Science in Crisis

Research to Ruin: The Worsening Spectre of Academic Fraud

Lynne Cohen
January 21, 2025
Rather than breaking barriers to knowledge, these days universities seem more adept at breaking the norms of academic conduct. An apparently endless stream of cases involving data manipulation, plagiarism, retractions and other errors and deceptions by researchers ranging from obscure graduate students to world-famous scientific names is plaguing academia in Canada and around the world. But is this avalanche of academic malpractice – what one scientist bemoaned as “corrupt, incompetent, or scientifically meaningless research” – a sign of weakening standards? Or are we now just paying more attention? Examining several troubling examples and interviewing experts from the frontlines, Lynne Cohen probes the dark underbelly of academic fraud.
Science in Crisis

Research to Ruin: The Worsening Spectre of Academic Fraud

Lynne Cohen
January 21, 2025
Rather than breaking barriers to knowledge, these days universities seem more adept at breaking the norms of academic conduct. An apparently endless stream of cases involving data manipulation, plagiarism, retractions and other errors and deceptions by researchers ranging from obscure graduate students to world-famous scientific names is plaguing academia in Canada and around the world. But is this avalanche of academic malpractice – what one scientist bemoaned as “corrupt, incompetent, or scientifically meaningless research” – a sign of weakening standards? Or are we now just paying more attention? Examining several troubling examples and interviewing experts from the frontlines, Lynne Cohen probes the dark underbelly of academic fraud.
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Jonathan Pruitt saw spiders do remarkable things. The evolutionary ecologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario won international recognition for his research on the habits of colony-dwelling African social spiders. His work showed that the “personalities” of individual spiders played a major role in the tasks they performed and the overall performance of their colony. Bold and aggressive spiders, for example, were more likely to be hunters and group leaders. And the introduction of a new spider could dramatically change the colony’s dynamics, depending on the tendencies of other “shy” spiders.

Pruitt’s fascinating observations rocketed him to prominence as an academic dynamo. He accumulated a long list of journal publications and was named a Canada 150 Research Chair, one of the youngest academics in Canada to be given the prestigious honour. A skilled self-promoter, Pruitt also boasted that his work on spiders, ants and wasps had application far beyond the invertebrate world. “This new research evaluates whether the rise and fall of societies could be contingent on having just one or a few…key individuals,” he declared grandiosely in 2018.

In fact, Pruitt’s research did nothing of the kind. It was all bunk.

Web of lies: Jonathan Pruitt, an evolutionary ecologist at McMaster University, gained world-renown for his research on the apparently fascinating habits of African social spiders; it was later revealed his work was fraudulent, based on data “falsification and fabrication”. (Sources of photos: (left) Retraction Watch; (right) (c) Wynand Uys, some rights reserved (CC BY), licensed under CC BY 4.0)

Beginning in 2020, some of Pruitt’s co-authors began to have doubts about the reliability of his data. His research results often appeared too perfect – and his conclusions too sensational. As questions into his methods mounted, the façade of Pruitt’s academic credibility crumbled. By 2022, 150 of his papers were under scrutiny and the dissertation that earned him his doctorate had been withdrawn by the University of Tennessee. A year later he resigned from McMaster following an exhaustive investigation that found he had repeatedly engaged in data “falsification and fabrication” and that his claimed results had “no statistical or biological explanations.” Today, perhaps fittingly, the former academic fabulist has reinvented himself as a fantasy novelist.

Pruitt’s case is outrageous – but by no means unique. Revelations of academic malfeasance and wrongdoing are everywhere. Last year, for example, Claudine Gay, widely celebrated as Harvard University’s first black president, was forced to resign after it was revealed her PhD dissertation contained multiple instances of plagiarism, including two passages taken almost verbatim from another professor, Carol Swain. “When I look at her work, I feel like her whole research agenda, her whole career, was based on my work,” Swain complained when the scandal broke.

