Althouse: "For years, whistle-blowers have warned that fake results are sneaking into the scientific literature at an increasing pace."

August 8, 2025

"For years, whistle-blowers have warned that fake results are sneaking into the scientific literature at an increasing pace."

"A new statistical analysis backs up the concern. A team of researchers found evidence of shady organizations churning out fake or low-quality studies on an industrial scale. And their output is rising fast, threatening the integrity of many fields. 'If these trends are not stopped, science is going to be destroyed,' said Luís A. Nunes Amaral, a data scientist at Northwestern University and an author of the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.... In an executive order in May on 'gold-standard science,' President Trump drew attention to the problem of scientific fraud. 'The falsification of data by leading researchers has led to high-profile retractions of federally funded research,' the order stated. But the administration has not offered any new initiatives to address the problem. Thousands of scientists have protested the order, arguing that it would lead to the political muzzling of genuine scientific findings...."

From "Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds/A statistical analysis found that the number of fake journal articles being churned out by 'paper mills' is doubling every year and a half" (NYT)(free link).

46 comments:

Dave Begley said...: The NYT article doesn't say, but I'd bet plenty of those fake articles are in the climate science field.; 8/8/25, 8:52 AM
Aggie said...: ...". Thousands of scientists have protested the order, arguing that it would lead to the political muzzling of genuine scientific findings...."

I'll just bet. But I bet that none of them are respected scientists whose achievements have withstood any challenge to the merits of their research, or the integrity of their methods.

How many of those protesting are 'climate' scientists?

As for the federal funding, if there is published scientific research that is shown to be fraudulent, then how is this not a case of prosecutable fraud?; 8/8/25, 8:53 AM
Josephbleau said...: It worked so well in psychology and economics who could resist the temptation. There are two classes of academics who write fake papers, and we know who they are.; 8/8/25, 8:56 AM
CJinPA said...: Forget Republicans, the bad science is coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE!; 8/8/25, 9:00 AM
Temujin said...: Whether it be climate 'science', covid disinformation, gender fluidity and child transitioning, or the years and money spent on amyloid plaque studies in regard to Alzheimer's, science has tended to want to go along to get along. Or so it appears (especially with the above areas of note).
This is how you lose faith in institutions. Even the scientists need to stay honest.

When did consensus replace the scientific method?; 8/8/25, 9:01 AM
RideSpaceMountain said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 8/8/25, 9:04 AM
RideSpaceMountain said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 8/8/25, 9:06 AM
Dave Begley said...: Temujin:

The official Omaha Public Power District net zero policy (SD-7) states that CAGW is the scientific consensus. Next time I talk to that Board, I'm going to use your line: When did consensus replace the scientific method?; 8/8/25, 9:07 AM
Wince said...: As if to reinforce Crichton Gell-Mann Amnesia effect...

Fraudulent newspaper (NYT) reporting on "Fraudulent Scientific Papers"?; 8/8/25, 9:12 AM
Steven said...: By conflating Trump's order with the findings about low quality scientific papers, this article obscures something important: Nearly all of those bad scientific papers are produced in Asia. This is not a problem in Western countries - it's almost all China and India.; 8/8/25, 9:14 AM
gilbar said...: TRUST THE SCIENCE!

it tells You, what WE Want!; 8/8/25, 9:18 AM
ga6 said...: String Theory, get your String theory here!; 8/8/25, 9:23 AM
Michael said...: 25 years ago I was listening to some heavy hitters in the social science field warning that the incentives were leading young academics to not only draw specious conclusions from genuine data, but to actually fake the data.

Federal funding of research is the main driver of this phenomena.; 8/8/25, 9:23 AM
Enigma said...: There have been repeated "crises" in social science since the 1960s. Every 20 years or so, people notice that the institutions are filled with corrupt and lazy academics who dribble out mental diarrhea. These corrupt professors lie to get tenure, then they formed publishing cliques in journals to pretend they and their friends are competent. Everyone gets big fat paychecks. They corrupt the next generation of youth. Their names end up in textbooks. Sophistry incorporated.

