The US government has spent US$471 billion supporting academic research over the past decade. A troubling proportion of that work, recent reports suggest, is riddled with errors, plagiarized or fraudulent.
In recent months, some of the nation’s most elite universities and research centers — including Columbia University, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard University and Stanford University — have been ensnared in scandal. While that is partly thanks to eager data sleuths armed with detection software, experts say cases of academic misconduct, if anything, are likely underreported. Just one-fifth of retractions are due to honest errors.
The consequences for public health are serious. High-profile retractions include some COVID-19 research and a study that linked routine infant vaccines with autism, in addition to widely cited findings about nutrition, cancer and Parkinson’s disease. Trust in science has fallen precipitously. However, while the US Congress has been quick to blame academic journals for misinformation and partisanship, it has not done much about the sheer waste of taxpayer dollars on shoddy research. The public deserves better.
Illustration: Tania Chou
For decades, the staid world of academia has been governed largely by trust. Principal investigators are left to run their labs. Coauthors of research papers take ownership only of their contributions. Peer reviewers at academic journals might challenge methodologies or conclusions, but rarely pore over the data themselves.
Enticements to cheat in such a lax environment abound. Career progression and access to lucrative grants hinge on the volume of a researcher’s publications and citations, a dynamic known as “publish or perish.” Influential academic journals tend to favor tidy studies with crisp conclusions. Yet the scientific process far more often is messy and incremental.
Fudging the numbers to engineer standout results has become disturbingly easy. One survey of research psychologists found that 64 percent had engaged in questionable practices once or twice, including omitting or falsifying data; more than one-quarter admitted to doing so occasionally; and 10 percent frequently. Social scientists are hardly alone; the biomedical and physical sciences have blemished records, too. Publications, meanwhile, can take years to retract papers — if they do so at all.
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) established the Office of Research Integrity three decades ago after a spate of misconduct cases in the 1980s. Its authority has been limited from the start. Former director David Wright, in a scathing resignation letter in 2014, described an office hobbled by bureaucratic dysfunction and unable to spend what little budget had been earmarked for oversight and recruitment.
“I’m offended as an American taxpayer,” he wrote, adding it was the “very worst job I have ever had.”
By some accounts, little has changed.
Moving the regulator under HHS’s inspector general might streamline probes and give investigators better tools. However, ultimately the government needs to address the biggest challenge: It still relies on institutions to self-police. Given universities’ incentive to mitigate reputational damage, investigations can stretch months, if not years, with little accountability.
With that in mind, policymakers should enforce requirements that government-funded researchers share the data needed for replication, and make results available whether they are conclusive or not. Cutting bad actors off from further public funding would be common sense. So would offering more grants for systematic replication studies.
Institutions and journals also need to evolve. Both should embrace the open science movement, which calls for greater transparency and more sharing of data and methods. Journals should require pre-registration — a time-stamped research plan, submitted before analyzing the data — which should discourage fiddling with figures to suit preferred outcomes. Publications should more regularly publish negative findings and demand reproducibility or perform randomized checks. Journals need to be much quicker to respond to misconduct allegations.
Public investment in science has improved the lives of millions. Most scientists do the right thing every day. That makes it all the more important to stop bad actors and restore public trust.
The Editorial Board publishes the views of the editors across a range of national and global affairs.
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