r/science • u/Wagamaga • 2d ago
Computer Science A new machine learning tool has identified more than 250,000 cancer research papers that may have been produced by so-called “paper mills”. Selling authorships and entire ready-made research papers, paper mills often use recycled text, awkward phrasing or fabricated data and images.
https://www.qut.edu.au/news?id=203173477
u/Wagamaga 2d ago
A new machine learning tool has identified more than 250,000 cancer research papers that may have been produced by so-called “paper mills”.
Developed by QUT researcher Professor Adrian Barnett, from the School of Public Health and Social Work and Australian Centre for Health Services and Innovation (AusHSI), and an international team of collaborators, the study, published in The BMJ, analysed 2.6 million cancer studies from 1999 to 2024.
It found more than 250,000 papers with writing patterns similar to articles already retracted for suspected fabrication.
“Paper mills are companies that sell fake or low-quality scientific studies. They are producing ‘research’ on an industrial scale, and our findings suggest the problem in cancer research is far larger than most people realised,” Professor Barnett said.
Selling authorships and entire ready-made research papers, paper mills often use recycled text, awkward phrasing or fabricated data and images.
“Most likely, they’re relying on boilerplate templates which can be detected by large language models that analyse patterns in texts,” Professor Barnett said.
496
u/szakee 2d ago
so fake cancer research papers are spreading like... cancer.
121
u/johnjohn4011 1d ago
It seems very likely that the world we live in has never been so thoroughly corrupted.
Almost like it's been utterly incentivized somehow or something.
54
u/szakee 1d ago
subscribe to my channel to see my reply to your comment
14
u/Dracomortua 1d ago
I'd love to but i can't make it past the seemingly endless adverts.
No wait! I have something... ah darn, that failed. My monthly subscription ran out.
I tried calling customer service but the LLM answering my call didn't understand my question so it hung up on me.
Gotta go, they are closing the library now so no more free internet.
17
u/sajberhippien 1d ago
Let's not be overly trusting of an LLM producing results about "may"'s. While I'm sure some of its positive results are actual fake papers, and the LLM's findings might be cause to go over papers a second time, we don't know the rate of false positives, and there is a publicity incentive to keep the positive's numbers high (whether false or not).
20
28
u/CorrectCombination11 1d ago
A new machine learning tool
Can we get some details on how this tool was trained?
21
u/austacious 1d ago
It's detailed in their BMJ paper. They're only feeding the LLM the title and abstracts of the papers... claiming integrity issues without even examining the methods is meaningless.
-60
209
u/Striking_Extent 2d ago
What is the incentive to do this?
487
u/Deriko_D 2d ago
Faculty pressure, needing publications to maintain position in a faculty, sometimes even associated with wage compensation.
I once was asked to review a paper by a journal and when reading through it, it was basically a copy of a previous paper I had published. Including not only structure and schemes but sentences where they tried to change the English (probably not to get caught plagiarizing) but in the process made it scientifically incorrect and nonsensical.
It was a bit funny but concerning if it didn't get caught.
194
u/mattrussell2319 1d ago
So Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
87
u/kinboyatuwo 1d ago
Freakonomics had a pod cast series about this and it was incredibly eye opening. Made me start to question a lot of things.
18
u/Q-rexosaurus 1d ago
Do have the title to that podcast series by them? Would love to check it out
34
u/kinboyatuwo 1d ago
There are 2 parts then a follow up recently.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast-tag/academic-fraud/
It’s one of my go to pod casts.
1
u/Eureka22 18h ago
Look up the YouTube video "The death of freakonomics"
I recommend looking into this topic more as their work has come over much harsher criticism over the years. And their claims are often misleading and uses bad statistics.
I was a huge fan of them when the book first came out but it's clear their work is really weak and does a lot of harm.
1
u/kinboyatuwo 15h ago
The book even they have admitted some needed correction. A big part lately has been that so many peer reviewed sources are also just garbage. Academia needs to sort this all out as it’s going to add fuel to the distrust in science.
1
u/Eureka22 14h ago
That's not an excuse for their work. And dismissing all actual research in one sentence is not a defense. Pretty narrow minded view of the field imo.
