Transcription
I need to tell you something that's going to make you question everything you thought about academia and research. For over a decade, I've watched colleagues manipulate the system, fake data, and cheat their way to the top, and annoyingly get away with it. So today, I'm exposing the five dirtiest tricks in academia that no one actually wants to talk about. And here's the annoying thing, they actually work.
So, I'm going to be talking about all of the things from bad like bad like everyone does it all the way down to things you shouldn't definitely do but people do and we're going to end on the worst type of academic dishonesty there is. So stay tuned because uh these things happen and I've seen them firsthand.
Let's just dip our toes into something that sounds innocent but actually everyone is doing it and it's absolutely rampant. Collaboration. Except what if I told you that some of the biggest names in research have never actually worked together. They're just trading authorship like Pokémon cards and this is how they're doing it.
All right, then. One of the things in academia that you need to get is academic publications. But you can do that a number of ways. You can produce your own, but also you can help someone else do something on their paper and you get your name on their paper. And everyone loves doing that. But it can be gamed. It's very simple. All you have to do is have someone that has like a paper. So, let's go here and say, "Okay, there's one paper here. He's happy and he's going to publish it." But the people around him also want to be on that paper. So, he invites other people to have their name on the paper. Have your name on the paper. Have your name on the paper. And then when they produce a paper, they're like, "Oh, you put me on your paper, so I'll put me you on my paper." Anyway, you get the idea. And then this person's like, "Oh, actually, yeah, I like this. Yeah, let's publish on each other's papers." But the thing is is that they don't actually do any work. And what you end up with is a publishing cabal. Everyone is publishing on everyone's papers. But here's the thing, they don't actually do any work towards any of the papers they're actually published on.
So here, this is one person who did it. And uh this is how you can boost a metric called the H index. The H index is what a lot of academic careers and progress is decided on because it's the number of peer-reviewed papers you've published with that number of citations. And so the more papers you have, the more likely you are to be cited. So by getting your name on other people's work is so important. So I found this which is how critics say a computer scientist artificially boosted his Google Scholar metrics. and it tells you how. But in the comments, it's actually the true gold because down here it says, "I have to say I'm somewhat disappointed in this strategy of boosting his age index. How could he do it better?" Well, get a couple of like-minded chumps into an authorship cartel by making everyone co-author on everyone's papers. So, that's exactly what we saw here. And then it says ideally some hapless and contract dependent grad student write the actual papers but seed first order authorship to whoever of the seniors has been promised this honor. And now if everyone involved also cites everyone's work in such papers, you can easily boost your H index to the moon. Simple, right? People are doing it. It's how you game the system.
It gets even worse. Check this out. Now imagine you've spent months perfecting your research paper. You submit it for peer review and the reviewer comes back with one condition. Cite my work or your paper doesn't get published. Sounds like extortion, right? Well, it is and it's happening at the highest levels.
All right, then this is what this one looks like. So, what you have is a paper. You have written that paper and you bloody love it. And I've done this and you're very proud of it and you send it off for peer review. And this peer reviewer goes, "You know what? I like it." But you also have to site all of these papers which happen to be my papers in your paper because then my H index increases. And I've seen it happen time and time again. Actually, one of my papers I gave him a mono brow. [laughter] One of my papers came back and I was like, why are you asking for all of these citations that are barely relevant to what I'm talking about in this paper? Well, it was because it was their papers and they want to boost the number of citations to boost their H index and make them look like a better scientist. So, here it says a highly cited researcher banned for journal board uh for citation abuse. So, it happens everywhere and at the highest levels. So, this is someone who is one of the world's most highly cited researchers and he was on the editorial board of one journal because essentially he was asking people to site his papers every time that people wanted to uh published in his prestigious journal. Ooh la la. But here you can see the magnitude of his self-citation requests were shocking and it blows my mind that suspicious citation patterns go back and that authors comply with apparent amazing frequency. Yeah. The reason they want to publish their paper in a really prestigious journal is because it makes their career sort of like accelerate. It makes their career look more important. makes their research stand out in an important way to get more money from the university to get um uh promotions and all that sort of stuff. So, if someone said to me, "Hey, site these papers and I'll let you into my pre prestigious journal." I would be like, "Yeah, okay. I'll do that." So, no wonder it's happening. And that's only number two of five. So, they get worse.