Academic misconduct in the form of fraud involves unethical behaviour like falsifying or distorting data, fabricating results, committing plagiarism, falsely claiming authorship, purchasing bogus papers from a “paper mill”, corrupting the peer-review process, or other forms of shoddy work. At McMaster University, for example, Canada 150 Research Chair Jonathan Pruitt was found to have fabricated data, leading to his resignation. This case highlights how misconduct undermines trust in prestigious institutions and programs like the Canada 150 Research Chair.

Canadian-born neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne was similarly brought low. In 2023, he resigned as president of California’s Stanford University after an investigation found “serious flaws” in his past work on Alzheimer’s disease, including data distortion across a dozen papers he’d co-authored. While he denied any deliberate wrongdoing, Tessier-Lavigne admitted he should have been “more diligent in seeking corrections” for his errors and “operated laboratories with tighter controls.”

The well-publicized transgressions of Pruitt, Gay and Tessier-Lavigne are just the tip of the iceberg. A flood of other unexplained errors, dodgy research and outright fabrication pours from Canada’s most respected universities with little or no mainstream media attention. In 2022, the website Retraction Watch revealed that Romina Mizrahi, currently a psychiatry professor at McGill University, was sanctioned for “intentionally, knowingly or recklessly falsifying data” in grant applications to the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health when she was working jointly at the University of Toronto and Canada’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

xRecent instances of academic misconduct include plagiarism by former Harvard University president Claudine Gay (left), “data integrity errors” by former Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne (middle), and a U.S. government finding that McGill University psychiatry professor Romina Mizrahi (right) was “intentionally, knowingly or recklessly falsifying data.” (Sources of photos: (left) Adam Fagen, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0; (right) The Douglas Research Centre)

Just last month Retraction Watch also revealed that a pair of journal articles by UofT molecular geneticist Daniel Durocher had been retracted due to “data integrity issues”. Some results from his DNA research appeared to have been duplicated in ways that defy explanation. And just days later it was revealed that 30 papers by University of British Columbia prostate cancer researcher Martin Gleave, a member of the Order of Canada, were also under suspicion for similar reasons. In Gleave’s case, “blot” images used to identify and measure chemical reactions appeared to have been reused across multiple papers, sometimes after the image was flipped, making it difficult to spot the duplication.

Universities have long cultivated a reputation for themselves as places of wisdom and integrity. The academy’s figurative ivory towers are supposed to represent an idealized commitment to excellence where society’s collective knowledge is amassed, protected, comprehended and expanded. And the scholars within these towers are lavished with praise, honour and substantial incomes for fulfilling the role of guardians of that knowledge. Lately, however, many scholars seem too busy making stuff up to care much about wisdom or knowledge. What has gone wrong inside the ivory towers?

Retraction Growth

Once an obscure website for academic nerds, Retraction Watch has lately become something akin to the sports pages for anyone interested in following the latest news on fraud and incompetence in higher education. Founded in 2010, the website is free and there’s no shortage of fodder. Last year it identified a record 13,000 retracted academic papers – articles that had been published (in many cases having first gone through peer review) but were subsequently proven wrong and withdrawn from circulation. The entire catalogue of Retraction Watch has swelled to over 50,000 entries.

“Our database is updated every day,” says Ivan Oransky, Retraction Watch’s co-founder, in an interview with C2C. “Usually with about 40 new retractions daily.”

Retraction Watch does not conduct its own investigations but, as its name implies, tracks events and publishes reports of malfeasance from tipsters, whistleblowers and media reports. It casts its eyes far beyond formal retractions, which occur when an academic journal announces that a previously published paper failed to meet proper standards and either marks it “retracted” (often adding a warning label) or – much more rarely – expunges the piece entirely from its website. Retraction Watch reports on material errors, plagiarism, duplication, faulty peer review, false authorship and other forms of shoddy work, as well as the associated corrections, resignations and punishments.

The sports pages for academic fraud: Retraction Watch has become required reading for anyone interested in the issue of academic error and malfeasance. According to co-founder Ivan Oransky, its database contains over 50,000 retractions and grows by about 40 new examples every day. (Source of left photo: Retraction Watch)

According to Oransky, an MD who teaches medical journalism at New York University’s Arthur Carter Journalism Institute, this daily stream of newly-revealed academic errors serves as a constant reminder that science is not flawless and scientists are not unimpeachable. “We’ve somehow been sold this bill of goods that just because a paper is peer-reviewed and published that it is somehow perfect,” he says. “That’s simply not the case. Science is done by human beings.” And these days, humanity appears to be more flawed than ever.

The purpose of publicly retracting a published academic paper is to ensure that defective research – the result of either deliberate or inadvertent mistakes – does not influence future research. In this way, science is able to discard false premises, avoid major misconceptions and iterate towards the truth, in step with philosopher Karl Popper’s theory of Conjectures and Refutations.

An AI paper writer makes it easier for researchers to generate fake or low-quality studies, facilitating the current rise in academic fraud. The technology enables the user to produce a credible-looking research paper that is nonetheless unoriginal and potentially riddled with errors, if not entirely false. AI is thus helping to worsen the crisis of fraud in academia. Still, the fundamental problem of academic fraud lies in the flaws of human nature and the perverse incentives embedded in current academic research processes, such as the pressure on academics to constantly author papers, known as “publish or perish”.

Beyond supporting the scientific method, the scope and type of retractions identified by Retraction Watch also offers insight into the quality of current work being done at universities. The fact that retractions hit a record high last year seems to indicate that the overall quality of academic work is falling. Oransky notes that along with the number, “the percentage [of retracted papers] is going up.” He estimates that a mere 10 percent of flawed or fraudulent papers are properly identified and retracted. The rest slip under the radar, suggesting a vastly bigger problem.

And yet Oransky is too careful a scientist to come to any unverified conclusions. When asked whether the problem of academic fraud is getting worse, he replies, “I don’t know how you would prove it.” The observed uptick in retractions and academic scandals could be due to an increase in bad behaviour among scholars. Or it could be a result of more attention being paid. If police decide to crack down on speeders, for example, they might assign more officers to patrol the roads, who will then write more tickets. But an increase in speeding tickets doesn’t necessarily prove the number of speeders has increased. Just that more speeders got caught.

“The front page of newspapers all over the world”: As Retraction Watch’s Oransky observes, the issue of bogus research and academic fraud has become impossible to ignore.

Others, however, are in no doubt. According to a joint investigation in 2022 by the UK’s Committee on Publica­tion Ethics and the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers, “The submission of suspected fake research papers, also often associated with fake authorship, is growing and threatens to overwhelm the editorial processes of a sig­nificant number of journals.”

On the issue of attention paid, Oransky is more comfortable taking credit. “When we first started, very few people were writing about these issues and now, everybody’s writing about them. Retractions are on the front page of newspapers all over the world,” he says. “We have put this on the front burner for a lot of institutions.” Thanks to Retraction Watch, academics are now coming under much greater scrutiny even if Oransky is reluctant to declare whether or not the problem is getting worse. There is, however, plenty of other evidence pointing in that direction.

“People who cheat” – And Those Who Spot Them

Academic fraud is not a new phenomenon. As long as there’ve been personal benefits to promoting new and exciting research, the temptation to deceive has shimmered. In 1912, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson gained worldwide fame for his claim he had found the famous “missing link” in humanity’s evolution. An unusual skull Dawson unearthed near the village of Piltdown in Sussex, England was estimated to be 500,000 years old and said to be the long-sought evolutionary connection between apes and early man, prior to the appearance of Homo sapiens.

xA hoax for the ages: A skull amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed to have found in Piltdown, England in 1912 was not, as he claimed, evidence of an evolutionary link between apes and early man – but it took nearly 50 years to prove its fakery. At left, a 1916 group portrait of the skull’s promoters; Dawson is in the back row, second from right. At right, a bronze bust of the alleged “Piltdown Man” by Louis Mascré, circa 1913. (Source of right image: Linda Hall Library)

