<story><title>Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?</title><url>https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-health-research-is-fraudulent-until-proved-otherwise/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ta988</author><text>When you want to do a proper work, your grants and papers get rejected because they are not innovatove enough or don&amp;#x27;t go far enough. So it is not a surprise that people that lied in their applications about what they can realistically do also lie when it comes to reporting results. Unfortunately there is no way out. I stopped counting how many reviewers of my grants disagreed on what was proposed, one saying that it was not innovative, the other saying that is was too risky to use this approach. We have a big problem in science, peer-review is broken and everything relies on it. And many reviewers are way out of touch about what happens in their field, I see reviews that clearly show the reviewer was sleeping for the last 10 years.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nextos</author><text>You are absolutely right.&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, universities tend to require tons of publications to promote you. Things are spinning out of control. I know a few EU countries where the written norm is to need &amp;gt; 100 publications to qualify for a full professorship, with equally ridiculous requirements for associate and assistant positions.&lt;p&gt;Obviously, this encourages and rewards completely broken practices. Many associate and full professors in my area only care about stamping their names into as many journal articles as humanly possible. Some of them are already beyond 500, with many of these in top tier journals (Nature, Science, Cell, NEJM). Obviously, they hardly ever contribute anything. Their serfs do all the work. Their job is basically to plot in order to stay on top of their neofeudal shire.&lt;p&gt;In addition to this, funding bodies do nothing after fraud has been proven. ERC only terminates grants on rare occasions. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;forbetterscience.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;forbetterscience.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; discusses many cases of serial fraudsters who keep getting funded despite having retracted 10 or 15 articles in major journals.</text></comment>
<story><title>Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?</title><url>https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-health-research-is-fraudulent-until-proved-otherwise/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ta988</author><text>When you want to do a proper work, your grants and papers get rejected because they are not innovatove enough or don&amp;#x27;t go far enough. So it is not a surprise that people that lied in their applications about what they can realistically do also lie when it comes to reporting results. Unfortunately there is no way out. I stopped counting how many reviewers of my grants disagreed on what was proposed, one saying that it was not innovative, the other saying that is was too risky to use this approach. We have a big problem in science, peer-review is broken and everything relies on it. And many reviewers are way out of touch about what happens in their field, I see reviews that clearly show the reviewer was sleeping for the last 10 years.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>Worse yet, it compounds. The people approving grants, seeing all these amazing results promised, will then raise the bar for what kind of results you&amp;#x27;re promising. Which means the next batch of promises will need to be that much more extreme to get approved. It&amp;#x27;s a race to the top... or the bottom, depending on your point of view.</text></comment>