Report: “1 In 7 Scientific Papers is Fake, Suggests Study That Author Calls ‘Wildly Nonsystematic'”

:From Retraction Watch:

In 2009, a now highly-cited study found an average of around 2% of scientists admit to have falsified, fabricated, or modified data at least once in their career.

Fifteen years on, a new analysis tried to quantify how much science is fake – but the real number may remain elusive, some observers said.

The analysis, published before peer review on the Open Science Framework on September 24, found one in seven scientific papers may be at least partly fake. The author, James Heathers, a long-standing scientific sleuth, arrived at that figure by averaging data from 12 existing studies — collectively containing a sample of around 75,000 studies — that estimate the volume of problematic scientific output.

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Heathers’ study pulls data from 12 different analyses from  the social sciences, medicine, biology, and other fields of research. All those studies have one thing in common: The authors of each used various online tools to estimate the amount of fakery taking place in a set of papers.

“There’s a really persistent commonality to them,” Heathers said. “The rough approximation for where we end up is that one in seven research papers are fake.”

Heathers said he decided to conduct his study as a meta-analysis because his figures are “far flung.”

“They are a little bit from everywhere; it’s wildly nonsystematic as a piece of work,” he said.

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