Together with Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology at England’s Natural History Museum, Dawson continued digging in the area, later finding other bones and prehistoric implements supposedly belonging to the skull’s owner. It wasn’t until 1949 that new fluorine dating techniques enabled researchers at the Natural History Museum to prove the skull was a mere 50,000 years old; further research by Oxford University experts showed it was comprised of human and orangutan bones pieced together to look convincing. The entire find was a hoax, likely perpetrated by Dawson (who died in 1916) to win attention. While it took nearly half a century to convincingly unmask Piltdown Man as fakery, these days modern technology makes it easier to spot the fakers.

Elisabeth Bik is among the most famous of numerous independent researchers currently engaged in hunting out and exposing academic fraud. A native of Holland with a PhD in microbiology, Bik was working in the biomedical field when, in 2013, she discovered one of her own research papers had been plagiarized by another researcher. This led her to pursue scientific sleuthing as a hobby; in 2019 she quit her job to hunt out academic fraud full-time. Since 2014 Bik has analyzed more than 100,000 papers and found signs of dishonesty in 6,500 of them. Her work has resulted in 1,074 corrections to published research – and 1,331 retractions. Last year, the Berlin-based Einstein Foundation awarded Bik the 2024 Quality in Research Award, along with a $375,000 cash prize.

It’s worth noting that revelations of shoddy work might only come to light years later, with the associated corrections and retractions occurring months or years after that, if ever. In the meantime, the published paper can influence the work of other scientists, the development of technology, products or protocols, or public opinion and even government policy. This could wreak immense damage – up to and including getting people killed. It is very difficult, for example, to envision what good could come out of fake cancer research.

x“What fuels me is anger at people who cheat”: Elisabeth Bik is among the most famous of many independent researchers engaged in exposing academic fraud and malpractice. (Source of photo: Michel N Co, San Jose, CA, retrieved from Science Integrity Digest)

“What fuels me is anger at people who cheat,” Bik says in an interview with C2C Journal. “How can people be so dishonest?” Asked if the problem is getting worse, she admits “it is difficult to say. It has always been there, just as that one bad person in the lab has always been there.” From the Piltdown Man hoax to Pruitt’s spider fabulations, the failings of human morality mean there will always be people prepared to lie or cheat for personal gain. What has changed are the tools and methods for telling those lies.

Back when she was working on her PhD, Bik recalls, it was necessary to have professional photographers come into her lab to take pictures of her research results. “Now we can do it ourselves, using scanners and phone cameras,” she says. That makes it easier to publish results. But she notes it also means unscrupulous researchers can now “add or delete things, if that makes their experiment look better.” Where Dawson once physically filed down human teeth to get them to fit into an orangutan skull, today academic cheaters can simply swap a few digital files to get the results they want.

But technology is a double-edged sword. Bik notes that she also uses digital methods to quickly scan vast swaths of data looking for suspicious anomalies or duplicated images. It is also much easier and faster for investigators based in widely separated locations and time zones to share information about suspicious research, or combine their efforts. On her website, Bik provides information to other would-be science detectives on how to spot various forms of academic fraud and what steps to take next. Oransky makes a similar point, noting that his website and other similar ventures make it easier for independent fraud-busters to share information and collaborate on investigations. This spy-vs-spy nature of the battle over academic fraud again makes it difficult to declare whether it’s getting worse or better.

China Syndrome

xBuy four and save big: So-called “paper mills” sell the right to put one’s name on an academic publication written by someone else. Shown, a screengrab of a paper mill ad captured by Rizqy Amelia Zein, a lecturer in social psychology at Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia. (Source of image: Rizqy Amelia Zein)

In some areas, however, Bik asserts that the problem is getting unambiguously worse. Among her specialties is tracking down and exposing “paper mills”. As she explains, “These are networks of individuals who create false or low-quality [academic] papers, and sell the authorships to students and researchers who need the papers for their careers.” This type of academic fraud is most prevalent in developing countries in Asia and Africa. Paper mills service young scientists who want to study at an advanced school in North America or Europe but lack the credentials to do so. The solution for some, says Bik, is to “to build up their resumes” by getting their name on a research paper they did not write.

