"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"
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/landmark-research-integrity-survey-finds-questionable-practices-are-surprisingly-common
If researchers are rewarded to produce wonderful results (Edwards & Roy dixit) and if as Professor Diamandis wrote in 2017, in a paper published in the journal Clinical Biochemistry that there are no Saints on competitive science then the aforementioned Dutch outcome cannot constitute a huge surprise. Back in 2014 Full Professor John Ioannidis already mentioned that science has an ineffective reward system that needs to be changed. But the ugly fact is that it remains unchanged. Belluz et al. (2016) suggested that science needs to celebrate and reward failure In order to make scientists more confident in designing robust tests and not just convenient ones.
However, a more effective solution could encompass ranking misconduct acts in order to tackle the
rise of the worse type just like penal codes rank crimes and assign higher
penalties to the worse ones. Everybody knows that infractions are less serious
than misdemeanors and that misdemeanors are less serious than felonies (that can go
up to life in prison or even a death penalty) but in Academia nobody has any
idea how research misconduct acts rank. For instance, in some countries, honorary authorship is not considered a misconduct act but a recent Swiss integrity code even wants to punish
excessive self-citations which i believe moves the focus away from the real
science offenders https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2021/06/new-swiss-code-on-scientific-integrity.html In fact if there´s only one world science why can´t we have only one
research misconduct code around the world ?