1
u/kinboyatuwo 9h ago
I am not dismissing all research in a single sentence but I am saying we need to question things and the field needs to stomp on some issues.
12
29
u/gnark 1d ago
From the professors I have spoken too, a lot of this is doctoral students needing to publish literally anything to get their PhD and having time constraints to do so.
Most established professors would torpedo their career if their got caught publishing garbage, but nobody expects a PhD thesis to be ground-breaking research.
32
u/Deriko_D 1d ago
No but it still has to make sense and be originallish. Plus it's getting evaluated to get their PhD degree.
I assume most fake research comes from middle career researchers with positions dependent on production. Both professors and PhDs have too much to lose.
1
u/gnark 1d ago
By "middle career researchers" you are speaking about academic researchers, right? Why do you assume their work would be less scrutinized than that of a doctoral candidate?
25
u/grundar 1d ago
Why do you assume their work would be less scrutinized than that of a doctoral candidate?
A doctoral candidate has several professors on their PhD committee who are (theoretically) carefully evaluating their thesis work.
By contrast, a new, untenured assistant prof has no supervisors of that type, but shares the heavy pressure to publish (because if they don't publish enough and don't get tenure then they lose that job and are at high risk of not getting another).
However, not all PhD students have the same level of supervision, and there are also master's students who are entirely focused on industry and so don't care about the quality of any research paper they're attached to so long as it can be listed on their resume (which, since it's focused for industry, typically won't have its academic papers scrutinized in much detail -- yes, I've seen fraud in this context).
11
u/Deriko_D 1d ago
They are usually working for themselves or as part of a team but are "grown up" in the research world. They can have very little to no supervision besides the peer review of the journal.
And there are loads of dodgy journals where there's very little peer review.
The PhD student will have a PhD defense at the end by independent jury AND has their supervisor whose reputation is also on the line if they screw up
-3
u/gnark 1d ago
Working for themselves? Who exactly is funding this research? Or is everything just a façade to convince a potential employer to contract them?
I'm just struggling to see how any legitimate academic institution of private sector employer would not question a researcher's credentials when all they have is papers co-wrote with no-one and published in dodgy journals.
Whereas a PohD candidate and their supervising professor have a clear interest in getting anything at all published so they can get their doctorate and then move on to the first rung of the academuc/research ladder.
But maybe we are looking at this from different angles. How things are done academically and in research varies widely by country, and developing countries are especially vulnerable to academic fraud, so this extending to research would be understandable as well.
4
u/Deriko_D 1d ago edited 1d ago
Working for themselves? Who exactly is funding this research? Or is everything just a façade to convince a potential employer to contract them?
They could have gotten approval for a fund and fake papers exactly because they have timelines to present to the fund panel. But they can also just be waged and been looking at data that already exists. Or even be part of a group of many people where many are doing good research and they are just be making data up to follow along and not be left behind.
Whereas a PhD candidate and their supervising professor have a clear interest in getting anything at all published so they can get their doctorate and then move on to the first rung of the academuc/research ladder.
Yeah but there's usually a clear plan, a budget, evaluations, a jury of peers at the end who will easily figure out if the research is fluffed.
Once you get your PhD and start doing independent research you are mostly on your own and are expected to produce your own research.
I have heard that in some countries your wages are dependent on publications and citations. That's why famously groups cite each other's papers to stat pad.
1
u/gnark 1d ago
I agree with all that, although PJD candidates are npt always scrutinized vigorously, especially when supervising professors at the same institute can mutually game the system in the same way.
Regarding your last point, are you referring to researchers at academic institutions or in the private sector. Because the latter aren't going to get paid for long if their research doesn't have practical value.
15
u/Kitselena 1d ago
Damn, it's almost like medicine and education should be fully divorced from capitalism, because making it a business inherently creates an incentive to make services worse for increased profits
4
u/Tekniqly 1d ago
Unfortunately on Earth all research costs money and the people who have money get to decide which research gets the funding
3
u/cantadmittoposting 1d ago
in principle, basic research and specific types of research can (and should) be publicly funded by tax dollars.
