ended. In the past people assumed that scientists didn’t do this kind of thing. But people are beginning to realize that scientists are not morally superior to anybody else.” The Times report added: “Although a few years ago it was rare for the National Institutes of Health to receive one complaint a year of alleged fraud, she said, there are now at least two serious allegations a month.” Science magazine observed: “Scientists have repeatedly assured the public that fraud and misconduct in research are rare . . . And yet, significant cases seem to keep cropping up.”
The chairman of one of the congressional investigating committees, John Dingell, at one time said to scientists: “I will tell you that I find your enforcement mechanisms are hopelessly inadequate and that rascality seems to be triumphing over virtue in many incidences in a fashion that I find totally unacceptable. I hope you do too.”
The NOVA program on “Do Scientists Cheat?” concluded with this acknowledgment by one of the scientists present: “Skeletons have to come out of the closets, bureaucrats’ careers have to be impaired if that’s what it takes, and there’s no alternative. This is ethically required, this is legally required, and it’s certainly morally required.”
[Blurb on page 6]
“Sixteen people all sign their name to a particular publication”
[Blurb on page 7]
“This is ethically required, this is legally required, and it’s certainly morally required”