Academic fraud may be the symptom of a more systemic problem

Pay08

Is it just me or is this article very weirdly written? I can barely parse it.

everdrive

>Don’t hate the player, hate the game I understand this is a cheeky section heading and the author is not really making this point, but this may be one of the dumbest popular phrases out there. You're effectively saying "Don't get upset at me for being an awful person, I probably wouldn't have succeeded if I'd been a good person." "The game," of course, is made up of players and if no one played that way there would be no game.

BeetleB

This has been the case for decades. At the same time, knowing someone who committed academic fraud during his PhD and was caught, I can say two things: A lot of people do it when they simply don't need to. They're not trying to "survive in academia". They're trying to get to the top. The person in question was smart, bright, and did good research (at least excluding the stuff he made up). He could have gotten an academic position without committing fraud. And he could have had a great industry job without it too. No matter - he simply switched to another top tier university, got his PhD, and is now running a startup. Which comes to the second point: The repercussions are minor even when you do get caught.

inavida

Lots of words that boil down to a 2500 year old mathematical formula, 天下之所惡唯孤寡不穀而王公以自名也, which in English translates as something like, Society's only problems are performative victimhood, colonization of the moral virtue of the vulnerable and oppressed, and mandatory penance rituals, especially when presidents and professors make it their job.

Al-Khwarizmi

"Especially if you are already well-established. Publish less, but publish better research. Put time and effort into transparency. Share everything you can share, as openly as you can share it. Use your privileged position to do research in the way you think it ought to be done, even if that’s not the quickest way to achieve academic success. (...) Be aware of the implicit signal you might be giving those you supervise when you say things like ‘you need to get a result’ or ‘we need to make this publishable’." While I agree in the abstract, the problem is that when you're well-established, in most areas, your research basically amounts to supervising PhD students and postdocs who are not well-established. And they're struggling to meet the requirements to finish their thesis, get a permanent position, etc. So if you encourage them to do slow science and publish less, there's a high risk that you're basically letting them down. Plus, to do research you're probably using some grant funding and guess what the funding agency expects... Thus, most people never get to a point in their career where they can safely say "let's ignore incentives and just pursue this project slowly and carefully". There might be some exceptions. Probably in math, where research is often individual. And maybe in other areas if you can have a smallish side project with other professors that doesn't require much specific funding, or if you have a student who is finishing and has already secured a position in industry so their stakes aren't high. I've been in those situations sometimes, but it's the exception rather than the rule. The truth is that even senior professors seldom have the luxury of not being heavily pressured by incentives.

mzelling

Here's an important aspect to understand: successful professors don't read papers in full. They're too busy for that. They only take a look at the title, abstract and introduction — and perhaps they will glance at the figures. This is why telling a compelling story is so important.

smcnc

One thing I noticed on the CS PhD side of the house is because many researchers don't want others to easily build upon their work (for whatever reasons), they don't often release the source code/data required to quickly validate it. This is a recipe for shortcuts, errors, and even in the worst cases, fraud.

glitchc

Academia is no different from any other profession or sport. Holding it to a higher bar than say, medicine, engineering, law or accounting, doesn't make sense. As an example, let's take soccer: All players will tackle if they think they can get away with it. Even Messi, Ronaldo, Mbappe do it. Those who are caught receive a red card and are sent off the field. Do red cards stop tackles? No. Players just try hard not to get caught.