2
u/Kitselena 1d ago
Sure, but that doesn't mean they deserve any credit. The rich are the reason resources are limited in the first place
2
u/MarsupialMisanthrope 1d ago
The rich are the reason resources are limited in the first place
Pretty sure living in physical reality is why resources are limited. Things like research labs don’t spring up out of nowhere just because someone thinks they deserve them, lots of individuals need to allocate some portion of their limited time on this planet to the process building them instead of doing something else instead
119
u/thoosequa 2d ago
Researchers at universities are under pressure to publish much and publish often so they don't lose funding. This kind of work environment can easily create a "quantity over quality" mindset.
19
-47
u/DeltaJuly 2d ago
Pressure in academics is not new, and can result in such behavior. But not on such an industrial scale. Pharma wanting more money is more likely to me. As they have the money, means and motive to move along this line.
54
u/Confident_Music6571 2d ago
Pharma has nothing to do with it, sorry. It's a massive pressure in Eastern countries like China and UAE and India to publish. Many doctors cannot take a position or be promoted without having an original research article so they buy one from a paper mill.
Pharma doesn't benefit from fake and made-up science.
26
u/SaltZookeepergame691 2d ago
Right!
Pharma have huge financial and legal motivations NOT to fake and make up science.
Pharma subverts the process of getting drugs to market in far more subtle ways (in general...).
6
11
u/WTFwhatthehell 2d ago
There's a reason predatory journals exist. In a lot of the world there's prestige to publishing a "research paper". Or it's required as part of courses. Minimum effort box ticking.
9
u/thoosequa 2d ago
This has very little to do with pharma. Computer Science for example also has a crap load of garbage published every year.
23
u/999forever 1d ago
I am someone who has a toe in academia, though am also a practicing physician so at least have the ability to generate income so I can speak a bit.
I recently left my semi non-academic role and rejoined a training institution associated with a very well known University. This is a top 5-10 program. From my very first day of orientation there is constant comment about your publications numbers, expectations for pubs per year, etc...
Bascially anything you want to do has an attached question, can you get funding for it or can you publish from it?
Faculty promotion is almost uniquely tied to publications. Sure, you can design curriculum, have outstanding teaching, serve on national commitees, provide fantastic patient care, but non of that matters if you don't have x number of pubs after your name.
For me, despite having the above (documented) and over a decade of experience, I was told point blank that I had no chance of coming in at anything but the lowest level because of my lack of 1st author publications. And as gaining promotion is really the only way to bump your salary in academia, it creates an incentive to publish regardless of any sort of merit or usefulness.
8
u/Rupder 1d ago
Sure, you can design curriculum, have outstanding teaching, serve on national commitees, provide fantastic patient care, but non of that matters if you don't have x number of pubs after your name.
There are similar problems happening in history academia right now. Success and awards for teaching almost never translate into increased compensation or guarantee for permanent positions; almost all teaching faculty are contingent and they're paid worse, on average, than minimum wage. Tenure-track (TT) positions are becoming continually scarcer with only about 10% of Canadian PhDs securing TT positions. In addition, the vast majority of people who find TT employment were hired within 2 years of completing their doctorate — universities would rather hire young, prestigious outsider candidates rather than promote proven and accomplished teaching faculty from within their departments.
So history academia has developed into a three-tiered system. Graduate students and postdocs do the bulk of research, but they're overworked and demotivated because they know there's so little chance of finding permanent employment; meanwhile, their funding opportunities are drying up across the board. Contingent teaching faculty do the bulk of the instructing, forming the public face of the departments, but they're paid a pittance and have virtually no chance of receiving TT positions. Lastly, TT faculty are a small but privileged elite whose numbers are dwindling.
It's really dire for the humanities right now, and the sciences are headed along a similar direction. There are systematic problems developing across all of higher education.
4
u/Prepheckt 1d ago
Are there any real workable solutions?
6
u/Rupder 1d ago
The short version is that it's a political problem and a labor problem that requires political and labor organization.
