By Liam Mannix
The young woman strolls along the cobblestone street. A gentle breeze blows in from the coast, ruffling her shoulder-length hair. She draws her hands from her jacket pockets – and a glove, unnoticed, flutters to the ground.
It is this saccharine scenario, a decade ago on France’s sunny southern coast, that started James Heathers’ journey into the dark underworld of science.
A woman drops something. What would you do?Credit: Getty Images
That journey concluded last month with a dramatic claim: one in seven scientific papers is fake.
The woman is a scientific experiment. She has deliberately dropped the glove to see how passers-by respond – and if the way she wears her hair changes that outcome.
Sometimes she wears it in a pony or a bun. Some men and women bend down to grab the glove. Others don’t.
The study, published in 2015, reported something extraordinary. If her hair was down, men responded to the glove “like a plate of lamb chops to a starving lumberjack”, Heathers writes in an analysis of the study.
Simply putting her hair down made them desperate to help. The effect size reported in the paper was “gargantuan” – so big, Heathers couldn’t believe it.
Digging through the underlying data, he was able to show the “natural hair effect” was apparently one of the most powerful psychological phenomena ever reported. But the underlying data was potentially problematic.
The Scandinavian Journal of Psychology eventually published an expression of concern, and Heathers started on his journey to hunt out fabrication and falsification within the scientific literature.
In the title of a paper uploaded online last month but not yet peer-reviewed, Heathers, who is now based at Linnaeus University in Sweden, puts a number on the scale of the problem he and others have found: Approximately 1 in 7 Scientific Papers Are Fake.
Such a high level of fraud presents an “existential threat to the scientific enterprise”, he writes.
The figure – based on a simple averaging of 12 other studies of misconduct – is meant more as a warning of the potential scale of the problem, which Heathers believes is systemic.
In Australia, the National Health and Medical Research Council received 139 research integrity notifications between 2018 and 2023, according to documents released to this masthead through a freedom of information request.
Some frauds are amusing or bizarre. Others are far more serious, such as in the case of the retraction of a key paper underpinning the dominant theory of the cause of Alzheimer’s after manipulated images were uncovered.
In a manual analysis of 20,621 papers, scientific integrity consultant Dr Elisabeth Bik found 3.8 per cent had images she termed “problematic”, with at least half of them probably deliberately manipulated. “It’s probably much bigger than people might think,” she said.
The problem has multiple causes. Science is based on trust, and career progression is based on a researcher’s ability to get published in prestigious journals, such as Nature.
“There’s almost no chance of getting caught,” says Dr Elisabeth Bik.Credit: Jason South
“It’s very rewarding. And there’s almost no chance of getting caught – and if you do, it will just be a little slap on the finger,” Bik said.
Indeed, a review of Australia’s Research Integrity Commission last year found many stakeholders did not even know it existed.
Solving a problem others don’t recognise
Last year, the Australian Academy of Science and the peak body for the nation’s universities united for the first time to call for an independent research misconduct commission to crack down on bad science.
But that push has stalled. When the idea was discussed with the federal government, they wanted to know the true scale of misconduct in Australian research. “The answer is: we’re not sure,” says Ian Chubb, secretary for science policy at the academy. “It went on the backburner. But we’re in the process of turning up the gas.”
In the absence of government action, Queensland University of Technology professor Adrian Barnett has taken matters into his own hands by stripping prestigious journal names from his scientific CV.
“When people are asked to rate you, they just fall back on heuristics: how many citations? How many papers in Nature?” he says.
“It drives this behaviour of people who will do anything to get in these journals.”
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