Science magazine, Landmark research integrity survey finds questionable practices are surprisingly common, 2021

ME/CFS Skeptic

ME/CFS Skeptic

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
More than half of Dutch scientists regularly engage in questionable research practices, such as hiding flaws in their research design or selectively citing literature, according to a new study. And one in 12 admitted to committing a more serious form of research misconduct within the past 3 years: the fabrication or falsification of research results.

Full text: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...uestionable-practices-are-surprisingly-common
 
Michiel Tack said:
More than half of Dutch scientists regularly engage in questionable research practices, such as hiding flaws in their research design or selectively citing literature, according to a new study. And one in 12 admitted to committing a more serious form of research misconduct within the past 3 years: the fabrication or falsification of research results.

Full text: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...uestionable-practices-are-surprisingly-common
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Depressing findings, but I wonder what those figures would be for BPS researchers looking at ME/CFS, FND, MUS, Long Covid, etc.

[added - what is the impact of using subjective self reporting in surveys of research malpractice and scientific fraud on the results. Would objective outcome measures been better science?]
 
Peter Trewhitt said:
I wonder what those figures would be for BPS researchers looking at ME/CFS,
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I suspect there is less fraud in the BPS literature on ME/CFS because the authors can use many other techniques to fabricate positive findings, that are accepted by journal editors such as a waiting list control group or manipulating how patients report their symptoms etc.
So there would be less need to commit outright fraud or other questionable practices.

Fabrication of results usually results in findings that look too good to be true. In ME/CFS, findings look too bad to be fabricated.
 
Some of the most questionable research practices in the survey were "“Not submitting or resubmitting valid negative studies for publication" and “Insufficient inclusion of study flaws and limitations in publications". I suspect these are quite prevalent in the BPS literature on ME/CFS.
 
Michiel Tack said:
I suspect there is less fraud in the BPS literature on ME/CFS because the authors can use many other techniques to fabricate positive findings, that are accepted by journal editors such as a waiting list control group or manipulating how patients report their symptoms etc.
So there would be less need to commit outright fraud or other questionable practices.

Fabrication of results usually results in findings that look too good to be true. In ME/CFS, findings look too bad to be fabricated.
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Cherry picking the litterature is rampant in BPS, though.
 
Michiel Tack said:
More than half of Dutch scientists regularly engage in questionable research practices, such as hiding flaws in their research design or selectively citing literature, according to a new study. And one in 12 admitted to committing a more serious form of research misconduct within the past 3 years: the fabrication or falsification of research results.

Full text: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...uestionable-practices-are-surprisingly-common
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Makes you wonder - why would scientists own up?
 
Doing good research is hard, and almost involves setting yourself up to fail, and the incentives to publish research and pressure of the environment make this not particularly surprising.

In the context of ME/CFS, designing a good trial of unblinded treatments would be very difficult, involve a lot of groundwork, and require some pretty innovative thinking in order to account for the nature of ME/CFS and an unblinded trial. You could do all of that, and get a null result, or follow pretty much generally accepted practices in the field, and have a positive result. I assume the incentives are the same in other research fields.
 
petrichor said:
Doing good research is hard, and almost involves setting yourself up to fail, and the incentives to publish research and pressure of the environment make this not particularly surprising.
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That depends how you measure failure. A really well set up trial of CBT/GET as PACE should have been, given the time it took and the cost, and the claimed expertise of those running it, would have used a properly characterised patient grou, clinicially valid objective primary outcomes and a longer follow up time. If that fould that the treatments don't work, as undoubtedly it would, then that should be regarded as a success, finally proving that the treatments don't work. Getting a null result is important information that advances knowledge, it's not failure.
 
Trish said:
Getting a null result is important information that advances knowledge, it's not failure.
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Yes.

But sadly our world is not set up like that. Society remembers those who make new discoveries.

Correcting the record without making a new discovery is not well regarded. It’s a bit like the science equivalent of “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

If someone says X is wrong, without providing a clearly true new answer, then they are being negative. Or maybe they did something wrong in their work, because X is established truth, so it carries on being regarded as true.

Null results just aren’t exciting, so even if recorded they slide beneath society’s gaze. :(
 
Keela Too said:
But sadly our world is not set up like that. Society remembers those who make new discoveries.
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I completely agree.

Back in the days of "honest" science, how many discoveries were made by accident though? An interested researcher realizing that although their experiment didn't show the expected result, something worth further investigation was found along the way.
 
I suspect there is little to no outright fraud in CFS research because they know their work tends to be scrutinised with a fine tooth comb. They don’t need to fabricate data, though, to obtain desired results since they can just rig the outcome by using laughably biased outcome measures.
 
They used to cherry pick patients to get the results they want but after the clinics began I think it might have been harder for them so nowadays they just get bad results and spin them in the bits people read.
 
Here's another article about questionable research getting published.

I think this article belongs on this thread but if I'm mistaken please let me know and I'll ask moderators to move it somewhere else.

https://www.sciencealert.com/iverme...ge-wake-up-call-for-fraud-in-covid-19-science
A recent editorial in the British Medical Journal argued that it might be time to change our basic perspective on health research, and assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise.

That is to say, not to assume that all researchers are dishonest, but to begin the receipt of new information in health research from a categorically different baseline level of skepticism as opposed to blind trust.

This might sound extreme, but if the alternative is accepting that occasionally millions of people will receive medications based on unvetted research that is later withdrawn entirely, it may actually be a very small price to pay.
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