So, here's a question for all you researchers. Would you rather publish one groundbreaking paper or slice that same research into five mediocre ones? Well, if you said five, congratulations. You are an academic fraudster. And this trick is called salami slicing, and it's inflating academic CVs everywhere.
All right, then. I've seen this time and time again. Essentially, you go into your uh research supervisor and you say, "Hey, I've got this really big paper and I think it's great." And they're like, "You know what? Hm, maybe we could split it up into like three papers. That way we get one, two, three opportunities. Not only to publish more and boost our H index, but there's a good opportunity to self site in between each one of these papers. Oh, that game will never stop being fun. Hm. Wouldn't they love it if you just published all of the stuff that you ever produced in little tiny minuscule bits so that everyone gets a better publication record? Well, the problem with that is that there tends to be a lot of overlap between these papers because they essentially share the same methodology. They say share the same sort of results. And so what you end up with is three papers that actually overlap so much that uh they really should be just one paper. And it happens all the time. And my favorite example of this, oh well done retraction watch for this chef's kiss of a pun. Salami slicing in pork research leads to retractions. Ah I brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. But ultimately, three journals in the food sciences were attracting a trio of papers because they just shared so much data. And I've seen this. I felt the pressure as well personally where you're like, you know what, maybe we can expand this into three papers or even two papers because then I could get these stories out there in uh a more careerbeneficial way. H yeah, that's exactly what happens. Ugh.
Anyway, this next one is where it gets a little bit dark. Well, this next one is where things get really dark because it isn't just about gaming this weird metrics or system. This is about stealing actual money. Some researchers are fabricating data in grant applications to secure millions in funding. And when they get caught, well, the consequences are you'll see.
All right, then. I've seen this one and I know a researcher who's actually done this. What happens is is that you're applying for money, right? You want loads and loads of money because you need it to do research. And to get that grant money, you need to apply for a grant. Now, the thing is is your grant looks pretty lackluster. Oh, sad face. Because h you're trying to say, well, we'll achieve this thing, but it seems a little bit too far-fetched. To get the big money, you need big results. And what you can do is fake some data. So you can say, "Oh, look, I got this data. It does this." And this is completely fabricated and made up. But there is a weird ethical sort of like loophole that people do this mental gymnastics where they're like, "hm, I will find this out with this research grant money." So, you know, it's just sort of like preempting what I would actually find using it. And so, they give this kind of like tantalizing uh option here where they're like, "Yeah, I'm going to change the world. um I'm going to save the world from whatever it is. We're going to find out this amazing thing. And so the grant body go, "Oh yeah, look, because based on that, we'll give you the money." And this turns into a happy face. And they're like, "Yes, I love it." But that money is given off the back of completely fabricated data. And if that isn't uh one of the worst academic uh lies, I don't know what is. And the thing is, I've seen it firsthand with someone I actually knew and hang out with. So, uh, yeah, check this out.
So, my story is all about Dr. Alan Cooper. Now, I knew Dr. Alan Cooper from Adelaide University. We did some science communication shows together. He was really nice and we even sort of like caught up for a beer once and talked about how we could work together more efficiently in the science communication sphere. There's so much word play, >> but what was happening behind the scenes in his lab was atrocious. I'll put this link in the description, but ultimately Dr. Alan Cooper ran this lab that was uh full of intimidation. It was full of harassment. And because he was a high-flying professor, he needed good results and big grants. So, he put the pressure on his uh research staff and his research team to be like, "Get me the results." and it led to them fabricating data so that he could then present that data to grab bodies to be like, "Oh, yeah, I love it." Now, it really goes much deeper and far beyond that. And if you want me to do a full video on Alan Cooper, let me know. But ultimately it comes down to intimidation, stress, uh, and just the fact that he really did want the best for his career and therefore was willing to intimidate the people below him in fabricating data. And that's really what it's at. And he was uh fired from uh University of Adelaide. You know, he comes from Oxford. Oh, Oxford, you know, like all of the things that everyone ever wants from their career, he was getting, but he was getting it by lying. Anyway, fabricate data and put it in grants, apparently, if if you want to get the big money.