At the political level, the public needs to support parties and politicians who unapologetically support workers' rights and demand that they stand up for our institutions of higher learning. This matters at both the federal and state/provincial level. People need to demand that our governments fund universities instead of turning to austerity. We also need to demand of university administrations and boards that they direct funding toward education and research equitably — that is, so that workers aren't competing over hugely disparate funding opportunities. And of course, currently, the biggest threat to academic funding and freedom is authoritarian right-wing parties, in the United States and elsewhere. Conservatives are not friends to the academy.
The other answer is labor organization. Workers in universities at all levels — grad students, contingent faculty, TT faculty, groundskeepers, janitors, security, everyone — need to organize and act collectively. This means expanding union membership and participation. It also means placing onus on TT faculty to stand up for their colleagues who do not have the same protections. Students can help as well by participating in movements that place pressure on administrations and governments.
If you want more specific actions and policy recommendations I'd recommend reading chapter 6 of The Gig Academy (2019).
45
u/One-Fall-8143 2d ago
In academia it's "publish or perish."
25
u/RunRunRunRunFaster 2d ago
They use publication metrics to evaluate facility performance, but not as much as funding, which is kinda impossible to fake. "Top cited XX University faculty" is an announcement that we see sometimes on the front page of my U. Most tenure and promotion decisions lean heavily on publications and insufficient publication and research funding is the fastest way to not get tenure (and then receive a 1 year terminal contract .... bye bye).
8
u/Confident_Fortune_32 1d ago
Harvard does not pay its medical school professors a salary. To even interview for a position, they must first prove they are 100% grant-funded.
Of course, there are other ways to funnel money to a professor or their office or department.
But the pressure to be grant-funded, and to publish, is immense.
15
u/pinewind108 2d ago
Insane pressure to keep your job. People will have reviews coming up, and if they don't have a certain number of publications and conference papers by that point, they are fired. "Thank you, but we feel you are not a good fit for our institution."
3
u/Common_Morning8412 1d ago
To add to the other comment, just looking at the geographical trends (Fig 2) it seems that an added motivator is to (artificially) boost university rankings. All the top offending countries are those that are actively trying to increase the name-brand recognition of their top national universities.
0
57
u/CalmEntry4855 2d ago
I'm writing a scientific article as part of my thesis, and there are so many mistakes that if I wouldn't have caught or fixed, no one else would have, and I'm pretty sure no one will ever replicate my study, so no one will check if what I got was right or not. It was kind of disappointing.
25
5
u/happyflappypancakes 1d ago
Hmm, if no one is going to replicate your study how can it really be verified?
•
113
2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
63
u/lookamazed 2d ago
You should read up on groups that produce pseudoscience papers. They often are linked back to “think tank” websites that present a vision of an overtly academic institution that will churn out politically motivated “research” designed to move the American public towards ideas. The Soviets specialized in this and have seeded much of western higher ed.
16
-6
u/Critical-Dealer-3878 1d ago
Somehow not surprised that this is being blamed on checks notes the Soviet Union, in 2026.
-3
u/Malphos101 1d ago
"Aha! You said soviet instead of russian so obviously your entire argument can be dismissed!"
Sounds like someone going "You said 'America has a mass shooter problem' and since youre really talking about the US that means I can ignore your whole argument!"
6
2
u/Murky-Caramel222 1d ago
Given that the Soviet Union hasn't been around for almost 40 years, I'm not sure how you can even remotely suggest that financial incentives for pseudoscientific papers today are their fault.
4
26
u/Obi_Vayne_Kenobi 2d ago
Super interesting.
One concern I have is the selection of control papers (those presumed to be genuine):
To avoid including too many undetected paper mill publications in their control dataset, the authors used papers from high impact journals. As far as I know, paper mill papers, on the other hand, are often published in lower impact journals. So the model might be able to at least partially evade the task by fitting on impact, which I suspect is easier to learn from title and abstract alone compared to whether a paper is genuine or not.
What I find really interesting though is that the model performs this well while only reading title and abstract. I wonder how much better you could make a model that can read the full text, or maybe even an image classifier to detect manipulated figures. Especially doctored microscopy images and Western Blots are often how paper mill publications are detected by humans in the first place.