The fee for such dishonesty can range from $500 to $5,000. In some cases, this involves otherwise legitimate articles published in legitimate journals with the author simply buying the right to claim they participated in some way. In other cases, the article – and even the journal itself – might be entirely phony. The services are frequently offered through Facebook or WhatsApp and the providers have proved devilishly hard to catch.

“These fake papers cause all kinds of scandals,” says Bik, who describes the phenomenon as gigantic. “There are probably thousands of paper mills. It is not just one bad person in a lab. It’s more like a telephone scam or a Nigerian prince scam. It is an organized crime and has been on the rise tremendously.” The world’s biggest offender: China.

Among the many ambitions of the Communist Party of China’s leader Xi Jinping is to see his country respected around the world as a scientific superpower. Xi appears to be making significant progress in that regard, at least on paper. According to the U.S. National Science Foundation, in 2022 China produced nearly 900,000 publications in the natural sciences and engineering, with the U.S. a distant second at 457,000. (Canada was tenth at 69,000.) But while China’s output is prodigious, it’s likely that many papers represent illegitimate, bogus and/or useless, research. Bik says she has identified 400 papers coming from a single Chinese paper mill.

Unlike in paper mills in Egypt, Pakistan or Indonesia, the demand for scam papers in China is driven largely by the Chinese government itself, which sets strict standards for the number of publications university researchers must produce to gain promotion. Similar pressures are created by institutions that pay substantial bonuses to scholars who publish regularly. The result is a perverted set of incentives that has undermined good scientific methods.

xA scientific superpower? China leads the world in the output of science and engineering publications, although widespread cheating renders the quality and usefulness of those publications uncertain. (Source of graph: U.S. National Science Foundation: Science & Engineering Indicators, Publications Output: U.S. and International Comparisons)

Last year the journal Research Ethics published a shocking exposé based on anonymous interviews with Chinese scholars regarding the scale of fraud being committed in Chinese institutions. “I had no choice but to commit misconduct,” admitted one scientist, identified as A2, who teaches at a leading Chinese university. Cheating was essential, A2 said, if he was to meet the unrealistic publication goals set by his bosses; this included paying others to write papers for him, bribing officials for access to information and altering data to fit his research hypotheses. Another researcher told the investigators, “As an old Chinese saying goes, ‘there are no fish in clean water’, [and so] we should not be overly stringent in identifying and punishing research misconduct, as it hinders our scholars’ research efficiency.”

Constant demands that Chinese scholars prioritize efficiency over integrity has caused the reliability of Chinese research to plummet. According to a survey by the science magazine Nature, of 9,600 retractions from one publisher of peer-reviewed, open-access journals, 8,200 had a co-author in China. A similar study covering multiple publishers over a single year found that of 14,000 retractions, three-quarters had a Chinese author.

xLicenced to cheat: Xi Jinping (left), leader of China’s Communist Party, has pushed his country to dominate the global output of scientific publications. In doing so, however, China-watcher Ian Williams (right) argues, the country “has sacrificed quality for quantity, enabling large-scale fraud.” (Sources of photos: (left) China News Service, licensed under CC BY 3.0; (right) Birlinn Books/YouTube)

All this suggests that putative scientific superpower China is actually teetering on the edge of irrelevancy, says Ian Williams, author of the 2024 book Vampire State: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Economy. Writing in The Spectator last year, Williams noted that, “In its rush for global dominance, the [Communist Party] has sacrificed quality for quantity, enabling large-scale fraud which threatens to undermine trust in the entire process of scientific publications.” Sometimes, he observes, the “forgeries are so blatant they are comical,” listing as an example a prostate cancer study that reported half of its patients to be women. Just because the output might be farcical, however, does not prevent it from also being potentially deadly if it leads to the development of poisonous products or damaging health care protocols.

