There’s Far More Scientific Fraud Than Anyone Wants to Admit

Despite recent scandals of research misconduct and error, the academic world still seems determined to look the other way.

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the president of Stanford, announced in July that he would resign, after an independent review cleared him of research misconduct but found flaws in other papers authored by his lab. Photograph: Patrick Tehan/AP

by Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus
The Guardian
August 9, 2023

Scientific misconduct has enjoyed some limelight lately. The president of Stanford, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, resigned last month after a series of investigations exposed serious problems in his research; an independent review of Tessier-Lavigne’s work found no evidence that he falsified data himself but concluded that his research failed standards “of scientific rigor and process” and that he failed to correct the record on multiple occasions.

And in June it was revealed that a scholar at Harvard Business School, Francesca Gino, was accused of having falsified research about – wait for it – honesty.

Of course, scientific misconduct does not happen only at Stanford and Harvard. Of the nearly 5,500 retracti…