There used to be a high barrier of entry into the (useless, repetitive, smoke-and-mirrors) journal publication industry, but the spammers and AI crowd can easily mimic naive, effete, and arrogant professors.; 8/8/25, 9:28 AM
Original Mike said...: Decades ago there was a guy in my field doing similar type studies as I was doing. He was more prominent than I and started sooner, so I was often referencing him in my publications. His results were a lot cleaner than mine and I wondered how he was accomplishing this. Turned out, he was fabricating his data. It turned into a big scandal.; 8/8/25, 9:31 AM
Leland said...: Science simply catching up with Obama's IC.; 8/8/25, 9:31 AM
Two-eyed Jack said...: The majority of journal papers, in the past, were never cited and probably scarcely read, so their impact, aside from bad tenure cases, was limited. Today, thanks to AI, nothing is unread and the possible impact is unbounded.; 8/8/25, 9:39 AM
Jamie said...: So the great bulk of the article focuses on scientific fraud, which is appropriate. But then Trump enters the picture and the focus changes to how whatever the EO in May did was going to make the competition worse and hamper scientific progress. All without saying what the EO does.

At least it ends on the right note: pointing out the incentive problem.

I have not thought this through, but I could see a dual track in research: the "original research" track and the "validation" track. Yes, the OT scientists would have higher status than the V scientists, but we have that inequity in lots of fields already, and people still choose to go into the lower-status tracks in their field. If there were a whole realm of research centered on retesting the "blockbuster" hypotheses that high-profile teams have forwarded or high-profile journals have published, we could perhaps have more confidence in those hypotheses and move the heck forward.; 8/8/25, 9:40 AM
Achilles said...: Scientific research has been corrupt and worthless ever since government grants got involved, and most of the research was corporately sponsored.

Within a decade, statins are going to be in the same category as tobacco. The sugar industry has paid for most of our “health“ research.

But the biggest joke of all is climate change “Research“ which made predictions 30 years ago that have been universally wrong. The successor failure of a hypothesis is the ability to predict future results, but in order to create the cult of climate change, the doom tongues have had to do away with fundamental scientific methods.

The core of this failures are university system. Our university system is utterly failed in its state admission and is instead just a bloated aristocracy full of mediocre idiot scions and legacy students who got in because the patronage of their rich parents, and if you look at all of the failures and stupidity going on right now the core of every movement is a bunch of rich kids like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who grew up stupid and rich, and are now looking for authenticity.; 8/8/25, 9:43 AM
Big Mike said...: Thousands of scientists have protested the order, arguing that it would lead to the political muzzling of genuine scientific findings....”

Well, that’s certainly a risk. The response is two-fold. First, we need to ask how many hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted in Alzheimer’s research due to the mistaken focus on amyloid plaques? The falsified data in his most famous paper cost Dr. Marc Tessier-Lavigne his job as President of Stanford University, but his 2009 paper cost the scientific community fourteen or fifteen years when all research was focused on amyloid plaques, to the exclusion of any other causes of Alzheimer’s.

The second is that, given the Democrats’ stubborn, fact-free commitment to CAGW, political muzzling of genuine scientific findings is already happening, and has been happening for decades. Go ask Dr. Judith Curry, once one of the world’s leading climate scientists but who has been muzzled for years. Go ask top mathematicians what they think of the climate models.; 8/8/25, 9:44 AM
n.n said...: A role model for Artificial Influencers.; 8/8/25, 9:58 AM
n.n said...: Humans do engineering well. Science less so where bias may remain a viable fixture in theory.; 8/8/25, 10:02 AM
n.n said...: Secular lucre and narcissistic pleasures are first-order forcings of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. Fortunately, competing interests with skeptical views can mitigate its progress.; 8/8/25, 10:05 AM
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...: I've seen many surveys that all say the same thing. The vast majority of all scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals are difficult to reproduce. Maybe over half are completely un-reproduceable. IOW not science.

It's plaguing the expert class right now as all their "foundational" documents for great social change are crumbling beneath their feet.; 8/8/25, 10:07 AM
boatbuilder said...: But the administration has not offered any new initiatives to address the problem.

Yeah--how can "scientists" stop committing fraud if nobody pays them to stop committing fraud?; 8/8/25, 10:12 AM
Anthony said...: Michael said...
25 years ago I was listening to some heavy hitters in the social science field warning that the incentives were leading young academics to not only draw specious conclusions from genuine data, but to actually fake the data.

Federal funding of research is the main driver of this phenomena.

That's a good chunk of it. The career incentives also drive a lot of it, with pay and tenure dependent on the number and journal quality of articles published and their citation rate. The old "publish or perish" thing. It gives researchers plenty of incentives to publish as much as possible, often the same work done slightly differently and submitted to different journals. Plus everyone knows the rules so everybody cites everybody else so you can get highly cited papers that make it look significant, but then 10 years later it turns out to be spurious.

