(5 November 2018) The spate of high-profile cases of fraudulent publications has revealed a widening replication, or outright deception, crisis in the social sciences. To Marc Spooner, researchers “cooking up” findings and the deliberate faking of science is a result of extreme pressures to publish, brought about by an increasingly pervasive audit culture within the academy.
By now most readers will have heard the news about the so-called “Grievance Studies” affair, where a team of three writers, with the explicit goal to deceive, succeeded in getting four of 20 fraudulent research papers published and another three accepted in humanities journals. They did so, as reported in the New York Times, by starting with conclusions they worked “backward to support by aping the relevant fields’ methods and arguments, and sometimes inventing data”.
The LSE Impact Blog has the full story by Marc Spooner.
