The credibility crisis in science

I could scarcely believe my eyes reading the headline to Robin McKie’s recent article in the Guardian – “‘The situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point”. The subheading said: “Last year, 10,000 papers had to be retracted by academic journals, but experts think this is just the tip of the iceberg”. The Guardian is proud of its high journalistic standards, but had it made a big mistake in this case, I wondered? However, a quick check on other sources confirmed no error had been made – we are in the middle of an international epidemic of scientific fraud that is seriously compromising scientific research.

Of course, I already knew that average standards of scientific publications have declined in recent years as numbers of science journals proliferated enormously, standards of peer review of submitted papers declined and some journals adopted woke ideology. However, I didn’t know the problem was escalating so rapidly. The watchdog group Retraction Watch tracks this problem. In 2013, just over 1,000 papers were retracted internationally, more than 4,000 in 2022 and, in 2023, more than 10,000.

The Guardian quotes Dorothy Bishop, emeritus professor of neuropsychology, Oxford University: “The situation has become appalling. The level of publishing of fraudulent papers is creating serious problem for science. In many fields it is becoming difficult to build up a cumulative approach to the subject, because we lack a solid foundation of trustworthy findings. And it’s getting worse and worse.”

Academic scientific posts are awarded largely on the basis of candidates’ history of scientific publications, as are job promotions and scientific prizes. Your academic career depends on your record of publications. Hence the temptation to “gild the lily”, particularly when your research efforts hit a prolonged dry patch.

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The way science works, when combined with natural human frailties, ensures we will always have a baseline level of scientific fraud. Results of scientific investigations must be published so that other scientists can learn of the findings, test the results and either build on them, correct them or reject them. Honesty and trust are essential and central to the entire process. The overall goal must be to keep scientific fraud to an irreducible minimum, but the current level of more than 10,000 sham papers per year is light years away from that goal.

Chinese medicine has a particularly bad reputation for faking research because clinicians must publish to scale the hospital hierarchy, forcing overworked doctors to outsource their ‘research’ to dark organisations called ‘paper mills’

Nobody doubts the validity and power of Chinese science but it is also true that publication of false papers is particularly widespread in China, as described by Eleanor Olcott and others in the Financial Times last year. Academics everywhere must publish to further their careers but, because of the scale of competition for limited resources, this pressure is particularly intense in China.

Chinese medicine has a particularly bad reputation for faking research because clinicians must publish to scale the hospital hierarchy, forcing overworked doctors to outsource their “research” to dark organisations called “paper mills”.

Paper mills produce and sell fraudulent manuscripts that resemble legitimate research manuscripts. This paper mill industry has spread to India, Russia and former USSR states, Iran and eastern Europe.

And an enormous network of opportunistic publishers now pours out false “scientific” articles for profit as outlined in another Guardian piece in August 2018. Most of these articles are not sieved through the traditional checks/balances of scientific publication, such as peer review. Most of these publishers are prepared to print anything submitted to them, provided publication fees are paid.

McKie reports that, of the 10,000-plus papers retracted in 2023, more than 8,000 were published in journals owned by Hindawi, a subsidiary of the publishing giant Wiley. Wiley is now beginning to fully integrate the 200-plus Hindawi science journals into the Wiley portfolio, having identified and removed hundreds of fraudsters. Wiley says it cannot handle this problem on its own. All publishers are under siege from the paper mills, finding it extremely difficult to filter out all the submitted papers containing fabricated results.

McKie illustrates the enormous harm done by publishing poor and fabricated research, citing the anti-parasite drug Ivermectin as an example. Early laboratory studies indicated Ivermectin could be used to treat Covid-19 and it was hailed as a “miracle drug”. When ongoing investigations found that these studies showed evidence of fraud, medical authorities refused to endorse Ivermectin as a treatment for Covid. But “anti-vaxxers” continued to cite the pro-Ivermectin “evidence” and to campaign against vaccination. Unfortunately, many people believed them.

William Reville is an emeritus professor of biochemistry at UCC