Why Are Science Frauds So Easy to Detect? #sciencematters

This question led me to learn a new bit of British slang: Pull the other one, it’s got bells on. As in, wow, is that an obvious lie.

Scientists examine Piltdown Man, a fraud from 1912 that took 40 years to definitively prove to be faked fossils. That was a highly successful fraud.

[In] a common feature of scientific frauds that involve fake data… Often, the fake data does not stand up to even casual scrutiny.

Which is puzzling. If you’re going to commit scientific fraud, presumably you want to get away with it. So why commit fraud in such a transparently obvious way? dynamicecology

The article’s author, Jeremy Fox, notes that art forgeries are often brilliant. “It’s a striking contrast with the laughable obviousness of many scientific frauds.”

What’s the deal? Maybe it’s because journals hate to “waste” space on endless tables and graphs, or maybe because there’s little reward for careful examination and replication.

Data are unlikely to be closely inspected by anyone. Heck, until fairly recently your data were unlikely to be inspected by anyone because you weren’t expected to show them to anyone! And even these days, when post-publication data sharing is increasingly the rule in many fields, it’s still rare for the shared data associated with any given paper to be inspected by anyone. dynamicecology

Fox notes that, in science or art, fakers put in as much effort as the curious will expend examining the fake. I think of it as conservation of energy. Or perhaps some fakes are the product of researchers who are panicked, lazy, or irrational. After all, scientists (and wanna be scientists) are only human. Some frauds are only exposed when the good guys’ tools catch up with the bad guys’ efforts. And there are plenty of good guys. That’s science in action, which is why science remains the best way to learn about the physical world we all share.