Academia is fundamentally broken and has been for decades.; 8/8/25, 10:15 AM
Steven said...: Climate science - A lot of you seem to think that climate science makes a lot of errors. You may be surprised to know, then, that the predictions from the 90's and early 00's about such things as global average temperature and polar sea ice coverage are remarkably close to what has actually occurred n the intervening 20-30 years.

The global warming people made a mistake in pushing panic scenarios like Al Gore's "day after tomorrow" that made it seem like it would be the end of the world. That was all political propaganda. To the extent it incorporated science, it relied on worst case scenarios. The typical models have been proven pretty much correct though.

Surely people have noticed that it snows less in the winter than it used to? That the summer is a bit hotter now than it was when you were younger? This isn't just nostalgia, it's real. Maybe not the end of the world and one can debate proper policy responses.

Personally, I would like to see the Right come to terms with the issue so that there are real alternatives to the leftists regressive ideas. Carbon capture technology, nuclear power, electric cars - there's a lot of stuff that conservatives could advocate for if you want your grandchildren to enjoy snowball fights someday.; 8/8/25, 10:15 AM
boatbuilder said...: Surely people have noticed that it snows less in the winter than it used to? That the summer is a bit hotter now than it was when you were younger? This isn't just nostalgia, it's real. Maybe not the end of the world and one can debate proper policy responses.
I haven't. It isn't. I'm 67 years old.
Steven Koonin has lots of good stuff to say about this.; 8/8/25, 10:19 AM
boatbuilder said...: Physician, heal thyself.; 8/8/25, 10:23 AM
BUMBLE BEE said...: Here's a Golden Oldie...

https://x.com/its_The_Dr/status/1950021248202797541; 8/8/25, 10:23 AM
Big Mike said...: Climate science - A lot of you seem to think that climate science makes a lot of errors. You may be surprised to know, then, that the predictions from the 90's and early 00's about such things as global average temperature and polar sea ice coverage are remarkably close to what has actually occurred n the intervening 20-30 years.

@Steven, surprised? I would be gobsmacked, since the percent of predictions that have come even close to true is why mathematicians invented epsilon-delta arguments. This is particularly true for arctic ice — some years there is less of it, some years more. If one cherry picks years of less ice then one can make it appear that there is a trend when, in fact, the only trend is that there is no trend.

Polar bears are not endangered. Humans living near polar bears are endangered if they don’t keep a sharp eye and don’t have a high-powered rifle readily at hand.

There is no “tipping point.”

Snow is not a thing of the past.

Surely people have noticed that it snows less in the winter than it used to?

It doesn’t. I still need my snow blower here in Virginia.

That the summer is a bit hotter now than it was when you were younger?

It isn’t.

Try again, Steven, when you don’t have real, skeptical, mathematicians on the thread.; 8/8/25, 10:42 AM
RCOCEAN II said...: Thousands of leftwing scientists have protested Trump order that Science be objective and fact based. "This will lead to results we don't like and is therefore bad science" - said Al Goldstein, a prominent leftwing scientist.; 8/8/25, 10:48 AM
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...: The predictions from the 90's and early 00's about such things as global average temperature and polar sea ice coverage are remarkably close to what has actually occurred n the intervening 20-30 years.

No. The bolded phrases reference the most botched "science" ever perpetrated in the "public interest." We had a global cooling trend for ten years, the "pause" that caused such heartache to the bad scientists at the Met and in Michael Mann's nefarious lab. "Hide the decline." The made-up term "global average" was adopted AFTER our own agencies altered the records and relocated their thermometers to heat islands to purposely capture "record heat."

Polar ice. How general. Both had catastrophic predictions. Neither is "ice free" although one made a good run at it, helping global shipping out. But the other has a thicker ice sheet than ever before in recorded history. Call it a draw on the ice issue.

What's next to look at? Cities under water? Disappearing islands? The Great Barrier Reef?; 8/8/25, 10:49 AM
John henry said...: Goes back to the 90s and before. The poster boy is Jon Hendrik schon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal

At one point he was publishing a peer reviewed paper every 4-5 days.

Or Alan Sokal. He famously set out to write a paper of gibberish to prove that anything could pass peer review and get published in a respected journal. He succeeded

That was 1996.

