> Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others.
Sadly, the system is often rewarding fake or, especially, exaggerated/misrepresented data and conclusions. I think that a significant proportion of articles exaggerate findings and deliberately cherry-pick data.
It's a market of lemons. Proving misrepresentation is really hard, and the rewards for doing so are immense. Publishing an article in Nature, Science, or Cell is a career-defining moment.
Yeah I agree it's not an easy problem to solve by any stretch. I'm not a professor or scientist so I won't pretend to understand the intricacies of journal publication and that sort of thing.
But I do wonder when someone's PhD thesis gets published and it turns out they plagiarized large parts of it, why isn't their degree revoked? When someone is a professor at a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are they still teaching the following year?
Serious universities do often revoke doctoral degrees if plagiarism is proven. I've seen Oxford University going as far as demanding someone to issue a correction of a journal article to cite prior work because they were making some claims of novelty that were not true.
> When someone is a professor at a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are they still teaching the following year?
Internal politics. Committees judging potential misconduct are not independent. If you are sufficiently high up in the ladder, you can get away with many things. Sweden recently created a Swedish National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct (Npof) to address this problem. I think this is a step in the right direction.
But, ultimately, I think academic fraud should be judged in court. However, e.g. Leonid Schneider (forbetterscience.com) has been taken to court several times for reporting fraud, including fraud that led to patient death, and some judges didn't seem to care much about data fabrication / misrepresentation.
Sadly, the system is often rewarding fake or, especially, exaggerated/misrepresented data and conclusions. I think that a significant proportion of articles exaggerate findings and deliberately cherry-pick data.
It's a market of lemons. Proving misrepresentation is really hard, and the rewards for doing so are immense. Publishing an article in Nature, Science, or Cell is a career-defining moment.