Steve Fuller isn’t bothered

The push to publish undoubtedly leads to fraud, but so what?

An increasingly competitive research environment provides greater incentives to anticipate the results of research not yet done or to massage the data of results already in hand. But it equally provides more incentives to check for such transgressions of scientific propriety. Consequently, it is hard to say that there is now more fraud than in some supposedly less competitive past.

We might imagine the level of fraud to have been less in the past, given the lack of incentives. But there may have been more fraud, given the lack of check. In any case, there are no records. What most certainly does not follow is that the relative failure to detect fraud in the past means that less fraud occurred. Just as much, or even more fraud, may have been committed in the past, but more rides on science today than ever before. Arguably that is the real problem.

Citation clubs

The current fixation on research fraud hides more systemic problems with the scientific enterprise. Interest in fraud is typically limited to the misrepresentation of research outputs, not the inputs.

Here I mean the tendency – captured in the phrase ‘citation clubs’ – whereby a circle of researchers cite each others’ work to ensure publication in key ‘high impact’ journals, regardless of their actual contribution to the intellectual basis of the research reported.  As citations are increasingly used both to inform and to assess research performance, a subtly misleading picture is thus presented of the relative significance of particular researchers and their fields.

Plagiarism can restore undervalued work

Moreover, certain kinds of fraud might actually be desirable, especially given science’s tendency to disown its past quickly.

Many plagiarism cases involve resurrecting work that was undervalued when first published but would unlikely appear credible now were it revealed to have been written many years earlier. In any case, much credible research can be – and has been – built on the back of frauds. Once that happens, the revelation of fraud may be reduced to a mere historical curiosity, as in the cases of Galileo and Mendel.

Truth to be told, science may flourish with a fair level of fraud, perhaps because reality is more tolerant of our representations of it than we might like to think. It may be that fraud goes undetected because it is ‘wrong’ only in misrepresenting one’s own work, but not in misrepresenting how reality works.

Steve Fuller is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick