This really undermines the "trust the science" narrative. It has become much more about cushy white collar jobs, than the brightest minds being laser focused on understanding and bettering mankind.
> This really undermines the "trust the science" narrative.
Not really, but it does mean you shouldn’t trust individual papers blindly.
Anyone who follows research already knows this. Individual papers appear all the time with remarkable findings which seem revolutionary, but then nobody can replicate or commercialize it.
Some communities eat these isolated results up, like supplement and health podcasters (Rhonda Patrick, Huberman). They should know better than to take some random mouse study at face value, but it’s too good of a story to pass up.
In medicine and the industry, anyone experienced knows not to get excited about singular results unless it’s from a trusted source or until it’s replicated.
The more this kind of thing happens, the more it's going to blow back on you. The hacks, ideologues, and frauds have done a lot to destroy trust in science and the image of science. When the public backlash comes, muggles aren't going to be able to tell the difference between someone like you and the hucksters you've trained yourself to ignore. They are ruthless, and nothing of science will remain unless you are as ruthless, to the people who abuse your good name.
I'd argue that the vast majority of fraud - even high profile fraud - doesn't actually affect public perception of science. For example, the STAP cell paper and Jan Hendrik Schön's series of papers aren't really widely known outside of academia. And those papers were essentially attempts to lie all the way to a Nobel prize - as egregious as it gets.
In my opinion, the three research frauds of the past 30 years that have had the biggest impact outside of academia are:
1. Andrew Wakefield's autism paper
2. Elgazzar's paper on ivermectin as a treatment for COVID
3. Marc Tessier-Lavigne's Alzheimer's papers
The interesting thing about 1 and 2 is that yes, they reduced public confidence in science, but only because there are large blocks of people who remain convinced that the research wasn't actually fraudulent.
I think trying to keep a tally rather misses the larger point. You can’t properly determine the most impactful bad science of the last 30 years, because you’re not aware of all of it! These meta-studies are showing how often you find bad science when you dig deeper, but that’s just a rate of incidence, not an absolute number. There’s a whole iceberg of findings we haven’t begun to press on. Who knows what kind of stuff might turn out to be fraudulent? The real concern is about what kind of damage has been done to the foundations of knowledge, which compounds as we continue to do research on top of shoddy prior work.
Fraudulent research can be damaging along multiple axes, and I completely agree that there is probably a mountain of undiscovered fraud out there that continues to have negative downstream effects. I'm more skeptical of the idea that undiscovered fraud has a negative effect on the public perception of science. If even highly prominent known frauds have had little discussion outside of academia, why would undiscovered frauds affect the way nonscientists think about science?
It does undermine the narrative. Eventually nobody will trust any public sector funded science. Private companies will still invest in scientific R&D to enhance their products but, like today, they won't talk about it much and they won't publish papers, only patents. That's where we're heading.
First problem: the sort of people who popularized Follow The Science™ actually meant "follow the people who run public sector institutions". Not "follow single studies" or anything that deep. The catchphrase was deployed many times during COVID to browbeat people into obeying people like Anthony Fauci, a man notorious for claiming he literally was science. "Attacks on me are attacks on science", he said. It was pure authoritarianism dressed up as intellectualism, as was so often the case throughout history (see: Lysenko).
Second problem: the heuristic that you should only trust a claim if it appears in several papers will also lead to you trusting many bogus claims. Academics regularly cite work they haven't even read, let alone replicated. It's easy to find invalid citations in the literature. Most of them just take claims on trust or even cite claims clearly advertised as made up fiction (sorry, "modeling assumptions").
Third problem: many results that replicate shouldn't:
> Anyone who follows research already knows this. Individual papers appear all the time with remarkable findings which seem revolutionary, but then nobody can replicate or commercialize it.
