Let’s call ‘research misconduct’ what it really is – fakery and fraud

Fakery happens because careers depend on publishing papers that report breakthroughs. Supplied: iStock

That science breakthrough you read about could be fake and that famous academic author all over the internet might have pinched their best bits – research fraud and theft are common in universities but often managements do not look hard to find them.

Molecular biologist David Vaux campaigns against research misconduct – people fudging data, fabricating results. He has worked at it so hard and so long that the Australian Academy of Science named an award after him, a fellowship for people who track research to keep scientists honest. This year it went to Jennifer Byrne from the University of Sydney who searches for published papers full of fake science.

Vaux wants the government to step up, however, and set up a national office to police research integrity in Australia because, he says, the research establishment won’t do it well enough.

Nobody knows how much made-up research results are published worldwide but it us enough to keep websites busy tracking papers retracted from science journals, for being inadvertently or intentionally inaccurate, when they are not plain wrong.

Other than human error, there are reason for it. Fraud (universities like to call it “research misconduct” but it’s fraud) is less common than baked-in, especially in disciplines where governments spend money, and that is mainly in medicine and the STEM disciplines, science, technology engineering and maths.

Certainly it occurs in the humanities, commonly as plagiarism – an academic copies a slab of text from somebody’s PhD thesis that no one other than the markers read and publishes it in an article that next to nobody skimmed.

This does not matter anywhere near as much as faked scientific findings that can send other researchers off on dead-end trails, pursuing world-changing, lifesaving results that cannot exist.

Fakery happens because careers depend on publishing papers that report breakthroughs. The more times other scientists cite a researcher’s work, the more they will be noticed, funded, promoted. And so corners are cut, small findings amplified into breakthroughs, results are written up that could, maybe, perhaps be true but certainly make for a great headline.

In December, Adrian Barnett (QUT) and international colleagues reported an experiment showing researchers were willing to “hold their noses” and edit their articles to appear in a prestigious publication.

And desperate academics publish rubbish science in junk journals. Byrne told a 2022 US congress inquiry that the number of fraudulent articles on human gene science could exceed the 100,000 real ones.

Surveys of early career researchers by Kate Christian (QUT) and colleagues found 20 per cent felt pressured to engage in “questionable research practices” and more than half knew of researchers who kept running data until they got a result that suited. They also feared they would not be believed and faced “negative consequences” for speaking up.

As then South Australian corruption commissioner Ann Vanstone warned last year, academics point to “a power dynamic whereby more senior researchers benefited from unfair practices”.

Certainly some people are caught. A decade back, Bruce Murdoch and Caroline Barwood from the University of Queensland were convicted of fraud in research on Parkinson’s disease and received suspended prison sentences.

That was rare then and still is.

This might be because universities have processes in place to investigate fraud. A Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission investigated fraud detection processes at a sample of state universities and found that overall the systems were OK.

Yet managements have to know what to investigate and have the will to do it. The CMC pointed to a case of what it considered corrupt conduct – a university official arguing that a researcher misrepresenting their work was not very serious, when it was.

And that’s part of the problem Vaux worries about – universities want to keep misconduct inquiries in-house so they can control what is reported and talk down the significance of findings. As he told the Senate inquiry, vice-chancellors want to protect their university’s reputation, “denying or covering up concerns protects reputations and maintains funding”.

Certainly every Australian university has a research conduct policy and integrity adviser but they can be so hard to find that Barnett and team surveyed contact information across the system to find that 60 or so institutions could breach grant requirements

And when it comes to inquiring into research misconduct matters, it is up to universities and medical research institutes to police themselves.

Yes, there is a national code of conduct and the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council, which also manages funding for the Medical Research Future Fund, have a watchdog – quite right, given that they will be handing out $2.5bn next financial year.

But a bloodhound the Australian Research Integrity Committee is not. Instead of investigating fraud, it oversights how universities run their own inquiries. If they stick to procedures, ARIC leaves them alone, which means people with allegations generally ignore it. The committee considered six new cases last year.

The case for leaving it to employers is that they can investigate and discipline their own people. The risk is that they won’t – research fraud is hard to prove, an image disaster when it is and generally too much like hard work when prominent researchers with reputations to defend dig in and defend themselves.

Vaux warns that by running their own inquiries, universities can go slow, downgrade allegations or dismiss cases after internal assessments.

Which is why he argues for a national research ombudsman, to support whistleblowers, and accused researchers, oversight inquiries, manage appeals. And, crucially, to maintain a list of “experienced, independent experts” to conduct investigations and “make binding recommendations”.

The Academy of Science argues an agency should have the power to order universities to investigate research breaches.

NCIS Universities this is not. But they are ideas that some university leaders with big and complex research operations less dislike than loathe, fearing an independent agency could develop delusions of grandeur and stick its bib into issues that their own research experts can handle.

It’s the sort of argument that used to apply to universities managing student complaints (excluding assessment).but after years of unconvincing management assurances that they had everything covered and appalling evidence, particularly about sexual violence on campus, demonstrating they didn’t.

Education Minister Jason Clare wasn’t having it. As of February, Australia has an Independent National Student Ombudsman.

Then again, research fraud isn’t a big credibility issue and maybe never will be – which is what sports administrators thought about performance enhancing drug use. Until it was.