The recent international attention focused on the scale of China’s academic fraud has even forced the Communist regime to take action. Last year the Chinese Ministry of Education ordered all national universities to provide a list of academic articles retracted from English and Chinese-language journals over the past three years and to investigate cases involving misconduct. But as Williams observes, “The move was met with widespread skepticism, since cheating is so deeply ingrained in the system.”

McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario was at the centre of a major research fraud case when world-renowned “African social spider” researcher Jonathan Pruitt, a Canada 150 Research Chair, was found guilty of fabricating research-related data. Over 150 of Pruitt’s papers came under scrutiny, and even his original doctoral dissertation from the University of Tennessee was withdrawn. Revelations of Pruitt’s fraudulent research damaged the university’s reputation and raised concerns about oversight in Canada’s academic institutions.

“Publish or Perish” – Academia’s Pressure-Cooker

It would be a mistake to assume that North American universities are immune to the same pressures undermining China’s scientific research output. Or that the same consequences of irrelevancy could not arise here. The pernicious requirement for academic staff to “publish or perish” is equally well established in Canadian and U.S. universities. And so are the resulting perverse incentives and knock-on effects on integrity and quality.

x“Publish, perish or deceive”: Relentless institutional demands that academics publish novel research ahead of their peers can cause some scientists to “resort to questionable research practices or even fraud,” says Bik. (Source of photo: Shutterstock)

Recent research by Ryan Hill and Carolyn Stein of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management suggests that a “desire to be first” remains a powerful force among academics, with wide-ranging implications. While competition is generally beneficial, the peculiar nature of academic rewards means that competitive behaviour can sometimes lead to poorer-quality science. And the academic institutions that employ such researchers are incentivized to turn a blind eye to or even collude in substandard work, since they routinely take an administrative “cut” of all research grants – in many cases, more than half the money never even reaches the researchers or their project.

Hill and Stein used the Protein Databank, a U.S. facility that collects information from biologists analyzing protein structures, to investigate the impact of racing to publish novel research first. Protein research is a highly competitive area, and the business professors found that when two groups of scientists were working to solve the same protein structure simultaneously, their frenzy to be first resulted in “significantly lower-quality work”. Follow-up research was often necessary to complete the solution, something that was less frequent when the work was done without competition. As Bik posted on X last year, “In a ‘publish or perish’ culture, some scientists may resort to questionable research practices or even fraud.” If widespread enough, such corrupt methods threaten China-like outcomes for North America as well.

The pressure to “publish or perish” is certainly nothing new. In his 1988 book Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education, author Charles Sykes complained that “volume rather than insight is what counts [in academia], and conformity rather than originality is what is rewarded.” What is new, says Oransky, is the manner in which academic research has been “metricized”, with China again serving as an extreme example. Concludes Oransky: “If we continue to base everything on metrics instead of actual quality, then we are not going to fix this problem.”

AI’s Looming Shadow

Adding to the longstanding and perverse incentives of the academic world is another, new threat to research excellence: artificial intelligence. For academics under pressure to produce research and tempted by the prospect of cutting corners or even cheating outright to win plaudits, AI offers an apparent godsend. The ability to produce complete (but phony) articles at the figurative push of a button threatens to multiply academic fraud by orders of magnitude.

xEnhanced by AI: The emergence of tools such as ChatGPT is already responsible for many absurdities in academic papers, including (top) an article that begins with “Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic,” and a graphic of a rat with impossibly large genitals – which was later “retracted”.

As an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report entitled “Flood of ‘junk’: How AI is changing scientific publishing” explained last year, AI has already generated a long list of absurdities that have appeared in published academic papers. This includes a graphic of a rat with ludicrously large genitals, a picture of human legs with too many bones, and a paper that begins suspiciously with: “Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic.” While such examples may seem easy to spot, as AI improves, such errors are likely to disappear as the fakes become ever-more convincing.

