There’s Always Bad Science — and More than You Might Think

Let's look at the fabrication, frauds and flaws

While science is a useful and reliable tool for understanding our world, it is not necessarily the ultimate authority. The general public often respects scientists for their expertise, yet science itself does not always represent truth or morality. Science often emphasises evidence, experimentation and self-correction. Consequently, if the rigour of providing evidence, conducting experiments, and undertaking self-criticism or self-correction is violated, then this is known as “bad science”, challenging the legitimacy or authority of the scientific information.

Worse still, not only do substandard scientists practise bad science, but world-renowned scientists do too. There are many scandals and reports indicating world-leading scientists have been fabricating their scientific findings for years, or decades, until their malpractices are exposed.

Scientific Fraud and Data Fabrication

In 2023, an investigation, released, exonerated former Stanford University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne of research misconduct, where he had to step down after the probe also concluded that at least four of his papers dating back as far as 1999 contained data manipulated by a member of his lab. The probe, commissioned by Stanford’s Board of Trustees, said the prominent neuroscientist “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record” when concerns arose about his papers. The report further faulted him for creating a lab culture that fostered an unusually high rate of data integrity problems.

In the same year, former Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino in Behavioural Science, who studies honesty, was accused of falsifying data in studies. Harvard Business School provided a 14-page document that included “compelling evidence” of data falsification, including the discovery that someone accessed a database and added and altered data in the file.

On Sept. 7, 2023, the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI) released two reports, one on former Professor Kotha Subbaramaiah in biochemistry at Cornell, and one on former Professor Andrew Dannenberg in medicine at the same institution. Both reports said that Subbaramaiah and Dannenberg were guilty of reporting falsified or fabricated data in 12 studies. The reports are based on investigations by Cornell and additional analyses by the ORI. According to the Retraction Watch Database, 18 studies co-authored by Subbaramaiah and 20 co-authored by Dannenberg have so far been retracted.

The list goes on and on. Ongoing research scandals and investigations suggest and accuse world-class scientists and their research labs of research misconduct and, very often, data fabrication in order to develop research findings that are novel and impactful as a means to strengthen their academic excellence and reputation in their respective fields, along with boosting the amount of professional and financial opportunities they can receive beyond academic research. These include by being invited to deliver talks or serve as a consultant for well-established institutions in the industry.

In today’s landscape, most of us do not only admire world-class scientists by their social and professor status and intelligence, but we also deem research findings delivered by their research teams/labs the authority. Unfortunately, just like everything else in our society, academic research can be a fraud. Especially when scientists and their research teams have been grinding so hard but still fail to generate novel, insightful and scientifically and statistically justifiable research findings, they may easily fabricate the research procedures or the scientific research findings to get their “work done perfectly” and continue to attract the influx of research funding from external funding bodies.

Science Can Be Flawed

Even when scientists fairly comply with the ethics and responsible research practices and maintain rigorous research integrity, their scientific findings can still be flawed.

Science is not a panacea.

Sometimes, for example, in my field of social sciences, participants are voluntarily and purposefully invited by any research team for data collection (such as through survey and interview). Voluntary sampling means participants choose to participate in a study or survey, usually by responding to a request or invitation; while purposeful sampling refers to how researchers intentionally select participants based on specific characteristics relevant to their research question. These participant selection procedures are not random, so we may very likely oversample a certain subgroup over the others of any given population that is not regionally or nationally representative.

When research findings use data collected from a certain subgroup to indicate that the targeted population (such as UK citizens, US citizens, or German citizens) behaves or thinks in a certain way, it’s not bad science unless the research papers fail to clearly declare their non-probability sampling methods (such as, as said, voluntary or purposeful sampling) and list the methodological and research design limitations. Social science research papers that fail to declare such methodological and research design limitations can be seen as bad science — misleading at the very least.

Moreover, there are many dodgy, substandard journal and book publishers out there, usually based in South Asia, where anyone can easily publish their research papers or monographs in these outlets as long as they pay article processing charges. These journals and book publishers are labelled as “deceptive publishing”. Deceptive or predatory publishing involves publishers who exploit authors by charging fees (like article processing charges) without delivering on their promises of editorial and publishing services, such as peer review.

These journals, for example, often lie about their impact factor values — a scientific metric to indicate how prestigious the journals themselves are — and promise to publish any submissions within a few days without conducting the months-long rigorous peer review.

Basically, these are scams.

Final Thoughts

Oh, so does it mean we can no longer trust science and scientists? Of course not. Yet, the bottom line is all of us should stay critical. With the mass information in today’s society, along with the surging numbers of scams and frauds, we must be critical instead of easily buying into any advice or arguments made by (ostensibly) legitimate sources.

Like any other industry, academia can have research misconduct and fraud at times. That being said, however, there remains a large pool of good science (well-structured and -justified research papers, for example) out there.

We can believe in certain arguments or research findings coming from legitimate sources, yet we should learn that scientific findings serve more as “indications” rather than “facts”.

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