Economists shouldn't be surprised that, in many fields of science, there is some incidence of deliberate fraud. Being a scientist is an attractive job, and to some extent a competitive one. Rewards flow to those who publish in top (read "competitive") journals. In big lab based, grant-dependent science, the ability to keep working may even depend on such publications coming at a steady rate, to keep the grants coming to keep the lab funded.
Most journals do their gatekeeping by peer review. But peers aren't detectives, they are volunteers who can mostly judge a paper primarily by what evidence it presents.* So we are seeing some growth in after-publication review by fraud hunters, typically also volunteers.
Here's an article by two interesting, interested observer/participants, Ivan Oransky (a co-founder of Retraction Watch) and Alice Dreger:
Science journals retract 500 papers a month. This is why it matters
A small team of volunteers is tracking thousands of falsified studies, including cases of bribery, fraud and plagiarism by Ivan Oransky | Alice Dreger
"So, how bad is the whole problem now? Much worse, it turns out, than when Retraction Watch was founded in 2010.
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"The Dana-Farber case, unearthed by whistleblower Sholto David, exemplifies a key change behind the massive rise in retractions. Sleuths such as David — typically volunteers — function as true heroes of modern science, spending days and nights detecting plagiarism as well as suspicious data, statistics and more. Looking at studies by Dana-Farber researchers, David found that images of mice, said to have been taken at different stages of an experiment, appeared to be identical, and identified bone marrow samples taken from humans that were presented in a misleading way. This kind of painstaking work has only become possible on any sort of scale thanks to the development of forensic tools, some powered by AI.
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"All the large publishing houses now employ research integrity teams to review allegations and retract papers if necessary.
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"Rather than giving up, we should pay more attention to how we create perverse incentives — promoting quantity of publication over quality, and sexiness over meticulousness. Perhaps most importantly, we need to help the world understand that, when splashy results turn out to be incorrect and are retracted or amended, that’s all part of how we get closer to the truth.
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*Peer review is not without other problems, don't get me started. But my sense is that, not unlike democracy, it does pretty well by comparison with alternatives.
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