The AFP report argues that AI has “turbocharged” the problem of academic fraud. This may be the case, but it is important to remember that while technology can facilitate bad behaviour, it can’t create the initial impulse to cheat. “I think a focus on ChatGPT misses the point,” advises Oransky. “ChatGPT has really just industrialized what is already happening by making it easier to…corrupt the scientific record.”

He doesn’t dispute that AI is an issue, but argues it’s “a symptom of the bigger problem”. The fact that no field appears to be immune from scandalous frauds – plagiarism, bogus findings and fakery afflict not only the natural or “hard” sciences but social sciences, humanities and all other academic areas – plus the fact that it occurs worldwide, suggests that this is fundamentally a problem of human behaviour rather than technology. The only way to tackle the problem, Oransky believes, is to figure out how to “get rid of bad incentives in science.” And the first step is to make it unprofitable for individuals or institutions to produce bad science.

Who Stands Up for Honest Research?

Given the enormous stakes, it is noteworthy that the most significant work being done currently to bring attention to the scourge of academic fraud comes from private efforts is from private efforts such as Retraction Watch and lone warriors such as Bik. There is little evidence that the academic world itself is collectively committed to going after the problem seriously. Doing so would require universities to admit that they have become academic crimes scenes, with the intellectual equivalent of mass shootings occurring almost daily.

In a 2020 article entitled The Intellectual and Moral Decline in Academic Research, American computational physiologist Edward Archer pointed an accusing finger at universities for failing to uphold necessary academic standards. “There are numerous examples in which universities refused to hold their faculty accountable until elected officials intervened, and even when found guilty, faculty researchers continued to receive tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars,” he wrote. In 2017, for example, the U.S. government fined Harvard University US$10 million following an investigation that showed the school’s teaching hospital habitually used false research to obtain federal grants.

x“Corrupt, incompetent, or scientifically meaningless research”: Computational physiologist Edward Archer accuses universities of failing to uphold necessary academic standards in favour of “the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding.” (Source of photo: The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal)

Archer, currently the Chief Science Officer at EvolvingFX, a scientific consulting firm, says his experience working at four major research universities as well as the U.S. National Institutes of Health taught him that “the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding has eliminated curiosity, basic competence, and scientific integrity in many fields.” Rather, says Archer, “universities often produce corrupt, incompetent, or scientifically meaningless research that endangers the public, confounds public policy, and diminishes our nation’s preparedness to meet future challenges.”

As evidence, he cited an anonymous survey of academics that found 14 percent believe their colleagues are committing fraud and 72 percent think their practices are otherwise questionable. “The list of elite institutions at which high-profile faculty commit misconduct is growing rapidly,” Archer wrote. Only fear of exposure seems to have a salutary effect on universities’ commitment to academic integrity. And then, only half-heartedly.

Recall the case of McGill’s Mizrahi described above. In 2022 she admitted to manipulating data from her work with positron emission tomography (PET) brain scans to exclude some patients in order to falsely improve the statistical relevance of her addictions research work in grant applications. A deception of this sort could send a corporate CEO to prison or get a stock broker banished from market trading for life; yet the only substantial sanction Mizrahi faced was having her work supervised by a committee of her peers for one year. And this punishment was imposed by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, which scrutinizes grant applications to U.S. government institutions. No such independent agency exists in Canada. It appears Mizrahi subsequently moved from UofT to McGill, where she is now the principal investigator at the school’s Clinical & Translational Sciences lab.

Fearful of damaging their reputations, universities are generally loathe to bring attention to evidence of academic malfeasance by their own scholars or to harshly punish those caught. Rather than suffer the ignominy of being fired, most transgressors are allowed to resign or move to another position. Other bad news is hidden or downplayed. When Pruitt’s Canada 150 Research Chair funding was finally suspended after he resigned, the move was not even publicly announced; it had to be sniffed out by another independent science sleuth.

