Posted on 12/19/2025 11:29:19 AM PST by karpov
Should we trust the research published by professors? The scholars who write books and papers have impressive degrees and teach at respected universities, and their work has to undergo rigorous scrutiny before it can be published, so the answer would seem to be that we should. The safeguards against deception and fraud appear strong.
Decades ago, they were strong, but that’s not true today. In recent years, deception and fraud have been proven in quite a few instances. Some of the guilty professors have admitted their wrongdoing, one even confessing that he didn’t have the patience for rigor. Clearly, academic research has changed for the worse.
Professor Max Bazerman of Harvard Business School has done a great public service in writing Inside an Academic Scandal: A Story of Fraud and Betrayal. His book puts people on guard against believing an idea just because it comes in scholarly wrapping. It was inspired by Bazerman’s own experience as a co-author of a paper in which others had falsified data to make the conclusion look strong. Over a period of years, he came to suspect the data behind the paper and sought to have the other authors explain their conduct, which they never did. Besides telling his own lamentable tale, Bazerman recounts many other instances of scholarly fraud, but let’s begin with his story.
In 2012, Bazerman and four co-authors published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which purported to show that people were far more likely to tell the truth on a document for which they had to provide data if they had to first sign and attest to their truthfulness rather than signing afterward.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
The left has no moral constraint against lying, committing fraud or anything else.
This article shows one of the outcomes of leftist ideology, which is of course, low IQ.
I had to leave a job because everything the boss was publishing was a lie. Another post-doc quit the same week I did, for the same reason.
For the left, ethics are situational and truth is relative.
Peer review is almost useless for detecting fraud, and no grad student wants to spend time verifying the work of others. Even if there is an attempt at verification and it fails, the author will claim the procedure wasn’t done correctly. Industrial research has fewer problems since the work is for practical application and if it doesn’t work it is caught quickly.
They were not strong in the past either.
You just did not hear about papers being quietly withdrawn because, unless it was in your field and in your area of the country you wouldn't.
As is the case now your work got scrutiny under three conditions;
1. it dealt with real world engineering stuff, bridges falling down bad.
2. you challenged on of the old powers in your field, the saying scholarship advanced on gravestones is not wrong.
3. you proved something that violated one of the pie in the sky stupidities that people educated out of their common sense very desperately wanted to be true.
The company I worked for sent 3 scientists to visit a University lab that published a paper that seemed to solve a problem we had. When they got there the Professor told them they had been unable to replicate the work and the student graduated and returned to Pakistan. Even though it was a fraud he hadn’t bothered to retract the paper.
… and they do say so, themselves.
Like the “Climate Change” people falsely claiming that there is a scientific consensus on its truth.
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