Speaker 1: The Stanford fake data scandal has brought the fact that academics lie into the public domain. They lie, they cheat, and if you look at this report that was produced by the Stanford investigation panel, you can see that this is a damning 95-page report that just shows that this person is a career liar. As someone with a PhD, postdoctoral experience, and time in academia, I am not surprised that this is happening. Speak to any academic, and something like this was only going to come out sooner or later. Now the thing that sort of like is more interesting to me is not how people cheat, but why people cheat. So in this video, I'm going to share with you all the reasons these people fake data, and why they even consider doing it, considering that at the end of the day, it could cost you your job. So the first thing I want to make clear is that at the higher level in academia, the researchers are not doing the actual research. They're not in the lab doing experiments. That falls to graduate students, PhD students, and postdocs. And so, this is what kind of sets up this culture of lying, high-pressure research. Now I don't want to soften this up for you, so I'm just going to say it straight. That any high-flying academic tends to be a bully. What they tend to create is a culture of competitiveness, high-pressure, and bullying in their lab. And so what happens is their students are forced and sort of pressured into producing high-quality, super, super impactful data. And the only way a lot of people can do that is by fudging results. At the end of the day, they've got this kind of like person up top, which is so overbearing, that the only thing they can do to appease this person is start to make things up. And I think that's one of the main reasons you start to see more fake data, because as people get more successful, they put more pressure on top, and it becomes just this cultural expectation that, yeah, sure, you know, you can kind of fake some data here and there just to keep the boss happy. As an academic, there is a huge pressure to publish. Publish your results in peer-reviewed journals. The better the journal, i.e. the higher the impact factor, the more pressure there is to continue that trend. There are lots of people that will never, ever get their paper into nature, into science, you know, the ones that every scientist or researcher wants to get their research into. And the more prestigious the journal, the harder it is to get in there, and you need extraordinary results. And how do you get those extraordinary results? Well, you fake them. The global science system has become a citation economy with academic credibility mediated by the currency produced by the two dominant commercial citation indexes, Elsevier's Scopus and Clarivate's Web of Science. All of your career success relies on you gaming the system. And so it is no surprise to anyone that people will start faking data. Academia needs money to do research. The money comes from funding bodies. What are those funding bodies impressed with? High impact factor journals that gets a lot of eyeballs on that work. If you're applying for a grant and your preliminary data looks pretty awesome, they are more likely to give you money, obviously. The way you can make your preliminary research look awesome is by faking it. I know of academics who have manipulated preliminary data just to impress the funding bodies to be like, wow, we found this surprising thing. I think it's going to be a game changer in our field. You need to give us more money because we really need to explore this. When in fact, that data was just completely made up and fabricated. I think it's like a slippery slope where they start changing little bits of data and then it gets easier and easier to change more and more data to get into high impact factor journals that get you more money and it just snowballs from there. There's no doubt that this is rampant because there is a lack of oversight. Now, the whole scientific and research system relies on peer review. The peer review process means that you get someone else's research as an expert in that field. You look over it and then you go, yes, this is plausible. This is new and interesting novel. I think everyone else needs to know about it. And then you say, yes, this should be published. There are moments where a lot of stuff don't get published because they criticize it, they say this is rubbish work. But so much falls through the gaps because, first of all, there's outright manipulation of data. Secondly, it's down to time poor academics to do this peer review. A lot of the times, they're not given adequate funding time or resources to do it properly. And therefore, a lot of stuff slips through the gaps. But luckily, there are people out there that are trying to catch it. One of my favorite at the moment is PubPeer. PubPeer is the online journal club. One thing I love about it is that you can get expert opinions about latest papers, whether or not they're bunk, rubbish or otherwise. So here, you've got the first room temperature ambient pressure superconductor, a very, very high profile bit of science that came out recently. But here you can see that there's people here saying, I work in the field and this morning we discussed the preprint a bit with the research group. In short, we don't believe a word of it. So here we are, we've got researchers actually highlighting the errors in other people's work. I love it. There are people out there looking at obvious manipulation of data so they can report it and say, this is fake. That is why a lot of these people get caught. And it is a service that not a lot of people recognize is so important for the scientific and research process. I think one of the last reasons people feel the pressure to fake data is simply a human one. They want to be accepted and loved. Now remember that these people are coming from a position where in high school they were the clever ones and they got that admiration from their higher ups, their parents, their teachers by doing well at exams, they became the clever one. And that just continues all the way through their life and career. They just want admiration. And so once they kind of see that they can get it by manipulating data, by looking at the edges of what could be ethical and not ethical and growing a reputation for being clever, putting out amazing work, getting that sort of reinforcement from the outside world saying, yes, you're amazing, you're clever, you're awesome. I can just see how it is a slippery slope to faking data. Now, a lot of these high-flying professors, like I said at the beginning of this video, don't do the research themselves. However, they have an obligation to make sure that every single paper that comes out of their research lab is true and honest. I don't necessarily want you to feel bad for these people, but I do just want to make you aware that this is the sort of reasons why they may end up in these positions where they feel like the only choice they have to keep on impressing people is by lying. If you like this video, I think the next one you'll love is this one where I talk about Wiley's $2 billion scandal and how researchers are standing up to big publishers. So the vast majority of scientists and researchers are doing the right thing, but it's high-profile cases like the Stanford president's faking of data that paints research in a negative light. But I want to assure you that in my experience, that is a very, very small portion of the academic world. And most, if not, you know, almost all of academics and researchers are just trying to do the right thing, further their career, learn something new about the world, and keep their job, obviously. So these people are just doing science and research how it's meant to be done, and it's only a few bad apples that can really spoil everything. So there we have it. There's everything you need to know about why scientists and researchers fake data. Let me know in the comments what you would add. 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