Universities’ willingness to tolerate sloppy or phony research in order to protect their own reputations is largely to blame for the “replication crisis” currently undermining public confidence in science generally. Very briefly, replication is a cornerstone of the scientific method because it allows the validity of experiments to be independently confirmed, in turn strengthening the underlying hypothesis. But more and more reported results from experiments in the natural, medical and social sciences cannot be replicated by other scientists. The ongoing replication crisis, now well into its second decade, furnishes further indirect evidence that a shocking amount of scientific research is shoddy or outright bogus.

xWhat price mistakes? Tolerance for sloppy or phony research not only undermines public confidence in higher education but sets back real progress in important areas such as health care. (Source of photo: Shutterstock)

More significantly, tolerance for such behaviour can have a damaging impact on the real world as well. Mizrahi’s behaviour may have set back actual progress in the important area of addiction research. The same goes for Tessier-Lavigne’s now-retracted work on Alzheimer’s and the search for a cure for this terrible disease. Every wrong step made by science, whether intentional or not, pushes the search for the truth farther down the road. Gleave’s now-disputed work on prostate cancer, Pruitt’s spider confabulations and Gay’s plagiarism are further, depressing examples. If the purpose of the university is to discover what is true, then every instance of academic error or fraud represents a detour or dead-end in humankind’s journey towards enlightenment. And the longer it takes to uncover each instance, the farther off-course we get.

Lynne Cohen is a non-practicing lawyer based in Ottawa. She has published four books, including the biography Let Right Be Done: The Life and Times of Bill Simpson.

Source of main image: Shutterstock.

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Buildings and other public structures, the ancient Roman architectural master Vitruvius wrote, need to be sturdy and long-lasting, must efficiently fulfill the uses and serve the users for which they are intended – and should be pleasing to the eye. Today’s architecture, writes Michael Bonner, is none of these things. In most cases, it’s the opposite – and that is usually by intention, as “starchitects” foist awful designs on an increasingly unwilling public. Thankfully, writes Bonner, there are glimmerings of a way back towards public architecture that not only does its job but reflects timeless principles of form, function, quality and beauty.

More from this author

Mischief Trial of the Century: Inside the Crown’s Bogus, Punitive and Occasionally Hilarious Case Against the Freedom Convoy’s Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, Part II

More people are becoming painfully familiar with the expression “the process is the punishment” – a legal or regulatory matter of such cost, complexity, length and personal stress that, regardless of its formal outcome, the targeted person emerges damaged, sometimes irreparably. It is all-but impossible not to attach this label to the nearly three-year-long prosecution of Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, which has included a marathon 13-month-long trial, now awaiting its verdict. In Part II of this series, Lynne Cohen takes readers inside the Ottawa Courthouse – talking to the defendants, their lawyers and other experts – illuminating the Crown’s relentless pursuit of the Freedom Convoy organizers. (Part I can be read here. )

Mischief Trial of the Century: Inside the Crown’s Bogus, Punitive and Occasionally Hilarious Case Against the Freedom Convoy’s Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, Part I

In his judicial review of the Liberals’ response to the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley ruled that “there was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act and the decision to do so was therefore unreasonable.” With Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s draconian actions thus exposed as unnecessary and excessive – in other words, illegal and unconstitutional – what now awaits Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, who each face up to 10 years in jail for playing key roles in the protest? In the first of a two-part series, Lynne Cohen charts the lengthy and vindictive prosecution of the pair, from their first appearance in downtown Ottawa to their initial arrest and pre-trial treatment.

Yay Men! A Love Letter
In Praise of Tonic Masculinity, Part II

What good is a man? Not much these days. With traditional male traits such as strength, competitiveness, independence and stoicism widely condemned as evidence of “toxic masculinity”, no one seems willing to celebrate manliness these days. Lynne Cohen is an exception to the rule. In Part II of a special series on the essential aspects of masculinity, Cohen offers a sensitive female perspective on what makes men timelessly irresistible. From gruff leather-clad bikers to balding, tie-wearing office workers and from university frat bros to selfless Ukrainian miners, Cohen finds something to adore about them all. Gather round, fellas, this love letter is to you. (Part I can be read here.)

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