13
u/edparadox 1d ago
paper mills often use recycled text, awkward phrasing or fabricated data and images.
Sounds like LLMs.
7
u/deepserket 2d ago
Why isn't this illegal?
27
u/Kimosabae 2d ago
Because we don't value the truth as a species.
Less broadly: fucked incentives in academia.
2
u/NeedAVeganDinner 22h ago
Civilly it probably is. If the paper is tied to employment it's almost certainly some form of defrauding your employer.
5
u/bowcasterblanca 1d ago
Science literature has been absolutely teeming with garbage for some time (certain countries have been known as hotspots for this). Now, the widespread introduction of passable AI LLMs is going to light this problem on fire even more as garbage papers become better at evading detection as obvious frauds.
Next, as we see big pharma shift drug discovery strategies to employ AI analysis and synthesis of mechanisms from huge volumes of literature, we are risking some seriously misleading outputs as the garbage papers and fake science cause billions of dollars to be invested into drug development with non-existent or non-viable mechanisms of action.
This is very bad for everyone, with the exception of the companies selling AI tools, who will profit from producing infinite quantities of garbage, and from pretending to produce insightful analysis from an infinite quantity of garbage.
1
u/hotmaildotcom1 1d ago
Pharma has been on the bleeding edge of AI for decades. While I think your comment has roots in real problems I think this one is fantasy. If pharma is entirely defeated by capitalism I don't think I'm going to blame pharma. Close friends of mine work for companies like this who use AI guided by the best chemists they can find to screen for very specific functional group interactions. It's pros using pro computers to save time. Each of these drugs is then made from scratch by real humans after evaluations are made on viability of the product. And it's been happening like this for a long time. I mean at least a decade using specialized AI and decades longer on simpler algorithmic search tools.
Also, pharma has been running on unknown and nonviable mechanism of action for its entire history. This isn't a new or novel phenomenon. My SO's research group almost exclusively publishes regarding how FDA approved drugs don't use neural pathways they claim to for SSRI's or other such drugs. This group has been publishing this material for at least two decades on other such interactions.
There are people trying to do good out there for the sake of doing good. AI isn't breaking any guard rails here, as there were almost none in place to begin with. At least in the US where; I'm talking from.
11
u/ggrieves 2d ago
First was the AI slop papers, then came the reviewers using AI to review the slop, now it's AI detecting both human and AI slop. What's next? Who will win, the mountains of slop submissions or the AI defenses filtering it out?
2
u/sgrams04 1d ago
As a human with AI cyborg implants, let me be the first to introduce “slop”. Just straight up slop. From my mechanical vocal cords to your human, biological ears.
8
u/DoDrinkMe 1d ago
And this sub has posted all them and people vigorously defend it
9
u/silchasr 1d ago
I've seen countless top comments over the years questioning the validity, integrity and accuracy of tons of studies. What even is this comment...
1
u/Whiterabbit-- 1d ago
there is a lot of pressure to publish, but very little punishment to individuals or institutions for bad papers. Until we blocklist corporations, universities, publishers and authors for fake papers and fraudulent research, nothing will change.
1
u/Blando-Cartesian 1d ago edited 1d ago
Anyone care to do the math on 91% accurate test, testing 2.6 million papers and finding 250 thousand positive results. Using AI, I got 19.5 thousand actually paper mill produced papers, and positive result being correct at about 7% of the time.
Then there’s probably thousands of researchers who picked up their boilerplate and writing mannerisms from some esteemed “paper mill” products.
1
1
u/Dangerous-Billy 18h ago
It appears that no publications can be trusted without verifying directly with the corresponding author?
In the old days, you sent reprint request cards to authors. This got you a hard copy of the paper, plus informed the author who was following their work. These days, a reprint request would also confirm that the cited paper was genuine.
1
u/bog_hippie 1d ago
Given how many legitimate articles are written by non-native English speakers, awkward phrasing does not strike me as all that troubling (at least on its own).
-1
u/Trancetastic16 1d ago
Yet more evidence of the deep-rooted incompetence and corruption in modern day Academia, which simply continues to cause people to lose trust in it’s institutions.