But there are many scientists that love hearing themselves on TV etc. that pull out a paper to shove whatever agenda they have.
i think what people are talking about is that infomercial-level quackery and double-think and dishonesty has now breached the levy into mainstream science. now, instead of seeing papers claiming breakthroughs you will also see papers that are fraudulent but claim to prove or reinforce a hypothesis or model that everyone already agrees is true. obviously most fraudulent papers are like this because the point of fraudulent papers is to avoid detection and create an appearance of legitimacy. now we have a billions dollar drug for alzheimers that literally does nothing. thats what people are talking about. but you refuse to acknowledge it
"Trust the science" will work as long as science works, which even to this day is pretty nicely, this practice is given a bad name by the "Trust the science*" crowd, which activity is based on having a position then attempting to legitimize it by quoting the abstract of a paper they have never read, prioritizing pushing ideas above factual matters.
This in turn allows certain people in institutions to trade legitimacy for agenda pushing, creating the current crisis of institutional trust, which the legitimate "Trust the science" crowd suffers from.
Science itself is all about testable hypotheses and facts. If we can't rely on it, chances are we are doing something wrong and science itself is perfectly fine.
The incentive structure in academia exacerbates that by encouraging authors to hype up their findings and obfuscate any deficiency in their models. Withholding information and making results difficult to reproduce is a symptom of that, as are academic jargon disconnected from terminology used in the private sector, and obtuse presentation. Those practices make it easier for bad data, bad methodologies, and misrepresentations of findings to slip past reviewers and readers and harder for other researchers to dispute, and undermine the scientific process itself as we get flooded with junk.
Agree on all points. It's worth asking: who maintains the academic incentive structures? If the social structures are harming science (e.g., promoting fraud), why do the social structures persist? Who or what stymies reform? As I've asked these questions, I am led to blame (i) scientists who gain power broker status by playing the game and (ii) university administrators who benefit from larger production numbers (dollars, papers, enrollment, awards).
Maybe it's a naive outlook but maybe "science" can continue to work... with, without, or despite all the politics, waste, cruft, and scaffolding that academia erects all around it.
According to the article, bad papers are getting criticized and retracted. It appears "science" is robust enough to work as intended, even with some bad actors involved.
What practical solution would you offer to this problem? Without changing the entire publishing software ecosystem, it’s not like articles are living in github repositories where pull requests are a thing.
In many cases, citing articles still go to print media.
Obviously not all of them. And obviously there is corruption and mistakes with anything involving humans. What's so funny is that when people make criticisms like this, they always leave out the alternative. What's the alternative? Trusting mostly uneducated influencers and quacks who do even less research and don't even attempt peer review?
I'm sure if, god forbid, you were diagnosed with a curable cancer you wouldn't go "trust the science" and go get treatment. I'm really sure you would do that.
You can say that of all cases of fraud, but that’s a survivorship bias fallacy, since we can only talk about cases we know to be fradulent, i.e. where fraud has been identified.
It's complicated. There is a whole lot of corruption and fraud in science. But this kind of fraud doesn't end up leading to dominating narratives. The fraud remains part of the 99% of science that is invisible to the general population and that is precisely why the fraud isn't so easily uncovered in the first place.
Depending in the field and impact, reproduction becomes “free” because other scientists try to build on the results. Science is often about chasing the latest, hottest thing
If they can’t reproduce the original, they should get called out eventually
In over 80 volumes of ASTM publications, I would estimate they may amount to more kilos than that.
Almost all of the actual lab work requires statistical determination of repeatability & reproducibility to be calculated between different labs, and the summary is included with each document.
I would say there is way less than a kilo without this.
And the amount of supporting raw data on file amounts to kilos which dwarf the pages published. Formally accessible so everything can be thoroughly reviewed at any time in the future, allowing for complete reconsideration if called for.
Scietific instrumentation doesn't stand still.
So it definitely can be done. Even if it's to the extreme not suitable for everybody else.
The less-reproducible documents are there, they did the best they could, but have a smell not shared by the good stuff. You know "exactly" how good or bad the underlying science turned out to be in the real world.
Paradoxically, or intuitively, as the case may be, if you're going to utilize the less-reliable techniques (most likely because they're the best there is), you may need to know how bad they are most of all.