And finally, the one that might scare you the most. What if I told you that some of the most famous scientific breakthroughs never actually happened? They were published, they were celebrated, they were cited thousands of times, but nobody could ever replicate the results and it took years for anyone to admit it. H it happens all the time.
So, you've probably seen great videos on this by other YouTubers, but essentially science has a reproducibility problem. You do something once tick and then you try to reproduce it and it doesn't work. So, let's just publish this as a story. Oh, that sounds good, doesn't it? And it happens more than you think. Mainly because it is expensive to do all of this research. So you've spent millions of dollars to do this. You try to replicate it doesn't work. What are you going to do? Do it again. Work out why it didn't work. It's easier and you're kind of incentivized to actually just publish the work anyway because no one really checks and it takes years and years to actually find out like that some of the research out there hasn't been reproduced and can't be reproduced by other labs or even the lab itself. So this is what we've got here. Um a load of retractions that highlight long-standing issues of trust and sloppiness that must be addressed. So this is about stem cells that were able to um turn into almost any other type of cell but not through genetic manipulation by by physical pertubation. I don't know what that means but I think it just means like putting them in chemicals or like using physical methods instead of genetic methods. And that would be just such a huge huge step forward in this field. And uh yeah soon after the papers were published crack appears as various media outlets reported errors that were found. But the thing is it's easy just to publish it and then sort of like let the world deal with that.
And I've actually seen this irre irreducibility the nonre reproducible aspect of science playing out in my field which was nanotechnology because what happened was this. Check this out. So uh a scientist would do something like a materials chemistry sort of thing. And I've seen this in a place where I worked. Let's turn it into red because this is horrible. All right. You put some chemicals in a test tube and uh you do something to that test tube and something happens to that sort of like stuff in the test tube. Then you take that and you put it on a let's say 1 cm by 1 cm square. You put all of the stuff on there and you go, "Yeah, this is good." Okay. And then what you do is you look at that under a microscope. Oh god, how am I going to do a microscope? Uh a microscope look like There we are. That's not too bad, but you get it. All right. You look at that under a microscope. But what actually happens is as you scour through the surface, you can find a tiny tiny area. And I'm talking like nanometers. Nanometers. You know, it could just be like uh 15 nanometers or five nanometers. Let's go with that. I forgot the zero. So, you got five nanometers. Let's expand that out. Where on this surface there's something that you actually want to find. Okay. And this is cherrypicking the data. So you can produce these not reproducibly. You can't do this over and over, but given enough surface area, you can actually find things that you can report on. Oh, look at these. These are great and interesting. Let's create a paper on it. And then you try to do exactly the same thing. It goes here. No, it doesn't work. You can't reproduce these results because you are looking over such a large area that on five nanometers you can find what you want, but it's not representative of the whole sample. And I've seen scientists do that. Really highly published and respected scientists do that. And unfortunately, it's completely uh nonredroducible. Hm. How do you say that? Irre irrucable. Anyway, you know what I'm saying.
So, here's the uncomfortable truth. These tricks work because the system is broken. But the more we talk about it, the harder it becomes to hide. If you found this disturbing, share it with someone in academia or someone's thinking about doing a PhD. And uh I'll see you in the next video. Love it. If you like this video, go check out this really old video where I talk about the things you aren't allowed to say out loud in academia. I think you'll love it.