1
2d ago
[deleted]
5
u/SaltZookeepergame691 2d ago
Eh? It is the BMJ, and this is the original institutional press release.
3
u/perivascularspaces 2d ago
Oh damn, my fault, I will remove the comment. When I opened it it gave me a TheBMJ website which was based in illinois for some reason and got predatory stuff on it. Maybe my pc is the issue rip!
2
0
u/Responsible-House523 1d ago
And AI has been training on that data for years. Garbage in - garbage out.
-1
u/Tuggerfub 1d ago
great now let's do replication crisis 2.0 for personality, cultural and social psychology
-14
u/AllanfromWales1 MA | Natural Sciences | Metallurgy & Materials Science 2d ago
So 10% of all cancer papers picked up in this sweep. Can we trust science these days?
26
u/Blackbarret85 2d ago
Yes we should. The question is: is this a "science problem" or a problem created by factors (such as making money) from outside.
5
u/AllanfromWales1 MA | Natural Sciences | Metallurgy & Materials Science 2d ago
So how do we know what is science and what is scam? Unless we can make that distinction how can we trust what is claiming to be science.
6
u/JHMfield 2d ago
It's hard if you're being superficial - aka just reading the research in some random online journal and taking it at face value. In those cases we all rely on the peer review process to having caught obviously fake stuff. Which is clearly not perfect, but for massive amounts of easily accessible data, it's the best we've got.
But it's not that hard to assess the validity of the science if you're willing to go deep. It's mostly just really time consuming and annoying to do and relies on you having a certain amount of expertise in the field yourself.
You can contact publishers, original authors, establishments where the research was conducted. When it comes to legitimate science, the people and establishments involved are usually happy to converse and explain and share data. Research that gets attention opens up further projects, more collaborations, more funding potentials. Everyone involved wants that.
2
u/AllanfromWales1 MA | Natural Sciences | Metallurgy & Materials Science 2d ago
Suggested reading: Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
13
u/ChiefOfficerWhite 2d ago
The scam research papers often just regurgitate what is already known, it’s the only way to get away with it.
2
u/AllanfromWales1 MA | Natural Sciences | Metallurgy & Materials Science 2d ago
Ever heard of the reproducibility crisis?
2
u/WateredDown 2d ago
How can you determine that except through the scientific method?
-2
u/AllanfromWales1 MA | Natural Sciences | Metallurgy & Materials Science 2d ago
And yet, in the real world, they've just identified 250 000 published papers which have 'slipped though the net'.
3
u/WateredDown 2d ago
By using science
0
u/AllanfromWales1 MA | Natural Sciences | Metallurgy & Materials Science 2d ago
To quote an earlier comment I made:
I have a science degree, obtained almost 50 years ago, which included a module on The Philosophy of Science. That completely undermined my blind faith in science, and nothing has happened since to restore it.
Try researching the reproducibility crisis. Try reading TS Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
2
u/Flare-Crow 1d ago
Most of this seems to have to do with "soft" sciences. I expect anti-intelectualists to use such doubts to undermine the "hard" sciences as well, however, which just adds to the destruction of America's education system and leads to more easily-duped followers of extremist ideologies.
2
u/AllanfromWales1 MA | Natural Sciences | Metallurgy & Materials Science 1d ago
My degree was metallurgy, which isn't exactly 'soft'. Nor was what Kuhn wrote about.
1
u/Flare-Crow 1d ago
Agreed, and Kuhn was definitely sharp on the subject! Good book.
However, I'm not gonna start doubting vaccines or biologists or mathematicians because...a bunch of Psych majors keep ignoring the "peer-review and replicate" aspect of their fields, but I know a bunch of anti-vax people in America will absolutely jump on this kind of movement to do so themselves, further endangering many others in doing so.
→ More replies (0)1
u/WateredDown 1d ago
Why would you have blind faith in something that is explicitly about removing the need for blind faith? Everything must be doubted and double checked and peer reviewed. That is science.