Maybe other publications should raise the bar on statistics as appropriate, I figure zero statistics is about as far as you can get from ASTM "standards".
Some places probably have a lot further to go than others and it would be nice to have a whole lot sweeter smell all around.
I thought it was understood that's what they do these days.
People can probably appreciate that lot of the kilos are more figurative than ever, but there's still enough hard copies made to fill big trucks though.
I'm not in academics professionally myself, how universal would you estimate it is among their journals these days to require a statistical study between an adequate number of different labs before final publication?
It depends a lot on the area. I'd not be so pessimistic. The problem is how many of the papers that reach newspapers are reproducible? I guess less than the average. And also strange results that are misinterpreted to get a amazing but wrong layman explanation.
I haven't seen the "trust the science" narrative since covid honestly.
Junk science has been around since, well, even before we coined the word science really. In some ways I think the situation has improved. People seem far more aware of misconduct, and willing to make retractions than they used to.
The lab where I did my postdoc had a joke that the first graduate student to make it big at some startup had to come back and endow a chair for their advisor.
I'd say they were when I was starting out in 2002. Obviously not perfect, but they had a lot to offer. That steadily changed until the pandemic. Then the job went to shit. I no longer recommend students look for academic jobs. I'll give my support if that's what a student's after, but I've talked to enough people that have moved away from academia, and academic jobs are dominated on pretty much every dimension in 2025.
you should not trust science. I mean look where the article is published. It's not Vox nor The New York Times, etc. It's in Science, one of the most reputable journals in the world. So the community of scientist is aware of the problem and in the end science is self-correcting. It's just a slow process. Science advances one funreal at a time.
Science isn't self correcting. These problems have existed for many decades. There were people complaining that social science doesn't replicate back in the 1960s.
The idea that science is self-correcting is a nice fiction spread by academics to absolve themselves of the need to reform. "Don't make us change, any problems will go away if you wait because science is naturally self correcting", they say. It's a silly word game. Academia, which is what they mean when they say science, is a human institution whose incentives lead naturally to rewarding bad behavior. Nothing in that system self corrects, corrections must be forced from the outside (or we give up on reform and dissolve the whole thing, a solution now actively being talked about in hardline right-wing forums).
There ideas in how to get better. -People start talking about pre-register studies, where the study design is evaluated independent of the results. -Some years ago Nature was thightening the acceptance criteria for articles about new laser principles. - in the field of metasurfaces there are more and more articles in how to assess the performance of flat optics and calling Out Problems with the Status quo. Honestly, i Don't See your point. Is the progress maybe slow... Yes. But changes are Happening. It's also in the best interest of Academia. You don't want to build Up your career (~5-30 years)on someone else fraudulent.
These ideas are all decent in the abstract but all rely on the assumption that there are auditors of some kind. There aren't.
Example: pre-registration does happen sometimes today, and it always happens for corporate clinical trials. It's a good idea that works. In the private case the FDA is the auditor and there's some circumstantial evidence that pre-registration may be the reason why pharma productivity flatlined around ~2000. But in a surprising number of cases in academia a study is pre-registered, the final paper doesn't match the pre-registration and nobody notices. Why? Well, who is responsible for systematically checking these things? It'd have to be auditors, but universities point the finger at journals and journals point the finger back at universities.
Papers calling out problems: it's been done for much longer than I've been alive. Doesn't work. People nod their head and say something should be done, then go right back to the bad old ways.
The only thing that can help is external force. Governments have to either defund academia and let science be done by the private sector, or they have to tie funding to passing rigorous external audits (by private sector actors paid to find fraud, not academics themselves). The latter has been tried a few times, the US ORI is an example of that, but it doesn't work. The ORI was set up on the assumption that academic malpractice is rare so its methods don't scale.
“Trust the science” is a terrible slogan. It almost turns science into a religion. Most people that use it seem to think that science is whatever a scientist says. We should be saying “Trust the scientific method”.