Or the gazillion papers that claim that Science! can determine the average temperature of the earth, today, with sophisticated instruments to within +/- 5 degrees. Yet Scientists! claim, and gazillions of gullibles believe that they can determine it to hundreths of a degree.

Past data, from looking at tree rings, in one location, is even loonier. Though not as loony as the people who take them seriously.

John Henry; 8/8/25, 10:51 AM
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...: Warning: There is an imminent national IQ test about to start as unprecedented SOLAR FLARES blaze out of a hole in the sun and cause NORTHERN LIGHTS across much of the USA. Listen carefully to how it is reported and discussed, especially among global temperature fetishists.

Group 1: People who say “This could affect our weather” are sensible and thinking logically (high IQ) about how the Sun interacts with Earth.

Group 2: People who say “OMG global warming has caused this” are low functioning and unable to process simple information (Low IQ) especially regarding Science and Facts and the relation of Earth to the Sun.

Enjoy God’s Light Show and have a great weekend!; 8/8/25, 10:51 AM
Original Mike said...: If you're curious, Steven.

The problem in climate science is you can't get funded if you don't toe the line.; 8/8/25, 10:53 AM
John henry said...: Steven,

Schon was German educated but produced all his fraudulent papers in New Jersey at Bell Labs

Also

Before he was exposed, Schön had received the Otto-Klung-Weberbank Prize for Physics and the Braunschweig Prize in 2001, as well as the Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the Materials Research Society in 2002, all of which were later rescinded.[2] He was also supposed to receive the William L. McMillan Award from the University of Illinois in 2002

And didn't the court recently find Mann guilty of scientific climate related fraud at UPenn? (or Penn State?)

I've published 100s of article, columns and essays over the past 25 years, including 3 peer reviewed articles in journals.

The commercial editors are pickier than the journal editors.

John Henry

John Henry

John Henry; 8/8/25, 10:58 AM
mccullough said...: The academies are a Grift; 8/8/25, 11:06 AM
John henry said...: You may be surprised to know, then, that the predictions from the 90's and early 00's about such things as global average temperature and polar sea ice coverage are remarkably close to what has actually occurred n the intervening 20-30 years.

Re temperatures, plus or minus how much? If I predict that the temperature is going to increase by 1 degree in 10 years +/-5 degrees it is almost impossible to be wrong.

That assumes that the measurements are halfway accurate whcih they are not. I've explained why not before here so won't bore everyone with repetition except to say that there are scores of problems with the tempearture measurements.

Re arctic sea ice: Every couple years we are told that the arctic will be ice free in 10 years. First time I noticed this was in Algore's 1990 book. Also, by 2000, the west side highway would be underwater as well as large swaths of San Francisco and Florida. Now I think that is scheduled for 2035 or so.

The predictions have been and are bullshit. You should be ashamed of yourself for that post.

John Henry; 8/8/25, 11:07 AM
John henry said...: I did not mean to imply that the predictions were +/- 5 degrees. They imply, and sometimes state, that their predictions on temps are good to +/- hundredths or even thousandths of a degree. Total bullshit.

John Henry; 8/8/25, 11:09 AM
John henry said...: RC Ocean,

Didn't Al Goldstein used to publish Screw magazine? Sequeing into science might be a natural career move.

John Henry; 8/8/25, 11:12 AM
John henry said...: Just by way of no harm

SS Manhattan was an oil tanker constructed at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, that became the first commercial ship to cross the Northwest Passage in 1969.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Manhattan_(1961)

Trivia: A shipmate of mine in the 70s had been in the merchant marine before the navy. He sailed on the Manhattan a couple of voyages.

John Henry; 8/8/25, 11:17 AM
John henry said...: Actually, there are 2 interesting points from my last comment. These first was my point that the northwest passage was open in 1969

But it just occurred to me that even more amazingly, the Manhatten was built in Massachusetts.

How many have forgotten that we used to build world class ships in the US?

John Henry; 8/8/25, 11:23 AM
Skeptical Voter said...: With the rise in fake studies that have to be retracted, what are all those homeowners with signs on their lawns that say "In This House We Believe In Science" going to do? Asking for a friend--while laughing out loud. Pious morons!; 8/8/25, 11:25 AM
n.n said...: Plausible but improbable with models.; 8/8/25, 12:11 PM
Hassayamper said...: This is not a problem in Western countries - it's almost all China and India.

This is nonsense on stilts, at least in the social "sciences" and medicine. I suppose it might be more true, or should I say less false, in the harder sciences.; 8/8/25, 12:37 PM