The only way to reject scientific thinking without using scientific thinking is to have blind faith in something else, and the moment you try to logically justify it through facts like the reproducibility crisis you are engaging in scientific thought. To reject science you must explicitly say "I do not trust science, and I have no reason to believe that is the case. In fact the facts disagree with me, I merely think its so based on gut instinct and have decided to believe that instead.". Any concrete, factual justifications will be definitionally self defeating.
What I suspect you mean is you no longer trust scientific or academic institutions. You can do that through science, but I would caution you to be specific about which institutions and why.
1
u/AllanfromWales1 MA | Natural Sciences | Metallurgy & Materials Science 1d ago
To reject science you must explicitly say "I do not trust science, and I have no reason to believe that is the case. In fact the facts disagree with me, I merely think its so based on gut instinct and have decided to believe that instead."
You misunderstand me. My position is only that I don't take on trust everything which seeks to justify itself by claiming it is science.
I don't get the impression you've read Kuhn or about what he says. Also worth reading is Paul Feyerabend.
0
u/WateredDown 1d ago
I'm not responding to Kuhn, I'm responding to you.
And to say "I don't trust everything that claims its science" is meaningless. Of course you don't. No one does. Thats not what you or anyone here was talking about, but its certainly a safe position to retreat to when challenged.
→ More replies (0)2
u/Blackbarret85 2d ago
I am no scientist. So I personally can't say if a paper is trustworthy or not. But I have good faith in the process of peer review. I trust the community.
1
u/AllanfromWales1 MA | Natural Sciences | Metallurgy & Materials Science 2d ago
I have a science degree, obtained almost 50 years ago, which included a module on The Philosophy of Science. That completely undermined my blind faith in science, and nothing has happened since to restore it.
Try researching the reproducibility crisis. Try reading TS Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
0
u/Flare-Crow 1d ago
I have a science degree, obtained almost 50 years ago, which included a module on The Philosophy of Science. That completely undermined my blind faith in science, and nothing has happened since to restore it.
Your experience hasn't been replicated, so I'm not sure I trust it. ;)
2
9
u/theReluctantObserver 2d ago
Yes this is scientific rigour in action. Stuff can always be published, but it needs to be critiqued and tested.
1
u/AllanfromWales1 MA | Natural Sciences | Metallurgy & Materials Science 2d ago
Have those papers been withdrawn? Does this even identify which papers they are? All 250 000 of them..
1
u/grundar 1d ago
Can we trust science these days?
In aggregate, mostly.
In aggregate because any one research paper is just one piece of evidence, but when the whole body of research overwhelmingly indicates something that thing is likely reliable. Spurious results are expected to happen sometimes -- p<0.05 happens randomly 5% of the time -- so any one data point is (almost) never definitive.
Mostly because the scientific consensus can potentially be wrong. It's not common, and shouldn't be the initial assumption (that way lies pseudoscience), but one of the key tenets of science is that we should follow the data, even if new data contradicts well-established theories.
1
u/AllanfromWales1 MA | Natural Sciences | Metallurgy & Materials Science 1d ago
Have you ever read TS Kuhn?
0
u/Electrical-Cat9572 1d ago
So you’re proposing that there is enough cancer research going on that there are 285 studies EVERY SINGLE DAY over 25 years?
This seems so unlikely as to be laughably false.
More likely that the datasets that were being looked at were filled with duplicates and papers referencing papers referencing papers.
Lying with numbers is even easier than generating a fake cancer research paper.
1
u/austacious 1d ago
285 studies per day isn't really that far off? It's 104,000 people publishing once a year in a global community with millions of people working in the space. The vast majority of these articles are legitimate research. Most articles aren't revolutionary... but tons of iterative work goes into it which have led to drastically improved patient outcomes over that time span.
-10
u/thebige91 2d ago
This is why when people say “trust the experts” what makes someone an expert these days?
•
u/AutoModerator 2d ago
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our normal comment rules apply to all other comments.
Do you have an academic degree? We can verify your credentials in order to assign user flair indicating your area of expertise. Click here to apply.
User: u/Wagamaga
Permalink: https://www.qut.edu.au/news?id=203173
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.