Agreed. I have never heard a scientist use this phrase, but I've heard plenty of left leaning folks use it. As left wing politics absorbs science as it's cause - and not a cause that everyone is for - I fear it actively turns right leaning folks against science solely because of it's mindless support by progressive folk.
I have been thinking through all of these comments that it's somewhat rich that a very SV heavy site is so critical of smart, driven people not applying themselves to important problems.
But I think the worst are the Science Fans who go around saying "Science, bitches!" just because something has a two-column layout and never actually read the shit. Then they go around saying "There is some evidence that" and they've never read the paper.
In fact, there is so much bullshit that you would never accept if you were the one making a decision. It's why so many outsiders frequently make the right decisions on things.
e.g. Bezos closed flights to/from China to/from his offices a month before the pandemic. Bezos isn't a scientist. Trump tried to do the same. Trump isn't a scientist. But what did the scientists say? That it would hinder a coronavirus response: https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/31/as-far-right-calls-for-c...
The "far right" non-experts said one thing while the scientists said another thing and now we know that the "far right" non-experts were right. It's not even because the "far right" has some exclusive access to truth. It's just that there is a certain kind of blind spot imposed upon science by the fact that scientists have certain political persuasions. This causes them to self-censor and blatantly lie so as to preserve those politics.
Even if some racist view were true, you would be hard pressed to find a liberal scientist who would espouse it. Even if some sexist view were true, or xenophobic view were true, or whatever. Which is a dirty stain on science as practiced today.
> This really undermines the "trust the science" narrative.
Even more like undermining trust in journals.
With Science.org doing it to its own self.
Which should be living up to a higher standard than most so they can set an example.
At Science.org I think they have the responsibility to reverse the forces that are trying to build hatred for scientific endeavors across-the-board.
Looks like the haters are most concerned with climate and vaccines, and are perfectly willing to let everything else go down the tubes if that's what it takes to purge every last trace there is concerning progress in those areas past, present, and future.
So when you get the direct opinion of the most hateful where they explain why they don't trust vaccine and climate research, they can often further explain why they don't really trust very many scientists at all, not even NASA, so this is where the most concentrated anti-scientist effort can be found.
The worst of the haters are the ones painting with the broadest brush.
But it has already "trickled" outward from there and naturally the hatred is so extreme (and undesirable) that is the part that fortunately gets watered down as it spreads, but that can leave the anti-science momentum seeming more credible than where it emanated from. When the source hatred & superstition are less prominent, the non-haters and non-superstitious laypersons are more likely to be persuaded.
This fraud needs to be exposed, but the way it looks to me it just gives haters another arrow in their quiver.
This article looks very well researched itself and seems like the authors are on the right track and will only gain more expertise on the subject if they try.
What bugs me is that they're painting with as broad a brush as you can get, themselves.
With the resources at their disposal, they should be breaking down in great detail which fields of science are the most effected and least effected by the growing fraud industry. The numbers of scientists in these fields and the locations their research was conducted in, as well as the estimated fraud in each of the fields. We want University and institution affiliations, correlations with educational histories, numbers, why not?
If they try, and stick with it for a number of years, progress in one direction or the other should become measurable for each field.
So the most egregious fraud can be targeted first & strongest.
If there was a time when there was no fraud "industry" at all, I would say that some of most questionable findings were still heavily concentrated on the social sciences, and least of all on the natural sciences.
It would be good to know if this trend still holds based on true statistical data, this could indicate if or when the fraud industries are disproportionally targeting natural science. It would be good to have a sign whether fraud in natural science is on the increase or not independently, whether initiated for the purpose of promoting the lesser scientists or their institutions, or perhaps a source of uncertainty & doubt that can be put on steroids without any intention to promote scientists or their work at all, just the opposite effect could be intended.
You know natural sciences like climate and vaccines are in their cross-hairs so you can expect those to take a big hit without any proven or rumored fraud, but if you're not careful everything else will be equally destroyed even though it was not the primary target of the hate.
One of the worst ways to discredit natural science is to lump it in with social science or anything else.
