In 2009, a now highly-cited study found an average of around 2% of scientists admit to have falsified, fabricated, or modified data at least once in their career.
Fifteen years on, a new analysis tried to quantify how much science is fake – but the real number may remain elusive, some observers said.
The analysis, published before peer review on the Open Science Framework on September 24, found one in seven scientific papers may be at least partly fake. The author, James Heathers, a long-standing scientific sleuth, arrived at that figure by averaging data from 12 existing studies — collectively containing a sample of around 75,000 studies — that estimate the volume of problematic scientific output.
“I have been reading for years and still continue to read this 2% figure which is ubiquitous,” Heathers, an affiliated researcher in psychology at Linnaeus University in Vaxjo, Sweden, said. “The only minor problem with it is that it’s 20 years out of date,” he added, noting that the last dataset that went into the 2009 study was from 2005.
So Heathers tried to come up with a more up-to-date estimate of scholarly literature containing signs of irregularities. “A lot has changed in 20 years,” he said. “It’s been a persistent irritant to me for a period of years now to see this figure cited over and over and over again.”
Past studies predominantly focussed on asking researchers directly if they had engaged in dishonest research practices, Heathers said, “which I think is a very bad approach to being able to do this.” But he noted that it was probably the only method available to use when the research was conducted.
“I think it’s pretty naive to ask people who are faking research whether or not they’ll honestly answer the question that they were dishonest previously,” Heathers said.
Heathers’ study pulls data from 12 different analyses from the social sciences, medicine, biology, and other fields of research. All those studies have one thing in common: The authors of each used various online tools to estimate the amount of fakery taking place in a set of papers.
Hellbound and Down 